I have travelled globally for quite a number of years, both for business and pleasure. That global experience helped me to understand some of what to expect but it is not the same as living here. Brief visits, living in hotels and eating in restaurants does not prepare you for the day to day. Particularly when you move to a culture that does not share your native language. I was speaking to another American expat the other day and we commiserated about the energy that the small stuff can take. I have mentioned it here before, but the minutia of daily life is what can exhaust you. Figuring out how to dispose of garbage or operate the parking meters amount to small victories but often take a significant amount of energy to deal with. Being functionally illiterate does not make any of this easier. Those small victories however, are what keep you going. When you do figure things out, you feel pretty good about it and you begin to feel like you are beginning to assimilate.
My in-laws arrive for a visit tomorrow and we are really looking forward to showing them around. I don’t think however, that they will get a real feel for how different our life is here. We will take them around and they will see some of our daily routine, but the fact is, because we have figured things out, I think much of how we have changed will be invisible to them. And that is probably a good thing.
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