Holiday Was So Great, Should I Live Here? (Travel like a tourist VS move like an expat)
Have you ever wanted to move to another city? This urge doesn’t hit everyone, but this thought will probably cross the minds of aa surprising amount of people.
The world is full of so many beautiful cities. We see them in music videos, movies, as well as on social media. It’s not surprising that many people fall in love with cities and the idea of travel.
You may want to eventually travel to your dream city, some people I know are return visitors to cities like Istanbul, Paris, London, or Dubai. They just can’t get enough of what the city has to offer. Every time they come back they find something new. This in turn makes their love run even deeper for the city.
So, if you’re lucky enough to be in this category, you might think that it’s time to move to that city. You’ve been enough times you’re practically a local at your favourite cafe. This is all well and good, and I’d actually recommend checking out your city multiple times before making a permanently migrating.
However, there’s a really big difference between travelling to a city for a holiday and moving there for an extended period of time. Your experiences as a tourist versus as an expat could be completely different.
Why do you love this place so much? What makes you want to move?
This can be a tricky question to answer, but what do you actually like about this city? Why is it your favourite?
I hesitate to say it, but I feel that for many of us who have never been to our dream cities our expectations might be skewed by the media we consume. We may actually be infatuated with a city, without actually having any substantial reason to like it.
You don’t need a reason to travel to a city for a day. “I just want to breathe the air there”, or “I just want to try their local croissant chain there” are honestly enough of a reason to see the city once.
Beautiful people, dreamy landscapes, and the art scene might be considered more substantial reasons to go on holiday but it still isn’t enough to choose a place as your new home.
Moving to a city means uprooting your old life, encountering new cultural norms, as well as the challenges of settling in. So you ideally want a reason to move to a city that’s strong enough to get you through the difficult times you will inevitably experience.
Here are a few things that differentiate visiting a city as a tourist and visiting as an expat.
When travelling or moving, it is important to fix both your mindset as well as your intention. Why are you really moving? Have you thought of that? Check out this article before you progress, to try and answer that question.
Packing for the long term vs short term
The first thing to think about before you visit your dream city, is what you will bring. There is a huge difference between travelling to a place where you will live in a hotel for 3 days versus somewhere you will stay for the next 3 years.
If you’d like an in-depth review of this topic check out my article here.
Travelling for a short term trip
For me, maybe the one key principle for packing and short term travel is the maximisation of space.
This used to be the most important consideration when I was packing my bags for a flight. I would also often not pack my suitcase to the very limit, just to avoid any hassles when it came to excess baggage.
And besides, if you are walking all around your dream city, you wouldn’t want to be lugging a whole 23-30kg worth of suitcase with you anyway; would you?
There is also a lot of flexibility when it comes to packing. If you forget something, you can just as easily buy it when you’re there. Need an extra T-shirt or pair of underwear? I’m sure you’ll find some wherever you are.
Similarly, you have the flexibility of choice of clothes. You will choose the best time to travel to your dream city; do you want to see Paris in the snow or with golden autumn leaves? So, theoretically, your choice of clothes can be limited to only one season.
Lastly, one thing you may not have as a tourist or short term visitor is access to regular house amenities. Things like washing machines or ironing. This might mean getting creative in terms of packing clothes. You might need to prioritise things that don’t need to be ironed, wear warm tops over your pajamas, or focus more on disposable rather than reusable items.
Travelling for a long term move
Travelling more than a few months or even expatriating to a new country is an entirely different perspective.
Are you looking for some tips to help you make a jump into the unknown? Whether it is moving overseas, or something else, sometimes our life requires a leap of faith from us. And in this article here, I will show you how best to prepare yourself for such a leap.
Previously the biggest decision you may have made was; should I bring the red jumper or the blue one? But now the decisions run more like; should I move my entire life across with me or leave pieces of it as I go?
Suffice to say the differences in decisions are radically different, and the amount of things you are bringing can be so much more. It’s likely that you are hiring a moving service to help you move across from one location to the other. Something a backpacker or weekend tourist would never have considered.
If you are travelling with a mover, saving space may not actually be your biggest priority. You might be thinking about saving money.
Saving money has many different interpretations; it might mean moving all your stuff at one time, it might mean not having it wait too long to be transported, it might also mean buying more. Yes, buying in bulk in your local area might actually be more cost effective than buying the necessary goods in a foreign country.
In your home country, you have access to discount codes, weekly specials, or even industry friends. These are all networks and connections you have built up at home, to re-establish all these in your new city could take forever. So in some ways, buying a little extra before the move might actually work in your favour.
You will probably be bringing a lot more clothes too. If your space is not restricted to one suitcase or less you may also be thinking of bringing clothes for formal occasions and different climates. Also, bringing things for sentimentalities sake becomes a lot more relevant.
You may be able to live a few days on holiday without your favourite record, pyjamas, or board game, but a potential year away is completely different. When you are not necessarily focused on reducing the amount of space you need, you have time to prioritise different things.
Traveling is like a whimsical romance; exciting unpredictable, and passionate. But moving abroad, you strip the city an it’s local culture revealing its demons and angels. You become vulnerable, dependent, and invested. The lust of wander is compromised by its imperfections and challenges.
Originally from a post by Stephanie Be
Language barriers are only cute on tourists
No-one really expects someone to come to their country and speak their language with minimal preparation.
For tourists, it doesn’t really matter if you can’t speak the local language that much. It leads to some endearing and memorable experiences and importantly, eventually you leave.
As a matter of fact, cities that are used to large numbers of tourists may even be more supportive of those who struggle with the language barrier. Check out my article here, for some other reasons you may want to visit the more “touristy” locations.
However, those of us that want to settle down in a new country aren’t as lucky.
People are not always willing to forgive your lack of communication skills outside the tourist areas. If you tell people you have lived in their country for a year or more they’re bound to ask; ‘why don’t you speak our language?’
You will eventually need to learn to function at the bare minimum in your new city; things like going to the supermarket and asking for directions, are some really important things to master. If mastering a language before you move is important to you, follow along to the end of this article, for a special language learning offer!
Helpful hint; you may not need to master the language
Nowadays technology and automation are your friends. You do not necessarily have to master a language to survive in a foreign city.
What does this mean? While you’re learning your new language, use your Google translator to speak to people at the shops or find the names of groceries.
Voice recognition technology has been really handy in that regard. Yes it’s still slow, but faster than waiting to type your messages in real time. You can also make paper lists of the things you need to buy ahead of time. All of these can still be ways of communication.
Automated services really assist us expats. Self-service checkout and online grocery shopping seriously help when I don’t feel like going down and interacting with the locals. Of course, technology often fails and when a problem arises you may still need some basic communication skills.
It’s important that you look like you are trying to adjust to your new culture; after all, you wanted to move here right?
So while you should focus on learning something, modern society means we don’t need to do it all at once. If you are feeling a bit pressured by the challenge to speak like a local immediately, check out my article here about the language learning journey.
You need to deal with administration and bureaucracy
When you travel nowadays the only real bureaucracy you need to deal with are visa applications, flights and ticket issues, and maybe PCR tests and quarantine.
Actually, that sounds like quite a lot!
But it gets a whole lot worse once you start move somewhere else and decide to live in another country. There are things like;
- Finding accommodation
- Obtaining the right permits
- Setting up a bank account and a whole lot more!
All these things take a lot of time, are relatively unclear where to begin with, have their own cultural connotations and can often occur in another language (see my above point).
Some countries are notorious for their peculiarities when it comes to bureaucracy. But it’s safe to say your new country will have some unique work and office mentalities compared to what you’re used to.
Especially if you’re from the English speaking world. These sort of differences aren’t always felt when you are a tourist, and it can take a long time to accept that people do things differently to you.
It’s good to come to terms with the fact that people understand the world differently to you. Even as a tourist this is such a helpful mindset to have. You will come across it even in your short travels with hospitality staff, customer service, and just “the locals”.
So if you’d like more helpful mindsets for tourists and travelers, follow my link here.
You don’t spend as much time in the tourist locations
So now that I live in Turkey, am I going out to amazing locations every week? No, not really.
Its a mix of a few things. You can’t be in holiday mood all the time; you need to save money and sometimes you just want to rest at the end of the week. Going out isn’t always possible.
You may also come to hate the vibe of tourist places. The scammers and general feeling of competing with people can wear you down.
Normalcy and life get in the way, as things become more predictable (and we want them to). Family engagements, friends and others may avert our attention away from visiting every tourist location.
Of course, we may do a lot more domestic tourism within the city. Also the fact that you can just take a tram past things like the Ayasofya and Blue Mosque is pretty amazing. Just because you’ve gotten used to the amazing sights in your city, doesn’t make them any less amazing.
I used to always joke around that I never actually travelled far in my native Australia. Things were just too busy and whenever I had time to zone out, I found other ways of entertaining myself.
However don’t prioritise the needs of your boss, work, and others over yourself completely. Until you never get the chance to see the things you want.
Remember that eventually this move and this journey may come to an end, and you’ll be heading back home, or somewhere else. Don’t let it come to that time, and you haven’t done all the things you wanted to.
This is one of the many small lessons I have learnt as an expat, and if you’d like 8 more follow the link to my article here.
You will be living as an outsider
The bazaars of Istanbul are so full of warmth, the streets are just waiting to welcome you into their shops and restaurants.
However life as an expat in this same exact city can be cold. It can get lonely. When you’re not a tourist with extra money to spend, when you’re living in a flat on the residential side of the city, things are not always as exciting.
When you move to a new country you effectively cut yourself off from a lot of your former contacts and connections. It will take your entire tenure in your new location to rebuild those again. And unfortunately there is a chance you may never be fully accepted “like a local”.
This isn’t necessarily a problem that needs to be fixed, rather something that needs to be accepted. Lots of things can set us apart from the locals in our new city. We might dress differently to them, or speak a different language.
Even where we choose to live might signal us as being an expat or a foreigner. What we can do is try finding those who have a similar background or someone who can understand us. This might be another expat, or a local who has had some experience with other cultures, or another open-minded individual like yourself.
One of the first words foreigners learn in Turkey is the word yabancı.
Who would’ve guessed? It means foreigner.
When you enter into an establishment you might hear the word as people float around behind you. It isn’t necessarily used in a malicious way, or to single you out as an easy target.
Some might be calling for someone who can speak English with the yabancı.
While other times, it might be easy for the waiters to refer to you as “the table with the yabancılar“.
Unfortunately, whenever it is used it breaks our reality a little. It reminds us how far away from “home” we really are and highlights just how much we still stick out.
I wrote about my experiences living as a fish “always out of water”. It’s a bit more experimental, but if you’d like, check it out here.
So is the move worth it?
That’s the big question.
Is it worth it to move to a new country? Different culture, different language.
You’re very nearly moving to a new world, not just country. The rewards for it are wide and often hard to measure.
However if you’re looking to see the world from a new perspective. If you want to get into the thick of things and experience life on the ground level, nothing I’ve written should’ve swayed you.
This is a warning, but not one to scare you away. It’s just to prepare you for what could be.
Travel, migration, and long term travel can be the vehicle by which we learn many new lessons. If you’d like to read about how migration can help teach empathy, check out a link to my article here.
This blog is all about fixing our mindset so that we can benefit the most. You need to visit some cities and see what they have to offer. Other cities, you need to shed your tourist layers and experience it in detail.
It’s up to you, which ones fall into those categories on your travels.
If you’ve reached the end of this article, firstly thank you. But you are probably interested in the offer I have. And how it can help you learn the language of the country you want to move to.
One of the things that finally helped things click with my Turkish studies was taking things at my own time with a private tutor. Italki is one of the most popular, and best ways to learn a wide selection of languages, with an even wider ranger of teachers.
