I am not an Expat or an Immigrant
Despite spending most of the past 14 years living away from the UK, I’ve never really bought into the whole ex-pat scene. It did appeal to me once, but that was when I went to stay with family who had moved to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. I went every six months for three years and loved the way that the Brits, Kiwis, and Aussies hung out in a fairly tight-knit community focused on having fun after working out in the midday sun. But learning to survive the challenges of Malaysia nearly thirty years ago is a bit different to living in Oslo, Zurich or Prague, which are where I’ve been hanging out.
When I first moved to Oslo in 2007, I was the only Brit on the project I was working on. Most of my colleagues were locals, with a couple of Germans and South Africans thrown in the mix. As the project quality manager, I had my work cut out from day one, and there wasn’t much time for socialising, and I couldn’t really afford to anyhow. If I went anywhere, it was either with my two best friends on the project (both from Oslo) or on my own. And that was fine. I never found the need to find and hang out with other Brits.
I spent two years in Zurich, Switzerland, and the same thing happened there. Prices were prohibitive, and the Swiss tend to keep their work and home lives separate. If I went out in Zurich, it was usually with some of the Indian guys who were there with the big Indian outsourcing companies, but again, I spent most of my spare time exploring and doing my own thing on my own.
Prague has been a slightly different experience. I’ve now been living there for the best part of ten years. It’s a much more sociable (and cheaper) place, and whilst there were a few more Brits around in the office, I was mainly working with a pan-European team; our manager was Polish, our admin Slovenian, and the rest of our motley crew were from Croatia, Romania, Britain, and a token Czech! We bonded, and we genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, I guess mainly because we worked as individuals with a common cause, and as foreigners, in a foreign land, we were sort of substitute family.
Over the years, my role changed a number of times, and I spent less time with work colleagues and more time hanging out with local people I’d met, people who have become my dearest friends. Which is one reason why I’m still here. And I have the wonderful title of “Stamgast” (local or regular) in my favourite restaurant/bar. But even now, I still think of myself as a guest in this beautiful city and country. My intention has always been to go back to the UK in the future when maybe I feel I have finally outstayed my welcome.
But although I don’t feel like an ex-pat or an immigrant, I have found myself in the situation where I don’t feel I entirely belong at home anymore. I’ve lived in a small village community, with about 4000 people, for over forty years. Having worked at home for a good chunk of that time, I was a bit more conspicuous than some other people in the village. I worked in one of the village pubs and played Pétanque for a local club. And having lived in the area when I was a student, I’d crossed paths with a lot of people from the village (for all the right reasons!) — which is why I chose to move back.
But in those first few years of living abroad, I found that I was treated slightly differently when I came home. I was no longer savvy to the gossip and nuances of village life. My drinking buddies seemed to treat me with kid gloves. People in the village might go and work in a nearby town or city, but they didn’t go abroad to work. Over time, the novelty wore off. I guess social media has helped a little in that respect. I know exactly what’s going on in the village. And right now, I sort of wish I didn’t. But that’s a different story which I don’t want to go into right now. It’s a little too raw.
I guess the point is that as our world has become bigger and globalisation has made it ever smaller at the same time, we humans have had to try and make some sense of it by labelling people like we label groceries. The consequences of labelling are all too obvious these days. There’s every chance that if Kate Bush ever writes another song, it’ll be “50 Words for Gender”, but 99% of us will still only identify with one of two of them (just in case that needs clarification, that’ll be male or female, and I won’t apologise for my background in science! So, even if I don’t identify as an ex-pat or an immigrant, other people will always try to put me into one of those categories. Unless they know me — in which case, I hope they still pigeonhole me under “friend” (or Stamgast!).
I am a semi-retired independent management consultant specialising in organisational change management and better Ways of Working. I’m from the UK but based in Prague in the Czech Republic. I mainly write about developing better ways of working, working in the Apple ecosystem, and my adopted home in Prague. I’m still fairly new to Medium (so please be gentle with me!), but if you’ve enjoyed this, please check out some of my other articles or even follow me if you’d like to be notified when I publish new material