Category: All Blog Posts
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Lose The Attitude
France has always been a challenge for me, there is a manner and a culture that has often left me feeling like my face has been slapped or highly embarrassed. There is also a reactivity that I have to the French manners that goes back to my childhood. I recognise…
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What Happens When You’re No Longer Trailing?
Most women I know didn’t plan a life of following their husband’s around for their work. It just happened. The women adapted, changed, worked within the parameters of the new situation. But what happens when the trailing stops? When the marriage is over, or the man’s career is done, or…
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What Scares Me Most
You’d think after ten years of living overseas, of moving from country to country, adapting to new cultures, embracing new experiences I’d be the queen of change. But I’m not. I think there are people who are naturally predisposed to change and those who aren’t. There’s no issue with being…
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Life Without Nostalgia
Living overseas often takes that nostalgia away from you, where possible you will have your mementos, your personal belongings, your photos but you don’t walk into a charity shop and see a toy you used to play with as a child (well not that I’ve yet experienced anyway). Your in…
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Is Earth Really That Small?
When I moved to Spain my knowledge of the country was limited. I knew I loved the people thanks to memories of visiting my grandfather in Jimena de la Frontera. I was all of four years old, in my recollections I was wondering the little town he lived in alone,…
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Do Multi-Cultural Couples Do It Better?
I feel like my first experience of multi-cultural couples was living overseas in France, but the reality is I grew up in a house with such a couple. From the ages of five to seventeen my dad (who had full custody of me) lived with a French woman, but it…
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Comparison is the Thief of Joy
My short two months back in the UK has been eye opening and educational. It has taught me a lot about myself, outside of the fact that it’s not the country I’d choose to live in. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a scenario where I’ve been away from a…
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Have I Changed?
Are you someone who classes yourself as easily influenced? Can you be talked into going out for drinks when you said you wouldn’t have any alcohol that week, or persuaded to have a late night when you’ve got a big meeting the next day? I know people in both camps,…
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Some Places Just Don’t Work
I’ve been reticent to write about Baku, mostly because when I was still in the country I was aware any negative thing said about it could result in them kicking you out. I had a friend who’s cousin was removed from the country due to an oversight with his student…
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Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Before I started living overseas, I think I would have been one of those self-righteous twenty year olds who claimed I would happily live any of the places I’ve gone on holiday. This was before. Before dealing with red tape, and local customs, and etiquette rules we know nothing about.…
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When Your Heart Is Scattered
As I prepare to move to my next temporary location, one of the benefits is that it is in France where my best friend and my goddaughter live. I am a mix of nerves at the this new start, this is the first move I have done for me. The…
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Over-Influenced Under-Caring
Each country has its own culture, this is an undeniable fact. How we as visitors see their culture is completely subjective, and how we interpret their behaviour can be the difference between understanding and reacting to their way of doing things. My husband used to say that if he was…
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Lessons Learnt
The second country we moved to was France, our first permanent post overseas and probably the most naïve and unprepared I’ve ever stumbled into a country. Prior to this we had completed a short term contract in the Maldives, an island where your staff food is cooked for you, your…
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The Place I Haven’t Named
A number of people commented about my not naming the place I’ve been living in, not talking about it in terms of my next stage in moving overseas. There has been an element of that which was intentional. When you talk about big brother states people tend to immediately think…
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Knowing More, Knowing Less
My childhood wasn’t conventional, in many ways that maybe one day I will go into, but my first experience of school was a Rudolf Steiner private school. It is similar to Montessori but with a more religious (and slightly more hippy) overtone. Neither of my parents were religious, both were…
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Don’t Let Bitterness Win
There seems a recent trend of tv series about living overseas, about the darker side of living abroad. These are ultimately stories about tragedy and relationships and the failures of humanity, but their ‘expat’ settings suggests an air of glamour that supports the cinematography.
Immigrants on the Move 