Living away from home: your expat nest
In her first article, Kadri talks to Ana, our Community Pro manager, about the value of creating your own space away from home
I’ve lived away from Estonia full-time for almost nine years, the biggest portion of that time in Portugal, so I consider the expat lifestyle to be my reality/my new normal. But, like most people, last year I spent the majority of my life indoors, having been removed from my home country but also from the country I’d made a home in, which is when I really noticed the cultural nest I’d created for myself. So, for my first article, I talked to Ana, on the community team, about the surprising (and sometimes unsurprising things) we’ve noticed in creating our home away from home.
Ana, who is part of our Community Pro team, was a natural choice to join me to talk about this topic, as she has also lived in several countries for many years. Ana is from Portugal but has lived in Belgium, Japan, UK and France.
Learning the local language is considered vital when moving to a new country, but how big of a part will it play in your expat bubble? With the exception of Japan, Ana has always lived in countries where she spoke the local language, so the language barrier was never an issue for her.
When you spend time with locals, they give you great music recommendations and talk about politics and local news, which also helps with practicing the local language. In my case, Portuguese was a completely new language and it is still very challenging, especially because my everyday life is conducted mainly in English with a touch of Estonian, Spanish, and a tiny bit of German. Nobody enjoys a language barrier, unless you are lucky to live with a local you’re likely to end up speaking a mix of several languages at home!
Ana has lived in France a long time, but always keeps her Portuguese spirit alive: “As long as I’ve got two strong cups of coffee, I don’t care where I am!” However, she does have these moments of saudade (Portuguese for melancholic longing or yearning), for example when Portugal has an important football match or, much more infrequently, when Portugal won Eurovision.“It was the first time in 58 years that we won the thing… why am I abroad?”
As people living abroad, we tend to look for that feeling of belonging, so perhaps it’s natural to be drawn to people in similar positions to ourselves. Our friendship circles tend to be composed of expats or others who have lived abroad, and help us create our ‘cultural nest’. When it comes to dating and relationships, they can prove to be exciting but also quite a challenge — for example, dating a local person can help you to integrate but can create a culture gap. However, they can also help to form what Ana calls a “third culture, where you create an alternative thing.”
One thing that is so distinctive for every culture is food; I get really excited about food and eating well has always been important to me while traveling, which is why it is only logical that this has an impact on what I cook in my home away from home. So, do I spend a lot of time in my apartment cooking traditional Estonian food? Well, as the years go by, I have noticed that I miss food from there less and less, but this doesn’t mean I’ve started to cook Portuguese food, and I actually prepare quite a lot of Italian dishes. However, there are some things I love that are definitively Portuguese: strong coffee, good bread, and wine!
While Ana was living in Paris she said that she very quickly adapted to the local lifestyle: “This will stay in my mind forever, but when I arrived in Paris I instantly changed how I dealt with food and food shopping.” All the shops there are independent and people tend to buy fresh food on the weekend at the farmers market. Ana lived in a small apartment on the 4th floor with no elevator, so she started to buy small amounts of food every day. For me and Ana food and spices become almost sentimental in expat life. Ana finds that adding chouriço, garlic and lots of olive oil to a dish makes it much better: “Oh it smells just like home!”!
So, we’ve talked about culture, community, and food, and it seems it’s really the simple things that make a difference. I’ll leave you now with the advice Ana would give to someone living abroad:
“Do something that anchors you to the place you are, read, watch some news… it’s so easy to get caught up in an expat life, but just talk to a local and find out what is going on in your neighborhood too!”
What advice would you give to someone living abroad? Let us know in the comments!
