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It's not exactly traveling, it's not exactly staying home. Expat bloggers walk the line between living somewhere and being a foreigner and they do it every day. I have a soft spot in my heart for the expat bloggers, having been one myself for so many years. I envy those living in vibrant foreign cities and I sympathize deeply with the difficulties of choosing the expat life, regardless of how romantic and perfect their "home" imagines itself to be. There's a rich crop of expat bloggers in the blogrolls here at BlogHer, meet a few of them:
Florida Girl in Sydney is just that - she blogs about her migrated life in Sydney Australia and in this post, discusses something near and dear to me: experiencing anti-American sentiment:
But I'm having a very different experience here. Sitting in a restaurant, hearing the people next to me say terrible things about Americans. Or while at the register in a nice department store (thanks David Jones for the great shopping experience) having the clerk tell me (and my American friend) how obnoxious Americans are and how ridiculous everything from the U.S. is. Um, I guess our ploy of telling her we were from Canada backfired... we got it even worse.
Rudders at Home is and American in London. In this post, she talks about how it's hard to decide if you're a tourist or a local and the weird feeling of being both.
I’m not a complete foreigner, any more, but it’s taken a long time to get to this place. I think becoming a local is a scary thing. For me, it means a certain level of permanence has been achieved, and I’m not sure I’m ready to admit it yet - even though five years is proof enough and extremely hard to ignore. I think I prefer to feel like a tourist.
Je Voudrais une Croissant is living in Paris, the most romantic city, and in this post, writes about the stuff that Just Drives Her Crazy. A lot of it is stuff you'd notice as a tourist but since you'd just be passing through, it would be easy to blow it off.
Linguism. If this isn't an acknowledged form of discrimination, it should be. I speak French. I know, not perfectly. Not even close to perfectly. But that does not mean that I appreciate people switching into English the moment they hear the slightest trace of an accent, because 99.9% of the time, it's blatantly clear that they're not doing it to be nice. They're doing it to say, "I know you're a foreigner, and I'm better than you and I think I can speak your language better than you can speak mine and would you like some spit with your café au lait?"
Roaming Aussie Mum is an Australian living in Mexico - in this post she talks about how the bloom comes off the rose and you can take things for granted. If you're lucky and observant, the magic comes back now and again.
When you’ve been living in a place for a while, you get used to a lot of things that were so noticeable to begin with. Going on holidays in Mexico has often reminded me of some of these things and walking through the Main Plaza and market area of Alamos I noticed again how colourful and alive everything is here.
[Photo: Expat dinner in Buenas Aires from blmurch on Flickr.]
I can't speak for these bloggers, but I can tell you that in my expat life, blogging helped me stay sane. It helped me connect with people who understood the feeling of displacement that comes from living in a country not your own, that feeling of "WTF?!?!" that pops up now and then when locals don't notice or question something that seems outrageous or just weird to you. The expat bloggers I met were the friendliest folks I encountered while living abroad. Go say hi, I'm quite sure they'll welcome you to their virtual homes.
Pam blogs about travel and other adventures at Nerd's Eye View. Her husband is the expat now.
