Traveling Light

Ten years ago this week — back at a time when I was a couple years out of college and at a professional dead-end in life — I packed my essentials into two suitcases and moved to Busan,

The weeks that immediately followed in my new Asian hometown proved to be among the strangest of my life up to that point.  Suddenly thrown into a new environment, unable to speak the language or grasp the nuances of the culture, I was like a child again.  All sense of self-sufficiency vanished as the simplest activities — shopping, taking the bus, ordering food — turned into complicated challenges.  Away from home, away from the rehearsed responses and instinctive comforts of a familiar place, day-to-day life became entirely unpredictable and intensely real.

In a certain sense, it was a tough time for me.  Teaching, I discovered, could be frustrating. The hours were long, the Korean winter cold.  Often I felt lonely, bewildered, lost.  More than once, I considered packing everything up and moving back home.

Over time, however, I learned to deal with the challenges of living in a new land.  Being lost eventually helped me learn the layout of my new city; being lonely inspired me to be more extroverted.  My students taught me as much about their culture as I taught them about my language, and eventually I learned to read the phonetic hangeul script of Korean writing.  I came to enjoy the simple pleasures of food, drink, camaraderie, hard work, and the sense of accomplishment that came at the end of a long day of new challenges.  I learned how to question my assumptions, withhold judgment, and improvise within an unfamiliar culture. 

Ultimately, through good and bad experiences alike, my time in Korea made me into a stronger, wiser, more capable person.  To this day I remember this initial expatriate experience as a vivid turning point in the way I viewed the world.  Just as Hemingway considered his Paris sojourn "a necessary part of a man's education," I consider my Busan experience to be an essential rite of passage in my own life. 

Moreover, I'd recommend an expat stint to anyone who's looking for a real challenge in life, be it teaching English in Korea, studying Spanish in Ecuador, working a Peace Corps stint in Gabon, telecommuting from Tasmania, or spending a summer as a tour guide in Croatia.

Indeed, if you're young and you feel like you're lacking edge and experience — or if you're not so young and you just want to shake your life up for the better — I'd suggest becoming an expat for a few months or years.  It won't always be easy, but it will inevitably be rewarding.

For those who are seriously considering a move overseas, here are a few tips on getting started:

1) Plan wisely

Living abroad isn't for everyone, so put some thought into whether or not you're ready to start a new life away from friends and family.  Don't move overseas on an impulse, or to "get away" from a bad emotional situation.  If you determine that you're up to the challenge of expatriate living, start preparing for your new lifestyle by simplifying your life and thinning down your material possessions.  Deciding to move overseas "indefinitely" is seldom a wise move if you haven't done it before, so set a concrete goal — one year is a time-honored standard — for your first expat stint.

2) Explore your options

In researching a move overseas, explore your interests and goals.  Are you looking to work and make money, volunteer in humanitarian projects, or just relax for a few months and soak up some culture?  Do you want to live in a big city, a rural area, or a small town?  Do you prefer to live in a temperate area, or the tropics?  Do you mind living in an undeveloped area, or do you depend on modern conveniences?  Answering these questions will help narrow down the destination and type of experience that best suits you.  Go to the library and read some geography, travel narratives, history, and literature from the countries that interest you.  Study travel guidebooks to determine cost of living, health considerations, and cultural differences.  Settle on a country or region, and start making plans to move there.

3) Read up online

Transitions Abroad magazine's excellent website has many links and resources for living and working abroad. Living Abroad and Expatriate Resources, for example, includes articles by expatriates, country-by-country resources, information on home exchanges, and support groups for Americans abroad; the magazine's Expatriate Websites page has outgoing links to dozens of other useful online resources, such as Easy Expat, Expat Exchange, and the Network for Living Abroad.

4) Attitude counts

Your first few months of living and working overseas will be your toughest, so be prepared to deal with the transition.  You can't plan for all the eventualities of expat life, so keep a positive attitude, and be prepared to adapt and persevere.  Keep healthy, exercise, and indulge in the cuisine of your host culture.  Moreover, culture is instinctual — not intellectual — so be prepared to deal with culture shock, and set a goal to stick things out overseas, even when the going gets tough.

5) Stay active

Isolation is the worst enemy of the expat, so be social.  Make local friends; study the language and history of your host culture.  If you're there to work, take that work seriously.  If you're there to relax, stay active as well.  Practice old hobbies and cultivate new ones.  Start an expat travel blog for the folks back home.  Take short road-trips on the weekends.  Throw yourself a party every once in awhile (but don't spend all your time in bars; that's an expat cliché).  Set goals, read books, and keep a journal, so you can look back on the experience ten or thirty years later and see how it changed you.

Next: A nation of one's own

Previous: To haggle or not to haggle

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