To Think Living Abroad is Rarely as Good as People Think it Will Be?

[lesley33]

I lived in Switzerland with young DCs. But the country you visit as a tourist and the country you actually LIVE in, are ime often quite different. We came back after 2 years. And I have spoken to many other people who have "discovered" things about living in a particular country that as tourists they were blind to.

For example, a friend returned from France after hating working there as she found the hierarchial, formal, non team working environment very difficult.

Visiting a country can be great and you can love many things about a country - the scenery, being family orientated, etc. But you don't often get to understand the negatives of a country. I have lost track of the amount of people I know or meet who say - i would love to live in x country - without any understanding of the realities. For example - no you wouldn't as x country is well known for having very negative attitudes towards people with SN like your DC.

So AIBU in getting frustrated at this. I know secretly I probably am as I was one of those people.

One of the things that people really fail to understand, is how little you will see of your own family.

Everyone has their own lives, its not so easy to just hop on a plane!

houdini - I think we've discussed your experience in Egypt on MN before but just wanted to say how hard that sounds and how well you have done to get over it. What a horrific experience for you.
Can I just check are you the same Houdini as the one on twitter who had a date with a bearded man or am I getting my houdini's confused???

I lived in the south of France for 2 yrs. Completely agree with your friend, OP. However, we were there because DH was on a 2yr contract so we always knew we'd be coming home. I think that made it much easier to put up with the crap cultural differences and just enjoy the good bits while we had the chance. Really missed Cheddar though .

I will also say how hard it can be to fit in with the local people - again, you will find that everyone has their own lives/families etc and in many countries/cultures family and/or the people you grew up with is everything, so if you are not one of them you will find it really hard to make close friendships. Which is why expats often stick together. It is sometimes easier if you are married to someone from that culture; alternatively of course it can be a total nightmare (see Houdini's post below).
Don't necessarily diss mixing with expats though. They don't need to be people from your own country. From my various stints of living overseas I have made friends from a huge variety of countries, including Japan, Israel, Croatia, Estonia, Ireland, NZ....

I always think this but several members of my extended family have moved to other countries and stayed and raised families there so have been in the 'new country' for longer than uk where born and raised.

So must be something keeping them there. Some married locals but some didn't and still stayed.

We moved to Virginia 5 years ago and yes, it took a lot of getting used to. I have to say though that even after 5 years it still feels like a holiday destination to me. The part we live in is very hot in summer with gorgeous warm springs and long, beautiful autumns and short winters. So it is tee shirt weather today.

I do miss home, but the food more than the places and people. I miss the nhs the most... I would never have guessed I would ever have to make choices about how sick my child is and how much a doctor visit would cost... but with insurance only covering part of each treatment or doctor visit it really is a problem. My daughter had to go to the children's hospital last week for suspected meningitis, so of course we took her, and thank God it was just flu, but the $1000+ ER trip and Dr office bills and blood work etc will hurt a long while after she is better.

That said, I love living here. The people are warm and friendly and neighbours care about each other. It isn't what I expected, if England were a cynical and sarcastic pessimistic older sister then Virginia is the bouncy, vibrant, slightly gormless innocent younger sister. It is a nice change.

It depends what expectations you go with. I've been in Belgium for 5 and a bit years now. There are things that drive me demented (the bureaucracy), things I will miss (beer, chocolate, patisserie), things I won't miss (the truly terrifying driving), but on the whole it has been a positive experience. There are some things they do so much better (health care, bread, steak) and things that are worse (no shopping on Sundays, shutting at lunch time, and my town is pretty well closed on a Monday), but it is how things are done here, and one accepts that.

You also meet an interesting mix of people and have time to investigate local events/traditions etc. I love the fact that today I met up with a friend and we spent 2.5 hours having two coffees each and no-one was raising an eyebrow and expecting us to move as soon as we had finished.

Houdini I went to Cairo in my mid twenties with a female friend. HELL on earth. We couldn't leave the hotel room without being sexually harassed almost every man would leer or shout obscenities at us and we were soberly dressed. Vile place wouldn't go back if you paid me.

'And capitalising the thread title is appropriate as it is, after all, a title! grin'

But most British publications don't capitalise titles any more. I know the style is different in the US, though, because I have just spent some weeks converting British English files into American English, and vice versa.

I've actually had no problem fitting in, although I am very much a home body no matter where I live. I have one or two good friends and that's enough for me.

I did marry a local boy (although one much better than Houdini's, so glad you're out of there and moving on!) and I do think that helped as his friends became my friends.

My family is scattered across the US anyway so I never had a huge family unit to rely on when I lived here, so I don't miss that. I do miss some of my family, but with Skype and cheap phone rates it isn't too bad. It also helps that my mom and step-dad are retired and spend most of their days travelling so I tend to get a visit from them every 6 months either going to or coming from somewhere else. In May it's way back from Israel.

Interestingly, the few Americans I've met here in Belfast I can't stand!

The point about how little you'll see your family is a really good one. I live in Oregon, which is beautiful, the outdoor lifestyle is fantastic, but it is June since I last saw my parents. 18 months since we saw the ILs (who are well off, they could definitely afford it) and two years since I saw my brother. We would like to visit the UK in the summer but the flights have almost doubled in price since I last went. Our baby had his first birthday last week and I am really sad that not only could we not invite any family to celebrate, but that he has only met one set of gps. Thank goodness for skype though!

I think YANBU. But my father would disagree.

He's lived in SE Asia for about 10 years and obsessively self-congratulates himself on leaving behind the UK which he earnestly believes is, overflowing with uncollected wheelie bins. His only source of news in the English language is the Daily Mail online. Local media is heavily censored. There have been military coups in his city, which he has only heard about because I've phoned him.

He revels in the higher standard of living he has over there, but is totally blind to the absolute poverty the majority of locals endure. He'll tell you how efficient the (costly) private health system is compared the NHS, but he fails to acknowledge this is a crap comparison. Locals working the paddy fields are quite likely to die if they contract a simple infection simply because they can't afford the medical fees.

A few years he desperately tried to get me to join him out there, and just wouldn't understand why I actually prefer living in dear old blighty.

I think it should be compulsory for all Brits to live in the Middle East for a year that way you will realise what a beautiful, amazing country we live in.

I agree things are not always perfect but the freedom we have is priceless.

like Israel?

I quite like not seeing my family very often. They quarrel with each other and have daft opinions. I love them more when I have a long distance relationship with them!

I'm sure I wouldn't want to live in my family's pockets either, but short, regular visits seem preferable, somehow!

We moved to NZ 3 and a bit years ago and I bloody love it. A lot of the things I didn't like about the uK are absent here.

So, to say 'same shit, different place' is incorrect for us. Life is much better on the whole. That's not to say our first year wasn't tough but you get out of situations what you put in a lot of the time.

And to whoever said 'there's no place like home'...it's an odd one. I found that the North East of England, where I'm from, changed so much over my relatively short lifetime (I was 28 when we left) that even home wasn't that much like the 'home' I grew up in.

For us, the move has been better than I ever envisaged. it's certainly not a holiday but I thank my lucky stars that the baby we're about to welcome into this world gets to grow up in such an amazing place. We'll certainly be able to give this child more freedom than we ever could have in the UK.

YANBU. I lived in Italy - twice - and when I tell people they all, bar none say 'Oh that must've been wonderful, I'd love to live in Italy'. I still love it for a holiday and I love speaking Italian, eating Italian food, watching Italian films, etc, but to live in again? No thanks. It's a bureaucratic mess and if you're not Italian you're treated like a second-class citizen. It's also very racist.

YANBU. I have lived in a few countries and believe that there are pros and cons wherever you go.

Agree that actually living in xyz and enjoying a holiday there can be very very different.
It can take a while to get settled, I mean really settled and for some people, for whatever reason, that just doesn't happen.

YABU. I'm a foreigner living in the UK, and mostly I love living here, warts and all. I think it's unreasonable to generalise about other people's experiences - I've lived in four other countries on three continents, apart from my home country, and enjoyed all of them, bar a deeply unenjoyable period in the confused, cultureless dictatorship that is Dubai (and even that was a wonderful place to travel from, and was interesting in the sense of letting you have a look at the workings of a non-democracy). I've never expected 'abroad' to be any kind of escape from my personal demons, or to be an extended holiday experience.

Lived in Germany for a while, about 8 years ago. I couldn't get used to the banks being shut for lunch and by 4.30 in the afternoon, or the fact that the shops were all closed on Sunday. The supermarkets seemed really basic and there were loads of things I could have bought so easily here, that were not available there. Mind you, I was living in a very small town, in the arse end of nowhere, so maybe it would have been different in a big city.

What I did like, was how welcome my children were made to feel wherever we went and I found the locals to be really friendly and kind.

Think I could survive there now everyone has broadband and I could shop online

strandednomore - I agree about in some countries how difficult it can be to make friends with locals. In the German part of Switzerland virtually everyone I met lived in the place they had grown up. They all mixed with family and friends from school. They were all vaguely polite and friendly, but nobody wanted to make friends.

the only people that ever wanted to make friends were other foreigners - not British as there weren't any where I was living, but from other countries.

Because everyone had been friendly when we had visited i had wrongly assumed it would be easy to make friends.

I suspect it must be different living abroad as a young single person though - rather than as I was a housewife with 2 small dcs.

I think there's good points and bad to most countries and not everyone will find that the pros and cons balance in the same way. YANBU to say that many people have unrealistic expectations of living abroad, YABU to think that everyone always prefers 'home'

I've lived in the States and absolutely loved it there, would still be there today if staying longer had been possible at the time I think. OH is Danish and says he'd never move back to Denmark - a country that regularly comes out top of countries to live. I wouldn't mind living there.

Houdini I've heard some equally hideous things about Egypt. I worked with a woman who had lived in Cypress and then Egypt for six months - she said she hated every single minute of it, and she wasn't married to a local - her h was British.

I don't think anyone is saying that living abroad can't be wonderful. Just that sometimes the idea of emigrating can be born out of a holiday delusion, and people think of emigrating somewhere without actually thinking it through properly. For example I've seen threads on here saying "We really don't want to live in the UK any more, we don't like x/y/the kids would be better off growing up elsewhere. So we think we might like to move to australia/canada/>.

My advice to anyone moving is always:

You shouldn't move somewhere because you don't want to live here, you should move there because you want to live there.

Dh has an uncle who was given a job in Jamaica and as they'd previously lived in Abu Dabi and loved it and were more open to the idea of living abroad they were really excited to be going - esp as it was only a one year contract so they knew there was an end in sight if it was too bad. Dh's aunt hated it so much that she and their dd came home after three weeks. She said the violence was horrendous, out on the streets, massive violent crime, shootings and the like - and the locals were awful. He worked out the contract alone and then came back to the UK without renewing.