Have you moved back to your home country after living abroad?

[Irreversible]

After living away from my home country for a few years I've finally made the decision to move back home, mainly for family reasons. I have a lot of mixed emotions about it and have been reading up about reverse culture shock and some of what to expect after being away for a few years but just interested to hear from people who've moved back home after living abroad and how easy/difficult you found it?

Yes and I’m not going to lie, it can be hard.

Obviously it depends hugely on your personal circumstances. In my case our return was abrupt and unwanted (ExH's company messing us about) and we moved to an area where I didn't know anyone nearby, hadn't had time to research it properly, and didn't really fit in at all. But if you do have the time to plan in advance, are making a positive move back to start a new chapter, and have family/friends nearby, it's possible it could be a totally different (better) experience.

I think there are some things which you'll always find though. These were the most noticeable for me:

1. Little things that have changed in your absence. For us it was Chip & Pin everywhere.

1. You don't recognise any celebrities (or those you do recognise look about 90 all of a sudden!) or understand popular culture references/chat. I'll never forget coming home for one family Christmas and all anyone was talking about was the Strictly phone votes scandal. We didn't even know what Strictly was!

1. Depending on how long you've been away, you may find that even your most culturally ingrained behaviour has disappeared or changed radically. I lost the ability to queue!! Got me in a ton of trouble at first.

1. Crossing roads is terrifying because you don't know which way the cars are going to come! For some reason it's much worse when coming back here than it ever was abroad. I think your brain thinks you should be on autopilot but you're not. I used to literally wait on the kerb for a car to come past, so that I knew which direction they were coming from! Got over it very quickly but it's a nightmare for a few days.

1. The worst one. Nobody, repeat nobody, wants to hear about your life overseas. Even if they ask, usually they don't really know WHAT to ask, so will say something like 'So...... what's [Country] like then?' which is just a mindfuck because how do you answer that? Or (and/or) you'll start telling them some fascinating (to you) fact or anecdote and you'll just see their eyes glaze over.

Soon after that you start to realise that practically every sentence you say begins with the words 'In [City] we used to...' or 'Did you know that in [Country] it's...' and you'll know that you're pissing everyone else off but you've got literally no other conversation. It's awful and you just want to tell yourself to shut up but somehow you can't. I still do it and it's been five years!

1. If you've been lucky enough to have lived somewhere where cheap childcare/ domestic help is the norm, it's a very very very tough adjustment to give that up!!

On the plus side, you get to eat decent sausages and Marmite again!

Last December, after 25 years away. Hard to know what part of the strangeness has been C-19 caused and what is simply the oddity of being home. Challenges for me have included living close to family members I’d previously only seen twice a year for short visits, or on Skype, and how that changes the relationship, the sheer bureaucracy of getting medical care and DS into school and supporting him in a new and very different school system in a different language etc, relearning home country ‘manners’, dealing with DS’s homesickness and — most difficult — it precipitating something of a midlife crisis in terms of looking at my life, successes, failures.

I think it’s been the right move, but a friend who moved back two years ago gave good advice when she said not to think too analytically about anything for at least the first year.

@turquoise50 this is spot on!!

I’ve had a few stints of travelling for extended periods and/or living abroad and this is a perfect description of all the things we encountered too.

Still abroad now, our longest stint yet and no sign of returning to the UK. We’re definitely happier abroad....

I moved home to Australia after 10 years in London, 18 months ago.

Thought I would struggle but we have actually settled so well and not once have I regretted leaving London (even before Covid )

My parents live 45 minutes away but we see them fairly regularly (before Melbourne's second lockdown 🙄)

I was just done with the UK. I wasn't sure Australia was definitely the right decision when we left (another serious option was Ireland as dh is Irish) but it absolutely has turned out better than I hoped.

I appreciate my home country so much more after living in the U.K. You realise that there was so much you took for granted the first time round. But equally there are things I took for granted in the U.K. that I now don’t have access to (really miss Ocado, I didn’t realise how much of a difference it made). You will be forever comparing the two countries to each other though.

You also may need to adjust your socialisation style a bit. Humour in particular is something that carries a lot across different countries.

I struggled with the food! I had loads of reactions and tummy problems. Just like when you go on holiday. I hadn't expected that!

I used lots of non-UK words/vocabulary in my conversation that UK people didn't like - and let me know they didn't like!

I really struggled in my first job back. Looking back, I was bullied terribly because of my slightly strange accent and a tendency to start sentences with 'in XX country, we did...'

I had no idea who celebrities were.

I had no idea about the cost of things.

I was shocked at the low salaries.

My fashion sense had gone out the window - my clothes were all wrong.

Ditto hair!

I'd got used to people being Interested in me because of my accent. No one was interested in me back in the UK.

A lot of my friend groups had moved on. I had to make new friends.

It wasn't all bad! Skills I learned overseas helped me get a good job in the UK and money I saved at my well-paid overseas job helped me buy my first property in the UK.

I'm also moving from the UK back home to Australia @ReefTeeth so I'm reassured that you found the transition easy! Obviously it's not like there are huge cultural differences or anything like that between the two countries, I suppose it's the more general stuff like friends moving on, regretting the decision etc that I'm worried about.

4 years ago I moved back to the miserable UK after 5 years travelling/2 settled and working in another country. I'm now married with a baby on the way but I still cant watch TV shows about that country. I wish I had done more to stay there or settled somewhere other than here

I lived overseas for 6 years in a trendy place and was absolutely delighted to come home to the UK. People are always incredulous that I would prefer to be here but I have no regrets whatsoever and been back a year now. Was a great experience but there’s no place like home!

We moved back this year after 25 years overseas and Turquoise is spot on with her comments.
Nobody cares about your life overseas and it’s hard to stop saying ‘when we..’ ‘in..’ but I have spent nearly half my life outside the uk so most of my experiences are from overseas.

OP I lived in London for two years in my twenties and returned home to Oz. I have to admit that I found it hard. I moved to Melbourne when I was from Sydney, so that was a culture shock in itself and I missed so much of my life in London. As well as the small things like food, Tesco, all sorts of things.
A PP said up thread about coming back and no one being interested in you anymore because your accent is normal. That totally happened to me and I found it so amazing! Every word I spoke in London sounded different to everyone around me and it was great. Back in Melbourne I just sounded Aussie, and it was jarring.
You’ve obviously had a lot longer in your adopted home town. I wish you well for when you return. Try not to be too hard on yourself and let yourself remember the good times!

Irreversible, its all new when you do 'come home' dependant on how long you have been away there will be some adjustment and yes, maybe at times you will get thoughts of have I done the right thing moving back, but as your moving for family reasons thats a bonus to be with them again.

turquoise50, what you say about talking about when you live in XYZ and people just not being interested is so true, I am not long back after living in a country that many people love for a exotic/once in a lifetime/expensive holiday, and when I say its different living somewhere to being a visitor for whatever reason people dont like it. The other things you mentioned are so true as well.

But like you FedUp, I am very happy to be back in the UK (not for the first time), I appreciate everything, even turning on the tap and can drink the water!

But when Covid is under control, we hopefully will be moving overseas again, but I always know I can come back to the UK

Had to come back due to COVID-19, hadn't been away for as long as some posters here. But still a reverse culture shock.

Good points: to have the NHS as a safety net when there is a crisis is fantastic, I just hadn't appreciated the NHS when I was in the UK before.
Also the cost of living, I was in a country where the cost of living was very high so accommodation is much cheaper in the UK, and food! So much cheaper for me. Can get items more easily, such as furnishings, foodstuffs and so on (I was very remote before, not much choice for anything). Home deliveries in the UK, not all countries do this, and certainly no home visits from the doctor (although during the pandemic this hasn't been an option). People have been friendlier in the UK on my return, it was very difficult to integrate into society overseas, it needed a look of effort. I'm now surprised how easily people speak to strangers in the UK, it's nice.

Negatives: struggled in my head to get the language right (English is my first language). When I first arrived back, if I spoke to anyone I used English easily but if someone asked me a question I would start answering in another language. Took a while to wear off.

Definitely odd crossing roads, I still can't work out which direction the cars are coming from. Also driving, spent a lot of time going very slowly down country lanes to practise before I got the hang of driving in the UK again.

Weird sense of having to learn to fit back into my own country and feel part of the community again. Other people explaining things to me that I know perfectly well about, eg. BREXIT as it happened while I was away....but yes, I was following it.....!

Also missing things from the other country. I really miss having mountains around me and also the "right to wander" - in the UK you can't walk just anywhere you please, everything is all fenced off, I didn't realise how constraining I would find this when I returned.

In addition, my family seems to have 'moved on' without me. I was unprepared for this. When I returned I came back to live much nearer family members. I fondly imagined they'd be so pleased to have me back and I'd probably see them every week. In reality they are used to not having me as part of their plans and so don't include me unless I ask; they are not being unkind, they just don't remember I'm around now....

Bill Bryson’s book Notes From a Big Country is about that experience.
He moves back to America after having lived most of his adult life in the U.K. One thing he found odd was home maintenance stuff as he’d learned all that in the U.K. and it didn’t really translate to America.

(I’ve never lived in another country and I’m jealous).

I think the difficult thing is that people will assume you have more shared knowledge than you actually do. For example, on the social side, I missed nearly all cultural references in jokes etc and felt like I'd lost my sense of humour and professionally I had no idea how HR etc worked which could be embarrassing. If you are moving back to an area where you know people I think you have a huge advantage though.

• lot, not 'look'

@Irreversible to be honest, we dont watch Aussie TV. I love HIGNFY and Last Leg which really helped with the transition of not feeling like we were missing out on what was going on in the UK.

DHs WhatsApp groups are his mates in Ireland and I spend a lot of time on MN.

When I say it like that it does sounds like I'm physically here but mentally there 🧐

But that feels like the best of both worlds and it's working for us!

I lived in a developing country for a couple of years, and found the return to the UK largely positive - it helped that it meant I could be together with DH; we'd been in a long distance relationship while I was away. There were lots of things I appreciated about the UK - reliable electricity and water are great; I didn't realise how stressful I'd found not knowing when we'd have power. There were foods I'd missed, but the prices here are an awful lot higher, and I'd been able to employ domestic help when I was away.

I'm white, and one thing I really really appreciated returning to the UK was not standing out - I wore local clothing overseas, but I was still obviously not local, and I really didn't enjoy being pointed at and talked about in the street (not least because I could understand what people were saying!), though I'm assuming that'll be less of an issue for you.

As PP have said, it's little things that have changed (it was the postal system - large letter, small parcel etc. for me) that are most disconcerting. But for me the return was largely positive.

I think the culture shock is obviously a lot more intense if you go between two radically different cultures. That's not the case with Australia and the UK, but for me I worry more about feeling stifled or restless and not being able to settle back into Australia. I know people back home won't really be interested in my experiences in the UK either, so I'm going to try not to drop too many 'Back in the UK...' references into conversation!

@Soph88888 I feel your pain. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever feel happy in the UK again, especially with all the crap that has gone down (Brexit etc) since we got back! I’m the opposite of you with regard to watching stuff on tv though. I avidly pounce on anything set in or related to the country we used to live in. We lived in a city with a distinctive skyline which sometimes gets used for film locations and we get immensely excited whenever we see it! (And enjoy pointing out errors, 'What? There's no way they could have got from X to Y as fast as that! etc )

Oh the water coming out of the tap! Yes, the relief - but only after several weeks (months?) of instinctive panic every night when you go to brush your teeth and your trained monkey brain goes 'But where's the bottled water?!'

The other thing I found hard - and obviously again it depends on what type of overseas experience you had - is how much harder it is to make new friends when you move to a new area in your home country. In our case, our overseas stint was very much in the classic 'expat community' (however much I may dislike that phrase) and because everyone was in the same boat, there's a strong motivation to make friends. You'd meet someone once and if you got on, you'd be exchanging numbers and arranging your next meeting straight away.

Back home if I tried anything like that, people acted like I was a dangerous lunatic! It was quite hard to relearn how to navigate the dance of 'slow and steady' buildup to making friends with someone. Which can lead to a lot of loneliness especially if, as a PP said, your family and pre-existing friends have moved on without you and forget to include you in stuff, or you're no longer living near them.

I wonder why everyone is so cagey about which countries they lived in? I'm guessing one PP was talking about Switzerland, others about New York and Thailand, but it would be nice to know. Is there an unwritten rule on MN that everyone should only say a generic "another country"? Serious question, not a dig at anyone.

I am laughing at crossing the road in the UK!

Being in the last overseas country, I could not even cross the road where I lived and had to go everywhere by car (and I was not allowed to drive) it was too dangerous!

Simple pleasures of wandering (pre CV) around a supermarket or shop with out being stated at, touched is such a joy, looking back it was a very difficult place to be, more so than other overseas places we have lived, and yes electricity and the joy of food not going off due to the lack of refrigeration, could not even trust the RO water...

I'm not sure why people don't want to disclose what country they're in, maybe they think it's outing? My experience of moving to the UK from Australia is a common enough one, so I'm happy to share

*they were in