When abroad, boredom, routine and ‘normal’ cease to exist. Try finding peanut butter in a Japanese grocery story or explaining in broken Spanish to the Guatemalan pharmacy that you need cough drops and you’ll understand. “What makes expat life so addictive is that every boring or mundane activity you experience at home (like grocery shopping, commuting to work or picking up the dry cleaning) is, when you move to a foreign country, suddenly transformed into an exciting adventure. “ Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.“ “You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, like you’ll not miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.”¨ Once you leave your birthplace nothing is ever the same.” “It is a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable, it is designed to make its own people comfortable.” Too foreign for home, too foreign for here. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.” Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. There would be a goal involved, and I liked having goals.” Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. What I found appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world. “Life might be difficult for a while, but I would tough it out because living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage.“ There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. “Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. “ Expats who can only criticize the country in which they choose to live are like a sailor who demands the wind blows only according to his skill.” “ When you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things that are worse, and there is nothing you can do about it.” “One of the things you learn when you go overseas is how much a lot of the countries overseas really just like to enjoy life.” Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.”ĭalai Lama XIV 13 Expat Life Lessons Quotes “People take different roads seeking fulfilment and happiness. The rhythm of their day is entirely different I am foreign.” Here they are all along, busy with living they don’t talk or look like me. “Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference.
As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially.”
“Loving life is easy when you are abroad, where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more a master of yourself than at home.” “ Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.“
“Our homes are not defined by geography or one particular location, but by memories, events, people, and places that span the globe.” “And suddenly you just know…It’s time to start something new and trust the magic of new beginnings.” “The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.”
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