This is the fifth time I’ve moved to a foreign country. I’ve been an expat for almost four years, bouncing from country to country with whatever possessions will fit into two suitcases, trying to figure out the whole world by savoring disparate bits and pieces of it. I love it, but I’ll admit that it takes a lot to live as an expat.
But it takes a lot of what? I don’t think it’s courage, at least not in the traditional Cowardly Lion sense. Rather, moving abroad requires a blend of insanity, tenacity, insatiable curiosity, and a willingness to demote your ego. That last thing tripped me up for a long time. For so long I tried to force the world to conform to my perception of reality, rather than accepting how the world is and adapting myself to it. It’s a misguided war that you can only fight for so long, especially when you dive headfirst into a foreign culture. All those universal truths about the world that you learned from your native culture, the things that you accepted as true since childhood? It turns out they’re hardly ubiquitous across the entire globe.
It’s an uphill battle sometimes, because I generally don’t even know which things I don’t know, you know? And it’s not like there’s a school where I can go to learn these things. The new country IS my school, and man, do some of the teachers suck.
The most brutal truth about moving abroad, or just traveling, is this: no matter what you do, or how hard you try to blend in with your new surroundings, you are constantly going to stick out. You are going to do absolutely everything wrong, including things you didn’t know it was possible to do wrong, simply because you don’t know any better. You can try to behave like a local all you want, you can leave your white tennis shoes and fanny packs at home, but it’s always going to be glaringly obvious that you’re Not From Here.
I have no shortage of anecdotes in which I came across as a foreign idiot. I’m definitely only even aware of a tiny percentage of the faux-pas I commit. Many of my crimes stem from my constant language barrier – as an unfortunate sap who spent the first 20-odd years living in one country and speaking only one language, I mispronounce every single word when I try to use a different language. Mostly it’s so bad that no one understands, and I have to either pantomime what I want or run away and try to find someone else to gurgle at. During my first trip to the supermarket in Bariloche, it took me 5 minutes just to find the milk section (hint: it’s not refrigerated), and then I stood there for 5 more minutes blocking the entire aisle, trying to translate every word.
Riding the bus in Bariloche required me to learn that I needed a re-loadable charge card, to learn that they’re only sold at kioscos, to learn what a kiosco actually is, then visit six (SIX) of them, trying to find one that sold the card itself. But at least it was better than that time I was fined 60 Euro the first time I rode a tram in Germany because I didn’t know where to buy a ticket (hint: there are ticket machines, but only in the LAST tram car) or a 150 Leu fine in Romania, where I did have a ticket but wasn’t sure how to validate it (hint: there’s an old-fashioned hand-turned screw that pretty much just punches a hole in the ticket). Sadly, I can’t even claim that my failures are only caused by the language barrier: once I took a bus in Australia and ended up 30 kilometers from where I meant to be, and the bus driver forced me to get off and wait an hour for the next bus to come along.
I once decided to move from a single apartment to an off-campus shared apartment in Germany, and I visited a nice place that I decided I wanted to move into. I told the girl I wanted the room, and I thought that was that. I canceled my existing rent contract and packed up my things, not realizing that I was actually just one of 15 roommate candidates she had interviewed for the privilege of moving into the room (I got EXTREMELY lucky because she did in fact choose me and I didn’t end up homeless, but it could have very easily gone the other way).
In southern Italy, the only way you can cross the street is by darting in front of traffic and making direct eye contact with each individual driver to make sure they see you. Meanwhile in Germany, you do not jaywalk, even if there’s not a single car in sight, or you run the risk of being yelled at by belligerent old folks. In Bariloche, it’s neither: there are basically no stop lights or even stop signs, you just have to wait until there’s a large enough gap in traffic and make a run for it.
Do these stories make you vicariously disgruntled? Do you think these things should be clearer, more logical, or more lenient on us foreigners when we inevitably do it all wrong? Because I used to be that person. I used to get pissed whenever something didn’t make logical sense to me, or when I was verbally or financially reprimanded for my ignorance. But this is entirely my point: the world is how it is, and if I don’t know the rules of whatever cultural game I start playing, that’s no one’s fault but mine.
I used to be ashamed by these failures. I would let the embarrassment take hold deep within me and there it festered, building until it metastasized into a black ball of fear and anxiety. I began to fear even the potential fuck-ups I might make if I tried something new. I was hesitant to use my burgeoning language skills or travel to new countries. Fear became my excuse to withdraw, although of course I never acknowledged it as fear. I put lipstick on that pig and just told myself I didn’t have the time, I didn’t have the money, I had better things to do – like watch Netflix for an entire weekend.
So, rather than courage, here’s what I think is the most useful quality an expat can develop: acceptance. Every day in a new culture I have to wake up and accept that I am an idiotic and functionally mute five-year-old who isn’t really sure how to cross the street. I have to accept that all day long I’m going to make a stream of ignorant mistakes that are probably going make a lot of locals dislike me. I have to accept that I almost always need help, and that I should graciously take it whenever anyone offers, even if my ego insists that I’m perfectly fine on my own, thankyouverymuch.
Accepting my failures makes it easier to learn from them, and also to immediately let them go. I don’t sweat my errors because no one will remember them tomorrow. Because I learn best by trying and failing. Because at the end of the day, it’s all fine anyways and no one died (probably). Letting them go means that that cancerous fear can’t get a foothold and hold me back from soaking in the world. Letting them go means I am free – free to to be a moron!
All this has changed how I see and approach the world. I know how it feels to constantly be treated like an idiot because I don’t know a custom (how many cheek air-kisses do I give? Is my face actually supposed to touch your face?) or where the yogurt is (it’s in bags, apparently) or an unspoken process (what do you mean I need Argentinian medical insurance to conduct research in a national park?). I know I deserve to be treated like a dumbass when I do dumbass things, especially when I could have avoided the mistake with a prophylactic Google search. I tend to look at other expats more kindly now. I know, like me, they’re trying. They’re working so hard to figure it all out, to drop their countless failures onto the ground and turn them into flagstones lining their path towards personal growth.
It’s hard, and it takes a lot.
But it’s worth it.
Window Seat Odyssey 
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