If you're an expat, maybe you can relate to a few or all of these. If you haven't lived abroad, this list might give you insight into how mixed up expats feel sometimes. And I mean mixed up in the most positive sense. It's definitely a life of mixed emotions and feeling like you've got one foot in multiple places.
You know you're an expat when:
- You have a love-hate relationship with the question “Where are you from?”
- You go into culture shock upon returning to your “home” country.
- Your life story uses the phrase “Then we moved to…” three or four, or five.... times.
- You know how to pack.
- You have the urge to travel or possibly move on a consistent (monthly, yearly) basis.
- You wince when people mispronounce foreign words.
- You don’t know whether to write the date as day/month/year, month/day/year, or some variation thereof.
- When asked a question in a certain language, you’ve absentmindedly respond in a different one.
- To everyone’s confusion, your accent changes depending on who you’re talking to.
And you often slip foreign slang into your English by mistake, which makes you unintelligible to most people.
- You’re really good at calculating time differences, because you have to do it every time you call your parents.
- You know your way around jet lag recovery.
- You convert any price to two different currencies before making significant purchases.
- No matter how many you say, good-byes never get easier. But, the constant flow of new friends makes up for it.
- You know better than anyone else that “home” isn’t a place, it’s the people in it.
- When you talk about home to your children, you have to stipulate which one.
- Everywhere and no where feels like home.
Can you relate to any or all of these?? Any others you have to add? I'd love to hear them!
- Everywhere and no where feels like home.
Can you relate to any or all of these?? Any others you have to add? I'd love to hear them!
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