Why Everyone Should Have a Pen Pal

A long long time ago, in a far away land two young girls wrote letters to each other and became good friends.

Well, okay, it wasn't in a land that far away but it was more than thirty years ago. As an 11 year old girl living in England I signed up for a pen pal scheme through Jackie magazine. For those of you old enough to remember, Jackie was THE magazine for young British lasses to buy. It was a weekly magazine just for girls with features on pop bands, interviews with stars, fashion advice and of course a very extensive problem page feature. It sadly disappeared from newsagents in 1993.

Anyway, I digress, lost in the good old care free days of magazines with articles about Spandau Ballet, Culture Club and Duran Duran and teenage pimples. It was through Jackie magazine that I met my pen pal.

Where to Meet People When You Are The New Expat on the Block

There's no getting away from it - this is moving season. The time of year when expats leave and expat arrive. A time for hellos and goodbyes.

Moving to a new country, away from family and friends, away from a life you have built up takes a lot of courage. It can be thrilling, there is no doubt about that; meeting new people, creating a new career, experiencing new cultures and learning a new language. It can also be extremely daunting. And very lonely.

Making new friends when you arrive in a new place is usually first on the to do list after unpacking, scouting the area and getting the children settled. But how? 

There are a number of ways to meet new people who are in the same boat and they all involve getting 'out there'. Think outside the box and you are likely to meet people with the same interests.

One expat friend of mine combined one of her passions with the desire to get to know new people - she joined a book club.  Another friend, not long after becoming a mother, set up a toddler group in her host country Belgium.

I have personally found other English speaking mothers where I live using expatriate forums and even a Dutch site for 'stay at home' mums - so looking in unexpected places can yield unexpected results.

Author, Jo Parfitt, swears by networking. She told me once in an interview that one of the first thing she does when she moves to a new country is join a professional network, like Connecting Women, which is a Hague based organisation.

Here are a few more ideas for expanding that social or business network when you land on new shores (with Dutch specific links):

• Join a Parent & Toddler group, and if you cannot find one then start up your own 
• Join a parenting group - like Amsterdam Mamas which is an amazing group for advice, activities and information or seek out parenting events (like those hosted by Passionate Parenting)
• Women's Professional Networks
• Spouse networks (like the Global Outpost services of Shell)
• Voluntary work (Access is a good place to start in The Hague or Amsterdam)
• Book clubs, reading groups or writer's circles (Check out The American Book Center in the Hague and Amsterdam)
• Maternity classes (Access offer English language prenatal courses)
• Sports clubs
• Expat forums
• Expat groups (see the list of clubs and groups on Expatica)
• Take a language course
• Get involved at your children's school with after school activities
• Indulge your hobby - join a choir, writing group or a photography or art group
• Sign up for an evening class 
• Local libraries have ''story time'' sessions for the children - a win win. Junior is happy and you meet other parents in the area

To close, there's a chapter on making friends as an expat in the Netherlands in the book Dutched Up!: Rocking the Clogs Expat Style including my take on making friends as an expat which is namely this: it takes time to make good friends and it usually happens when you stop trying.

Expat Life Means Throwing Your Plans Out the Window

It won't be news to anyone but life doesn't always turn out like you expect it to. If someone had told my seventeen year old self that I would end up living in the Netherlands with a Dutch husband and three children who are way more Dutch than they ever will be British, I would never have believed them. I would have been intrigued, but convinced? I don't think so.

Whilst I was making plans for my future, fresh out of university with a degree in European Studies, someone, somewhere was sniggering saying, "Well, I doubt you'll be needing any of that - maybe you should have tried learning Dutch. That's a language you will be using daily when you are 27." But how was I to know?

Expat life is planned for some, it sneaks up on others. Either way, it probably means life as you envisioned it doesn't quite become a reality. Expat life changes things - and sometimes that means a huge adjustment. Expat life can throw a spanner in the works. All the things you imagined for yourself in life can turn out so differently, in the blink of an expat eye.

It's a feeling I touched upon in a chapter I wrote about my Dutch wedding in the Dutched Up!: Rocking the Clogs Expat Style anthology. I had visions when I was younger of me trying on wedding dresses with my best friend at my side. I always figured my mother would also be a part of that build up to my wedding day. Together we'd be sipping bubbly while trawling through a range of dresses to find the perfect one for my big day.

My final choice of wedding dress

The reality was very different. Both my best friend and my mother were in England and I was here in the Netherlands. I actually put off looking for a dress for a while, and I guess it should have been one of the first things on my mind. At the time it wasn't a conscious decision to keep putting the visit to the bridal shop off, but looking back, I understand why I was more reluctant than I should have been to try wedding dresses on. It's the little things that suddenly slap you in the face and make you realise that expat life means sacrificing some things to gain others.

Having my first child was another reminder of how expat life changes things. In a non-expat life I had visions of my mother waiting outside the delivery room, eager to see her grandchild. I guess I figured I would have her to lean on, as the voice of experience, whilst I was pregnant in a different country. The reality was a million miles from the ideal. If I look back now I can't say whether there would have been more interest in my children from my mother had I not left England. It's a question I will never have the answer to, but I do know that my expat life changed our relationship for the worse. And I can't change that.

When you opt for an expat life things change. It is inevitable. I wouldn't change my decision to move overseas for all the tea in China, or all the fish 'n' chips back in England. But maybe, I could have been more prepared for the changes that expat life brings about. I don't mean the daily, practical things; I had envisaged those. I mean how expat life changes how the little things turn out, how it challenges the plans and visions you had for yourself, how it strains relationships with those left behind. How it puts turns in the road you hadn't seen coming.

To thrive as an expat I've needed to throw everything I saw for my future self out the window, and start with a clean slate. Make my plans from scratch. I've had to deal with the unexpected, and recover from being blindsided many times. Expat life means a pay off. That is the only certainty.

But I'm glad I've had the chance to find my way through my expat life. The journey was worth it.

5 Reasons Everyone Should be an Expat at Least Once in Their Lives

If you're not an expat, you should be. At least for a while.

When I was a teenager, I planned to be an expat. A translator living in France to be exact. Then my great expat plan took a back seat, maybe even got shelved,  whilst I worked out a career and all that grown up stuff. Then, as is often the case, expat life just kind of happened whilst I was making plans for my non-expat future.

Though it was never part of the original plan to wind up in the Netherlands, that's where the turn in the road led, and I followed it. I'm glad I did. Aside from my beautiful family, I gained a whole new life.

Expat life changes things. It changes you. Whether you plan it or not, whether your stay overseas is a temporary move, or one meant for a lifetime, being an expat is enriching. It's life changing. And that's why I think everyone should do it, at least once in their life.

If you're still not convinced, here are five reasons why.

You Meet Amazing People

When you move to a new country you, by default, meet new people, people different from the ones in your social circle back home. You meet people who speak a different language, who are from a different culture, who have a different background.

Friendships grow with people from all walks of life, people who make your expat life colorful and enriching. Without even trying you learn about other countries, other cultures, other attitudes and traditions.

Of course, let's be real, you'll also meet arseholes; unfortunately they live abroad too - but thankfully they are in the minority. Avoid them and you'll do just fine.

You Immerse Yourself in New Cultures

When you move abroad you try new foods, you take part in new traditions and learn new customs. You are party to new ideas, new ways of doing things. You listen to new music. You see different political and economic systems in practice. You celebrate new holidays. You see the arts and heritage of a country first hand.

If you are lucky you even learn a new language.

You learn about a country's past, and you learn what traits a nation treasures, what ignites a nation's pride. You notice the details, things you don't read about in school books, or learn about in travel books.

If you open your eyes, you'll see a little piece of the world through someone else's eyes.

You Fall in Love with Your Birth Country

When you become an expat,
you see your birth country in a new light

What is that saying? Absence makes the heart grow fonder? Well it's true. Nothing gets you looking at your birth country with rose coloured spectacles quicker than leaving it. I never really understood what it was that made me British until I left Britain, and then it all became incredibly evident. It turns out, you can take a Brit out of Britain but you'll never take the Brit out of the girl.

You start to appreciate all those things that make up your national identity, and realise that your home country culture, customs and traditions really have moulded you.

You notice the things that are dear to you from your own culture (for example, I never realised how attached to Bonfire night celebrations I was until I left England and 5th November just became a regular day) and which customs seem ridiculous and disposable.

When you become an expat, you fall in love with your birth country, including all those funny little quirks and odd habits that you never get a second thought to when you were living there.

You Realise Just How Much it's People, Not Things, That Really Matter

Living overseas, even temporarily, forces you to re-evaluate everything; to look at what you actually need and what you want in life. It's a clean slate, a chance to start anew and dump the baggage you no longer need to carry with you - both physical and mental baggage.

You start assessing what you miss from your 'old' life, what you actually need to move forward and what it is in life that really makes you happy.

You focus a little less on the material and more on the emotional aspect of life. You focus on the truly important things in life. You appreciate the true worth of those friends and family that were on your doorstep before you moved, and you sincerely value the worth of new friendships.

Relationships matter more than material goods when you have to start over. You realise it's people, not things, that really make the difference in life.

You Meet the Better Part of Yourself

When you leave everything familiar behind and set your feet down on new territory, you soon learn what you are capable of.

You uproot your life and replant it in, what seems at first, a hostile environment. You do everything to make sure it thrives. Because you must.

You learn to think differently, to think outside the box. The rules you once knew have been discarded and it takes time to learn the new rules - so you'll improvise. Maybe you'll get creative with your career, or amaze yourself with how determined you can be, or how passionate you feel about realising a goal.

You notice both huge and subtle differences and learn to be more open and flexible, because you have little choice. You become more accepting of change, because you have to be. You go through an unconscious self-improvement course and come out the other side stronger, more aware of yourself and your capabilities.

As an expat, you'll get to know yourself a little better, and you'll meet the better, more courageous part of yourself.

Over to you:Why else should you become an expat? What has been the biggest advantage of your expat life? Do you think everyone is cut out for expat life?

Expat Truths: Making Friends

Just over a month or so ago I shared my scary experience of meeting a group of extremely negative expats which stayed with me for a long time after (more than ten years and counting).

The response I got to that blog post ranged from,

"Didn't it occur to you that they maybe needed help?" to "I have had the exact same experience. Don't go there."

What Picture do we Paint of Ourselves Living Life in a Second Language?

What picture do you paint of yourself living life
in a second language?

Can your true self ever really shine through if you are constantly communicating in a language that is not your mother tongue? It's a question that I've given a lot of thought to during my time living overseas. I've even written on this topic before. (See "How do you say me?" on Expat Harem). I'm not talking about expats who spend a couple of years in a country and then move on, but those of us that have moved overseas to be with a partner for example, who don't have an end date to their overseas assignment. Those of us who live our daily lives in a foreign language.

Think about it. The situations where not speaking the local language fluently can give someone the wrong impression about you are infinite. Someone tells you of a bereavement but you don't have the words to tell them how sorry you are, you cannot express the depth of your sympathy in their language. You can't comfort them in the way you would like, the vocabulary just isn't there, like it would be in your mother tongue. Do you come across as uncaring or cold, whilst actually your heart aches for them?

You can't tell your favourite anecdote with the descriptive words and detail you'd like, the one that reveals so much about you. You can't get that punch line out, tell that joke in a way that shares so accurately your sense of humour. Do you seem distant and humourless whilst the truth is you'd love to be able to share a little more of yourself and you're actually amusing to be around?

I'm pretty sure that I sometimes (read often) come across as a bit of a klutz to my in-laws. There are times I cannot get the right Dutch words to my tongue in time during a conversation and the result must be that I seem disinterested or that I have no opinion. The truth is I have an opinion on most things, but I can't always express them in an intelligent manner in Dutch. When I add something in the midst of a conversation with my Dutch family it sounds like a five year old suddenly piped up and said something. I've been here so long in the Netherlands now I wonder how much of an allowance they make for me. How much of my awkward communication do they put down to me speaking in a language not my own, and how much do they attribute to who I am, or their view of who I am.

How, in our interactions with others, do we reveal the real us? It is of course not just verbal. We show a lot through our body language (which incidentally can also be a cultural nest of vipers) and the actions we undertake. Putting your arms around someone can say much more than any words at a difficult time. There are ways to show feelings without having the words at our command. However, I do believe that you need a certain level language ability in order to let the real you shine through, to share your depth and let another person in to your inner world.

It's the reason why my husband and I end up having dual language conversations when the subject matter is complicated or emotionally highly charged - so that we can truly explain how we feel without stumbling around looking for words in a second language, a process that waters our emotions and feelings down, unconciously making some things seem more trivial to the other than the reality.

It's the reason why professionals recommend that any coaching or therapy you have is done in your mother tongue.

It's the reason why so many expats complain making friends with the locals is hard. How deep can a friendship be when one of you is always communicating in a language that is learned?

That's not to say a relationship or friendship conducted in two languages doesn't work. Far from it. We are living proof that they do work. We develop our own way of communicating with each other. It works. But it takes time, it takes understanding, it means making allowances and giving the benefit of the doubt. All of which are not givens when you are meeting new people, developing new relationships, trying to let others who know nothing about you see a glimpse of your personality, when what they hear is someone tripping over their words in a  language that they clearly have not made their own.

Does it matter whether people here in the Netherlands ever know me as I was back in my passport country? Is there a pre-expat me and an expat me? Am I a different person when I talk in Dutch? Is the English-speaking me the real version of me? I don't know.

What I do know for sure is that I am more reserved in Dutch than in English because my Dutch vocabulary doesn't stretch as far as my English. I have less to say in a Dutch crowd than in an English group. There is currently a gap between the two personas. And I wonder if it will ever change. And I know that it does matter, at least to me.

Expat Life: The Dark Side of Making Friends

The scars run deep
Photo Credit: Martin Boose

Many moons ago, when I was a much younger and naiver expat, I met a group of people that chilled me to the bone. The experience scarred me for life, and made me wary of expat groups.

I read a blog post yesterday which made me laugh. Just for a minute or two. Before the post reawakened sleeping memory cells I thought I had buried deep, and my harrowing experience blasted back into my mind. I felt for an instant whisked back to that bar, whisked back to an expat life I used to know.

When you're an expat, meeting new people is a priority. It can be the difference between sinking and swimming in a new land. Expats often gravitate towards other expats, and there's nothing wrong with that, but just because you have the commonality of living outside your home country it does not by any means mean you have anything else in common, or that you are destined to be life long buddies. Trust me, I know that the hard way.

It wasn't long after I moved to the Netherlands, and by long I mean it was a year or so after arrival, when I actually stopped being incredibly overwhelmed and wanted to meet other people who I thought would know how I felt and who would help me adjust to life overseas.

For a while I struggled with the feeling that whilst I am an expat I'm not the same as some other expats. At the time I worked with a lot of expats but they were expats who had no intention of putting down roots in the Netherlands, making friends with the locals or even learning to speak Dutch. After a few years in the Netherlands, they would be off again to another far flung destination. They were a different breed of expat, so certainly not in the same boat as me.

Making friends with the locals proved hard. Without a good command of Dutch I wasn't really destined for any Dutch speaking groups and so I felt a little in limbo, stuck between the expat world and the world where the locals circulated.

It should have been so much fun

Then I came across a group that seemed perfect. On paper. Like minded expats who were with local partners, who were carving out a new life for themselves here in the Netherlands. And after some deliberation I went to a get-together in a bar.

Oh, what an evening it was. The worst evening I have ever had in the Netherlands. Quite possibly the worst social occasion of my life.

I was sandwiched between Mrs Depressed and her Angry Daughter and Mrs I Don't Want to Be Here.  Mrs Depressed loved her partner but hated her life, hated Dutch food, hated that people wouldn't talk English to her everywhere she went, hated Dutch supermarkets, hated that she couldn't buy the things she could buy in her local Tesco in England, hated that Dutch people were blunt, hated that she had no friends, hated Dutch stairs, hated all the Dutch administration she had been subjected to. You get the picture.

Angry Daughter thought her mother's partner was nice but hated her life in the Netherlands and resented her mum for dragging her away from her home country. She longed too for the aisles of a Tesco supermarket.

Mrs I Don't Want to Be Here had a baby but was considering running away from both her baby and her husband because she hated everything and everyone that even remotely seemed Dutch.

I listened (and barely spoke) for a few hours to nothing but how terrible life was in the Netherlands. I seem to have caught an entire group of expats in a bad place on their culture shock curve, and they did nothing but egg each other on to see who could make the most negative comment about expat life in the Netherlands or anything Dutch.

By the time I escaped I felt violated, battered and bewildered. Why wasn't I experiencing life in the Netherlands as something so terrible and soul destroying? Was there something wrong with me that I actually liked life in the Netherlands? I had arrived at the meet feeling quite optimistic and perky. By the time I left I wanted to throw myself under a tram to ensure I NEVER experienced another evening like I had just had.

Needless to say it took me a long time to get the courage up to attend any gathering that comprised wholly of expats. I get that expat life can be tough, and it can help to talk about it over a good pint of Guinness, but there is a limit.

So now, I'm very careful about the groups I get involved it, and surround myself with positive, happy people, people who get that living in the Netherlands is a privilege and not a disaster.

How have your attempt to make friends as an expat gone? I would love to hear your success stories, and about those not so positive occasions.....

Different Expats, Different Challenges

It's school holidays here in the Netherlands and we've just got back from visiting friends in Prague. My friends are also Brits but are abroad for a work assignment for a couple of years. It was a stark reminder of how expat life is a varied thing indeed. Some become expats for the adventure, for some it's a move to be with a partner and for others it's for work.

Keeping children in touch with
their grandparents needs to
be worked at if you live abroad
Photo credit: Gokhan Okur

The different reasons for being an expat throws up different challenges for our children. My children are not actually expats themselves but I am. That means there are cultural and language issues to deal with. There are issues keeping in touch with grandparents and aunts and uncles that live overseas. The issues are more mine trying to understand a school system I did not go through, understanding a culture that is not mine. However, whilst they stand out sometimes, most aspects of life for my children are stable and consistent and not effected by my expat status.

For my friends in the Czech Republic almost every aspect of their lives is effected by their expat status. Their challenges are more related to providing their children with some kind of stability in another country, knowing that their stay there will come to an end. Their challenges include making a temporary dwelling that is not theirs a real home for the children. Expat life means the friendships their children make are temporary, and indeed the friendships they themselves make mean learning to say goodbye after a year or two. It's not an easy cycle to go through.

A temporary stay abroad also means a change of schools for the children and provides another challenge once the expat assignment ends, because it calls for the children to slot back in to the British state system. After being in small classes with a varied curriculum and an abundance of teachers how do you help children to adapt to classes of 30 plus and overstretched resources? The flip side of course is the gift of excellent education for at least two years in an environment the children are thriving in! And what an opportunity for children to go to school with such a mix of nationalities alongside them, in a cultural richness you won't find in national schooling. We arrived in Prague two days after the new Dutch king came to the throne. Thanks to the Dutch influence in her class, my friend's daughter knew all about Willem Alexander and Maxima, made crowns to mark the occasion and she proudly told us,

"The new Dutch queen is much better, because she's much prettier than the old one."

I'm pretty sure she would have known very little about this Dutch event had she still been in a British primary school.

Old Town Square, Prague
(c) Amanda van Mulligen

And on top of that what a rich culture Prague has to offer. A bustling city full of history and beauty. A surprise around every corner you turn in it's Old Town. What an amazing place for children (and their parents) to soak up and store in the memory bank. An expat life that surely enriches their children, but that inevitably comes with challenges. There are pros and cons to every decision we make. Different expats, different challenges.

Yes, expat life is a varied thing indeed but there is one common factor - we're raising the global citizens of the future!

What do you think? How does the reason for your expat status effect your children? Is it better for children to have the expat experiences and deal with the challenges as they arise or play it safe and avoid the big changes?