Being an expat is glamorous, right? After all, you’re living the dream, living your best life in exotic places far away from the daily grind that was your ordinary life before. How could you have possibly spent so long doing dull stuff like supermarket shopping, cleaning the house, and washing the car, when you could be an EXPAT. Now it’s all excitement, magic and the stuff of fairy tales. Right? Right? In Europe, you can just pop across borders to travel around other countries, nothing’s too far. Normally for a New Zealander this would be 24 hours of flying and an entire year of savings. Well okay, yes, this is one of the benefits. I mean, you won’t get any sympathy back home when you grumble about the six hours of trains between Bordeaux and Barcelona.
No one tells you about the searing homesickness, the adjustments to different ways of living, or the cultural habits. People are silent on the fact you are re-learning everything you did as a child in your home country. How to open a bank account. How to get a cellphone. How to use a cellphone. How to cross the road. How to read a bus timetable or a metro map. How to get a library card. How to buy bus and train tickets. How to use the cash tills at a bakery. The list goes on. All these things we take for granted but they are a fundamental part of settling in a new country and all depend on the type of visa and resident permit that you have.
Country administration is probably the most challenging and you’ll spend about 50% of your time wrestling with it. Let’s not talk about the process for changing your driver licence. There are entire websites dedicated to this topic. Oh and did I mention it’s often all in another language? My first year was spent in a town where approximately 0.63% of the population spoke English despite being just across the English Channel from England.
This page is dedicated to the good, the bad, the ugly and the ordinary like supermarket shopping, cleaning houses and washing cars that make up the glamorous life of the expat. You’ll find everything about expat experiences, social blunders, and what it’s like to live far from your roots in a country severely affected by serious events such as Covid 19.