5 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Spent 5 Years Abroad
On culture shock, Toblerone mountains and the fact that dumplings are still gross
I gave myself a month to get ready for moving to another country. I packed. I gave things away. I got decision fatigue and built a box fort.
I installed a well-known language app on my phone and learned how to say ‘that is not my horse’ in German. Disappointingly, 5 years in, I have still not had to use this sentence.
I made an old-home bucket list and checked off half of the things. One day, I went to the beach to fly a kite and eat fish and chips with my best good friend. Pro tip: the friends who insist that you abandon your packing to go outside and play are the ones who’re going to stick.
Like a true optimist, I also studied how to deal with homesickness and culture shock and anticipated the day when I would cry because my cup of tea was wrong. I knew that reading about it wouldn’t be the same, but I’m a lifelong subscriber to the idea that understanding the theory will help.
I wasn’t completely wrong. In general, I also think that I managed to swim instead of sinking. Still, with every year that’s passed since I arrived in my new country, there’s been something else I wish I’d known.
Year 1: Geography matters
I moved from a country where I had grown up seeing the ocean from my window to one where I was landlocked. This doesn’t sound like the biggest issue — You can go to the beach when you visit home! We have beautiful lakes! — but I felt antsy for months and, looking back, I realise that the landscape was to blame.
Being far from the sea made the weather predictable. It took me months to unlearn my habit of taking a jacket ‘just in case’ and to accept that I could use an umbrella without it turning inside out. In the summer, it wasn’t the high temperatures I struggled with, but the fact that the hot weather settled over the city and stayed for weeks on end. It was as far from my natural habitat of ‘four seasons in a day’ as you could get.
I tried to solve the itchy feeling by getting out of the city but it never helped. Used to Scottish mountains, the alps were all wrong. They were craggy and cold-looking, at once too chocolate boxy and too imposing. Annoyingly, rather than giving me space to breathe, leaving the city consistently compounded my homesickness. Adjusting to a new landscape was the first of many challenges I hadn’t been able to prepare for.
Year 2: Small achievements are worth celebrating
Living abroad requires bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are not always patient with people trying to complete forms in their second language. I spent my first 12 months terrified to do all the chores I had to do to be an adult in another country. This changed when I started to give myself a break and cheer when I got something right.
In year 2, I started imagining that the hoops I had to jump through were a scavenger hunt. Waiting rooms were no longer anxiety-inducing. Garbling a phonecall was not enough to make me wish the ground would open. I even got to eat cake when I did something right. My life abroad improved immeasurably.
Saying this, one of the most significant moments happened, not in my new country, but my old home town. After 2 years of feeling increasingly socially inept, increasingly out of my depth, I went to the supermarket and made small talk with the cashier. We both laughed. It was the smallest of small victories, but it helped me more than I ever would have guessed.
Successfully holding a 2 minute conversation was a reminder that I could interact with other humans and that I was usually just working with a language barrier. Returning from that holiday was one of the first times I didn’t dread getting back on the plane.
Year 3: Culture shock is not a bell curve
Year 3 was not a good year.
In the weeks before I moved, I read that homesickness was a process. It was natural to feel elated at first before becoming slowly disillusioned. There would be a rock bottom but, eventually, you would start to climb out of the pit.
This was not my experience.
I skipped excitement and went straight to terror, convinced, even after 10 minutes in the airport, that I had made the worst mistake of my life. Over the first winter, I got angry too. Everything about the city annoyed me and I couldn’t get past the idea that, if I were a more impulsive person, I would have grabbed my passport and got on a plane literally anywhere else.
I experienced culture shock not as a curve but as a series of cliffs. It would come from nowhere and stay for weeks. It had nothing to do with the season, work, or who had just visited. It was like being under attack.
Looking back, the frequency of days when I couldn’t cope must have slowly decreased, but even the end of it wasn’t a smooth curve. My last major bout of homesickness, almost 2 years ago, was the worst.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that you can’t plan for the emotional rollercoaster of uprooting and replanting yourself. I’m also not naive enough now to believe that these feelings are never going to hit again.
Year 4: It’s never too late to make a place your own
In year 4, I moved house and got a new corner of the city to explore. It sounds ridiculous, but this was the first time that I started to find places which made me feel at home.
These places weren’t always what I had expected. Yes, I have 2 favourite coffee shops now, one for working, one for brunch. I also have strong opinions on where to find the best cheeseburger, kebab, ice cream and chai tea latte in town. But the things which make me feel at home are smaller.
I have a favourite house. I don’t know anyone who lives there, but there’s something about the shape of the roof and the number of windows and the way it’s slightly narrower than the houses on either side that makes it look like it must have a story.
I have not only a favourite park but a favourite tree in that park.
I know where there’s a fabric shop that sells the ends of bolts for half price. I like to rummage through the box on my way down the street.
These aren’t places that I take people to when they visit, but they mean the world to me. I only wish that it hadn’t taken four years to climb out of my culture shock cave and start noticing the things that would make me happy every time I saw them.
Year 5: Long-distance relationships suck
I was an LDR survivor before I moved abroad. I knew how it worked. I knew that keeping in touch with everybody would be impossible and that cramming as many people as possible into a week at home wasn’t enough to keep up with what was actually going on in anybody’s life.
What I didn’t realise for several years was that distance doesn’t just strain friendships and romance, it can wear down family relationships too. It’s not a surprise to learn that talking is important. It is a surprise that keeping up communication with family is often harder than it is with friends.
When you move to another culture, you change. It’s easy to talk about the sights you’ve seen but much harder to talk about how, bit by bit, it’s changing the way you see the world. The problem with this is that people on both sides can feel attacked when they hear that life is better or worse in one place or another. This just becomes harder as the roots you put down in your new home grow deeper. And then, in the back of every conversation where you touch on long term plans, there’s the unspoken ‘but when are you coming home’. After 5 years, the unsaid answer starts to be ‘I really don’t know if I will.’ It’s fertile ground for resentment to grow.
There are things in my new country that I thought I would never learn to deal with that I now appreciate. Shops being closed on Sundays. Having to find a different doctor for every part of your body. Swimming in the river.
There are also some things that seem innocuous but which I still can’t abide. Decorating your home for autumn by bringing deformed pumpkins inside. Being told off by strangers on public transport. The prevalence of dumplings in local cuisine. Perhaps another 5 years will change this too.
If this piece had been written by someone else and I had read it in 2014, my journey through my first few years as an immigrant might have been easier. But maybe not. Maybe these are just badges you have to earn, so unique to the person earning them that they can’t just be passed on by those more experienced.
5 years on, I’m in a strange place. I’ve built a life here which would be difficult to abandon and I can’t picture myself leaving. I’m even having fun. But I also don’t belong here yet. I don’t know exactly where home is, or if I even have two of them now. I’m in between, and it’s somehow comfortable. But who’s to say what the next 5 years will bring.
