Beyond the Bucket: The Quiet Reality of Living Abroad
This prompt has lived inside my head, rent free, for the last five years. Maybe more. Back in the days where I semi-regularly contributed to the Wanderlynds blog.
My early writing focused on the grand adventure of moving abroad. The romanticized version of the expat life is filled with stunning views, weekend travels, luxe vacations and exotic food. Don’t get me wrong; all those extravagances are present in varying, but overwhelmingly minute quantities. Of course that was my reality at the time. Everything felt so new and mind-boggling. But what I suggest today and what has been on my mind for years, is that what actually makes up the expat life isn’t the opulent moments, but rather is more defined by how you handle a Tuesday afternoon.
I mean, what transitions you from visitor to expat is settling into a comfortable, maybe sometimes boring, routine in a brand new place. Depending on how striking a difference your resident country is from your home country, this may take a while. Often the initial attempts at the daily grind present many challenges that will be ironed out over time; with a little luck and a lot of patience.
For example, how a simple run for milk can turn into a high-stakes guessing game. Staring at ten different types of flour and not recognizing any of them as all-purpose. Later, a Google search will explain to you it’s called Patent and if you’re lucky, the next trip you can find it neatly labeled without using a translator app. The expat life is missing the brands you relied upon for years, occasionally splurging 3-4x the amount when you come across the brand in the import section, and eventually getting used to the local counterpart.
The expat life is needing twice the brain power to figure out if your community recycles, how to operate the washing machine and how to read your thermostat or oven in Celsius. It’s not knowing what the hose in the bathroom is for and then it becoming your most beloved accessory. It’s changing over your Driver’s License; needing it translated into a language you haven’t begun to understand, and being told seventeen differing requirements by different people on how and where to accomplish the task. It’s finding someone to bake a birthday cake, hunting for places that are open on the holy day, and not throwing a tantrum when the directions in your map are utterly impossible given updated construction, so you’ve turned a 30-minute errand into a 3-hour ordeal.
Micro-triumphs rule your world and define a good day. It’s finally getting to the grocery store, mall or craft store without using your map. It’s ordering that cup of coffee in the local language and actually getting what you intended to. It’s having your kids eager to order Kabsa any night of the week! It’s getting through an entire day running errands and realizing you never once felt out of place.
The real life in “expat life” is the shift from tourist to resident. It’s what happens when you’re no longer on a visiting visa and the honeymoon phase has ended. You’re simply living. Getting your kids enrolled in school and onto the school bus. Finding the family a dentist, a doctor, an after-school activity. It’s when the landmarks you once snapped a dozen photos in front of have now blended into the background of your daily commute. Here, predictability has become your biggest sense of belonging.
You cannot talk about the reality of routine without mentioning the people who help you survive it. When you move abroad, your friends aren’t just people you grab a casual drink with—they become your emergency contacts, your stand-in family for holidays, and the people who validate your daily frustrations. Back home, friendships are often built slowly over years of shared history or proximity. Abroad, friendship operates on an accelerated timeline. You skip the small talk because you desperately need someone to tell you which pediatric clinic to use or how to sponsor a nanny. Expat friends become your chosen family by default.
As unsexy as it sounds, it’s the mundane that really shapes an expat’s reality. This is where the growth occurs; where you learn you can blend in with anyone and any place. It takes resilience, humility, certainly humor, and ample patience to build an ordinary life in an extraordinary place. Gearing up for our 8th year in the Middle East and almost 11th year living abroad, it’s actually how normal everything feels and the way I’m very rarely surprised that has me feeling more like a true expat than all the surprises of those first years arriving anywhere new.
What are your favorite, boring yet beautiful activities in your home away from home?