ItDontMeanAThing
Full time employment: Posting here.
First off, I don't know what it takes to be an expat but almost three years into this adventure has given me some clues. Any of you expats have clues that applied to you?
Googling turned up many self assessment check lists. Most of them seemed too general to allow for self evaluation when I read them before making the decision to leave the US. I've been realizing and writing down specific situations where such general principles can be applied.
First one came about from a frequent comment by expats about traffic in the Phils. The most frequent words used to describe it were chaos and chaotic. I knew it wasn't chaos otherwise they accident rate would be an order of magnitude above what it was.
Here's the test one can take while on vacation someplace where the driving conventions* are different than in one's home country. Observe traffic from both the side of the road and on public transit. Deduce some rules. Observe again to confirm the rules. Ask yourself if you could live with this without voices constantly screaming in your head things like 'you're all insane', 'We're all going to die', 'why don't you idiots do it the right way', or the most insidiously harmful to life as an expat 'if they just did <fill in the blank> instead of <fill in the blank> everything would be so much better'.
* I wrote 'conventions' because it doesn't matter if the drivers are following the laws or following the local customs regardless of the law. Either one is a set of conventions.
Googling turned up many self assessment check lists. Most of them seemed too general to allow for self evaluation when I read them before making the decision to leave the US. I've been realizing and writing down specific situations where such general principles can be applied.
First one came about from a frequent comment by expats about traffic in the Phils. The most frequent words used to describe it were chaos and chaotic. I knew it wasn't chaos otherwise they accident rate would be an order of magnitude above what it was.
Here's the test one can take while on vacation someplace where the driving conventions* are different than in one's home country. Observe traffic from both the side of the road and on public transit. Deduce some rules. Observe again to confirm the rules. Ask yourself if you could live with this without voices constantly screaming in your head things like 'you're all insane', 'We're all going to die', 'why don't you idiots do it the right way', or the most insidiously harmful to life as an expat 'if they just did <fill in the blank> instead of <fill in the blank> everything would be so much better'.
* I wrote 'conventions' because it doesn't matter if the drivers are following the laws or following the local customs regardless of the law. Either one is a set of conventions.