out of interest, cd, what kind of music do you play? I play classical viola, and moved to the Midlands not so long ago and am finding a wealth of opportunities - not as many as I had in London, granted, but plenty to occupy one life.

I've been an expat, too, cd, but "only" for about a year. What compelled you to move where you did in Britain?

altolinguistic, I have been playing a lot of Americana type of stuff, a little Bluegrass, and some original (more modern-style) tunes with another singer. I can give you some links...

mdonley, we wanted to be around my family or my wife's family. My wife is from this town: her family all live around here (some are as far as Wales or Shropshire or London, but her mom and sister are both right here).

I completely understand where you're coming from, oddly enough, my move to the UK was not by choice and I thought I would be very, very unhappy. I still find myself almost wanting an interpreter but besides the backwater where I live, it can be an amazing place. I'm close to London with all that that entails. Good education system but not as good as the one I left. Excellent health services.
And I love the mix of languages & cultures.

How long have you been over here, Wilder?

(the schools in my little town are excellent, btw; that's one of the biggest reasons we moved)

I'm 5 1/2 years here now, and it gets easier ;-)
Having family connections mean you more or less have an instant "in" socially and then you can build up a set of friends/acquaintances/interest groups.

I didn't really have that and found it difficult since I'm very into people.

In the age of the internet, satellite TV, and endless mailorder services it seems like it'd be easier to move to another country now. You can still keep tabs on your roots and follow things that interest you from back home. I'm sure for some part of the joy of moving to a new nation would be total culture immersion and leaving everything behind, but I just couldn't do that.

I've lived in the Chicago suburbs my whole life and have turned down several good job offers in other towns because I just didn't want to leave here. For years it's been "New York City" or nothing. But recently I've suddenly turned around to the I-want-to-live-somewhere radically different from where I am now. Suddenly the idea of living in the middle of nowhere or in a totally foreign country seems very compelling. I really wish that desire struck me when I was younger and it was significantly easier to pick up and move. I could still do it now, but there's quite a bit more involved.

cd (or any other expats): Was there anything that totally broadsided you when you moved? Something that you never thought would effect you about living in a different country?

@Slack-a-gogo: When I was living in Indonesia, I was blindsided by how much effort it took to do anything mundane at first, until I realized that I wasn't engaging in small talk because I didn't have time to study the language in depth, so I wasn't picking up all the tips that you'd usually get from friends/neighbors/peers cluing you in. Language - just being friendly and chatty like you'd be at home - stopped being full of banter and ridiculousness, and became a really boring, functional thing in my life, like a potato peeler instead of a chandelier. It was like I couldn't express my personality through words and had to rely on a phrase book, which was insufficient in a language where "shy", "embarrassed", and "ashamed" are all signified by the same word. It was almost like losing the ability to speak, and it was really isolating.

For the first few months, everything I said was in grammatically-incorrect, barely-understandable Indonesian, so while getting on a bus or buying an onion was fine after a week or so, asking someone how long they've lived in your neighborhood or what they think about the new badminton court took ages - and even when I left, I still only could remember maybe 500 words - and probably just 20 verbs and 10 adverbs/time phrases. It's probably my biggest regret about the whole experience - I didn't get to know as many locals as I would have liked to because I chose a job with a contract that didn't give me enough time to practice and learn the language.

the town I live in now is nicer than the town I lived in before.

And you're happy. And that's all that matters.

Was there anything that totally broadsided you when you moved? Something that you never thought would effect you about living in a different country?

Several things:

how difficult the fucking driving test is
people asking me where I'm from constantly
lack of Mexican food (oddly)
lack of The Colbert Report
strange profusion of shitty instant coffee
feeling crowded all the time
how SMALL the place is
the love/hate relationship with the US that most Brits have
how much people drink
backwards attitudes / widespread racism

Hrm.

Moving from New Zealand to the USA was a weird one, because you feel like you should know exactly what you're getting into. I mean, the american popular culture is so saturated around the world - I was familiar with most of the pop-cultural references that people my age are, as well as historical stuff.

Taking a step back to before I moved - I had been to the USA once before, when I was 21. I travelled by myself and often picked up a travelling buddy for a day or two. I was up in Seattle with this girl, she would have been around 28, and she started telling me this whole story of this thing that happened the year before, where this dude had blown up a building in Oklahoma City. But she was all like "you wouldn't have heard of it; you wouldn't know where Oklahoma City is". And I was just agog. "No," I said to her, "I've heard of it. It was worldwide news for ages. Just because you all don't look outside your shores doesn't mean no other country does".

And that was kind of the end of the conversation. But it really stayed with me. So, fast forward to when I moved here, I was kind of expecting, but really hoping not to have similar conversations. (particularly because I was going to start working at a med school, I figured people there were a bit more clued in). But again, I was baffled by how little people (in general) knew about other countries. Moreoever, I seemed to know more about the US than they did. At least, historical stuff.

I did, however, move to the USA (Baltimore) just after Sep 11, '01. It was a strange time.

Anyway that was the main kind of culture shock. Others:

*east coast work ethic (10 hour days are not healthy, people!)
*napkins with dinner. Go out to eat with a group of NZers and few-none will lay a napkin on their lap. Sounds odd, and I thought for a while that maybe it was just me, until I had friends visit after a few months and I was now the only one to use a napkin (we're just tidy eaters, what?)
*patriotism. flags. again though, post-9/11


I'm sure I'll think of more. It's been nearly 6 years now, so I'm kind of assimilated.

I've been thinking that after I hit my 5-year anniversary at my current job (2 years in the future from now), I'd like to go work in Europe for 1-2 years. I think it's something I need to do.

To echo what gaspode said (but from the other direction), when I first went overseas at age 18 the prevalence of American pop culture was shocking- and this was (barely) Soviet Russia! I had assumed that every country had their own Hollywood and Britney Spearses (or whatever was Top 40 back then). There was also a tendency to criticize America for exporting it. For my part, I critized them for not getting off their duff and creating something better.

I was also was surprised that they knew so much about the states. They felt very superior because of this, but it's not like they knew that much about every country- just the first world ones, and not even all of those. They knew most about America and their close neighbors. At risk of offending, I think it's less a matter of how natively worldly people overseas are and more that America behaves like a rabid grizzly bear, and it therefore behooves other nations to keep an on what it might be up to.

On a personal note, it turned out that a big chunk of my identity here at home is that of white person. When everyone was white I couldn't figure out who I was. Also, when everyone's the same color it's hard to tell them apart. Russians had some variation, but Finland and Minnesota were really hard.