The Expat Experience 2: Try It On

You’ve shopped around and have decided where you’d like to emigrate to. Great! If you are of working age, your next step is going to be to start to look for a job there. If you’re able to get hired by a foreign business, then your way is immediately smoothed. You will have a slot and a role, the moment you get off the plane. Your employer will hae poerful incentive to help you find someplace to live, negotiate the local bureaucracy about getting a bank account or wifi or your kids into school. Best of all, if the job is a bust? If living in Portugal frosts your apples? You quit and come home, easy.

But let’s say you can’t do that. No jobs turn up. Or you are already retired. Then, before you commit to a major move, take a test drive. Go over there and live for a while, and see how you like it. You can rent a furnished place on line (AirBnB or VRBO work fine) and walk a mile in a Sicilian or a South Korean’s shoes.

If you do this, do it with intentionality. Stay as long as you can. Don’t just tourist around. Consider carefully whether this is where you want to live. Rent a car — do the highways drive you crazy? Look at towns, neighborhoods. Turn on the TV. Hop on line and case the internet for expatriate websites that will clue you in on how to find a podiatrist that speaks English in Calabria. Find out if you like the pizza or the Asian noodle shops or the sushi restaurants in Portugal, whatever cuisine you will not give up when you leave the US. (When I was living in France I found my deal-breaker. There are dim-sum restaurants in France. But they are all lousy! No, impossible. I moved to Portland, Oregon, where there are Asian restaurants and groceries galore .)

But, you don’t have the money or the vacation time to spend? Then do this from the US. You can find an English-language news site for a great many countries. Bookmark the one for the polity you’re considering, and start following the news in Kuala Lumpur or Mexico. Read the newspapers, watch the TV, and start growing the roots you’re going to need.

You’re doing Duolingo, right? You can also find conversation groups here in the US, either on line or meetups in coffee shops, and start practicing. If you have any important needs or issues — diabetes, let us say, or significant allergies — start considering how you’re going to get care where you’re going. Are there the medical facilities you will need, in Morocco? Google will kick up every endocrinologist in Rabat.

Do as much as you can before you make the big jump. It’ll be tons easier and cheaper, for you to find out that this isn’t going to work before you move over there. All of this you can do yourself, at your own pace. It’s when you face the bureaucracy that the clock begins ticket. I can’t face it here — next post!