Food blogger, Makiko Itoh has some healthy advice for fellow expats settling into a new home.

23 January 2008 

I've been an expatriate of some kind for almost all of my life.
I was born in Japan to a fairly average Japanese family and when I was five, my father was sent to England by his company. We lived there for about five years, followed by a year-and-a-half in the United States. After that we moved back to Japan for a few years until I was 16-years-old, when the family uprooted again and returned to the US. About 12 years ago I then moved to Switzerland, and except for a couple of years in between, when I was back in the states, I've been here ever since.

Because of those experiences, I have come to see a pattern in the way that someone who moves to another country behaves. First there's that flush of excitement and enthusiasm at being in a new environment. This is followed by a period of confusion and a feeling of strangeness as you settle in. And finally, as the novelty and excitement wears off, there comes a period of general grumpiness. This can last anywhere from a few weeks to several years.

The food is not what you're used to, the kids aren't doing well in school, the neighbors are unfriendly, you miss your family/ friends/ favorite television programs back home, the climate doesn't suit you - whatever the reasons, it's all too easy to fall into a funk that makes your life, and the lives of those around you, miserable.

And it can be made even worse by hanging out with fellow grouchy expats, or reading blogs and forums that seem to specialize in criticizing everything. You can get stuck in a rut of complaining, looking down at your host country, and waxing nostalgic about how great things are back home. Unfortunately, quite a few people who are on short-term assignments never get out of this funk phase until the day they leave.

I've been there myself. When I first moved to Switzerland I loved everything about it - the beautiful scenery, the climate, the orderliness of everything. Then the negativity took over, and I kept  comparing everything unfavorably to the place I'd lived before. I found fault with everything - the garbage sorting and bagging requirements baffled me (everyone who moves to Switzerland must go through a puzzling about the garbage system); laundry scheduling issues irritated me; the much shorter store operating hours and total lack of 24-hour groceries were an inconvenience; and the higher prices for groceries made me almost neurotic with worry. I missed easy Chinese and pizza takeout and the constant buzz of a huge city. I resented the fact that a few of my mostly well-meaning neighbors treated me as an exotic presence, and that some little kids would turn around to stare at me in the tram. And of course, there was the language issue, even though Switzerland is a relatively easy country to navigate for an English speaker.

I'm not sure when something clicked and I realized that I was approaching things all wrong. It's so easy to focus only on the negatives when you are in a new place, and negativity tends to breed more negativity. So I began to try and focus more on the positives instead, in small ways. For instance, instead of grouching about the lack of good bagels, I learned to enjoy the wide variety of breads available here. (I also taught myself to cook many of the foods I really missed, which is one of the reasons I started my food blog, justhungry.com.) I also got used to the shorter shopping hours, and started to think of the garbage sorting as doing something good for the environment rather than just being a hassle. I accepted that restaurant prices were higher, but realised that I didn't have to add on a sales tax and tip. All fairly trivial things, but they added up. It was hard at first to find the positives, but got easier and easier as time went on.

There's a Japanese phrase, “sumeba miyako” (literally: "if you live there, it's the capital"). It means that once you live somewhere, it becomes home, the best place to be. I really believe this to be true. When I went back to live in New York for a while after I'd been in Switzerland for a few years, I missed all kinds of  things from here, from great cheeses to quiet and clean streets and the clean, fresh air. I also realized that things I thought I missed about the US weren't all that really - Doritos were too salty, candy bars too sweet, and the buzz of the city was now as much irritating as it was exciting. (The bagels were still great though, and don't talk to me about sushi in Zurich...)
In any case, every place I've lived has had good and bad points.

So if you find yourself in the expat funk, please try to find at least one or two positives about your host country every day. And try to stop thinking of it as 'only temporary', and consider it instead as your home, where you live. At the very least, you'll leave with more good memories than bad.

Makiko Itoh (Maki) is a web and PDF developer. Originally from Japan, she's an American citizen who has also lived in England and now resides in Zurich. Since 2001, she has been publishing Just Hungry (www.justhungry.com, a food blog mostly about Japanese cooking) and Just Bento (www.justbento.com, all about bento lunches). Her personal site is www.makikoitoh.com.