Living Abroad
A Boy and His Bike
Recently my bike broke. For most Americans imagine what it might feel like to lose a car. My main mode of transport in the summer months reduced to the phrase “more expensive to fix than to buy a new one.” I am not totally stranded though. Thankfully there is wonderful public transport in Freiburg, but it is still sad. I bought the bike during the first summer that I was here, which makes it 3 and a half years old. It is getting darker and colder, so I wouldn’t be riding as much anyway, but it is awful to lose it.
Expat Isolation and Loneliness
You are different than everyone around you. Perhaps you don’t speak their language so well (or at all). Maybe you miss your friends at home that know all of the inside jokes. You are out of your comfort zone so far you can’t even see it anymore. And this isn’t travel, so you could be living alone and likely working all day. The expatriate experience is a wonderful one. Though it can be a isolating and lonely one at times.
London Expat Experience
Lots of beer, lots of parties, trying to make heads or tails of the tube map and planning the next European trip. That’s the London Expat Experience.
The Siren Song of Home Leave
I will also be heading home in June after over three years as an expat for a “home leave”, so this topic is close to my heart too. In this guest post, Suzer expands upon one of her posts about going home again. The mix of identities that an expat has to deal with “going back.” Check out her blog for more expat tales from Australia.- Andrew
Taking Advantage of the Crossroads
The expat life is sometimes quite unstable. For those abroad on a job post, this job can evaporate and leave you in an uncertain position. Ariana from And Here We Are writes a guest post about how to harness this instability and use it at these times to change your life for the better.
Traveling vs. Living as an Expat
Guest Post by Italylogue: Jessica Spiegel.
“My plan is to move to Italy,” I tell my new Italian friend over coffee in Milan. He looks back at me blankly and for a moment I wonder if I’ve used the wrong verb tense or accidentally said something about his mother. It’s not until he replies that the blank look becomes clear and I get a strong sense of déjà vu.
“But – why would you want to do that?” he asks. And I sigh. Again.
What I want to do when I visit Home
I have been in Germany for a little over three years continuously at this point. This summer I will make my first trip back to the US since moving here. At the point I left there I was fully ok with the idea of not going back. Now I kind of excited to see the country again. Here is a list of things I missed and experiences I want to stock up on.
Distance
One of the few scenes I remember very clearly from watching Sesame Street is of a monster describing near and far. He would wander into the distance and shout “far” then rush toward the camera and shout “near”; all with music and such in the same vein as the old school Mahna mahna(*). This is the idea of “going far away”, “having a long way to travel” or “living near your loved ones”. Travel seems to be all about this distance.
