Although I don’t have any personal experience with living abroad yet, one of the tidbits of information I’ve picked up is that you need to flow with the unexpected, because the unexpected happens a lot.
As I learned recently, the unexpected happens even before you make your overseas move!
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About a week and a half ago, my trusty computer had a heart attack. My husband rushed out and bought a standalone hard drive — a purchase we’d been putting off — and we were able to put the poor computer on life support long enough to back up all the data. The poor thing then suffered a series of strokes, and that was that.
I had to bite the bullet and buy a new computer.
Had I been as well organized as I wanted to be, I would have had several posts already written and ready to activate here on the Future Expats Forum, and you, dear readers, wouldn’t have noticed a thing amiss.
I didn’t. So new posts have been, shall we say, irregular. . . The unexpected happened, and I was definitely not prepared.
Once we’re living in a new country, with new cultural norms, different ways of doing things, different priorities, different infrastructure, it’s harder to anticipate what might go wrong. Here in the US, I could rest comfortably in the knowledge that I could order a new computer online and receive it within a few days. Overseas, if my computer dies, I have absolutely no idea how I would go about repairing or replacing it. Depending on where I’m living, it could happen just as quickly and easily as it did here, or it could be very slow and painful.
If it’s slow and painful, I have no choice but to prepare myself better ahead of time to ride out the unexpected happening, and to be patient and roll with the situation. Can I do that?
I’ll have to get back to you on that.
Do you have an account of something unexpected you’d like to share with your future expats? Click the comment button below.
