My guide to Expat DOs and DON'Ts

To supplement this blog, I will be creating a survival guide specifically designed for Expatriates new to an area. My suspicion is that most people who read this will have had some experience with most, if not all of these items. And it is a work in progress, so input is welcome.

A draft version is as follows:

DO learn to cuss immediately

You know when you were a kid and you were on the bus and one of your neighbors was bi-lingual, so you asked them how to say this or that terrible word in Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic . . . ? And then you’d practice by saying it to all of your friends, yelling it in the cafeteria or under your breath in class? Yeah, this is INVALUABLE knowledge. So I hope you remembered it all. Because the very first thing you need to learn when you travel somewhere new is how to say “Please” and “Thank you” and then how to cuss someone out. It doesn’t even need to make sense. Just a string of horrifying cuss words will do. This knowledge will come in handy when the cab drive tries to charge you extra, when the guy at the bar won’t leave you alone, when you’re being hassled at the market . . . Generally it says “Hey, I may not be from your town, but I can still f*ck up your day so find someone else to screw with.”

I don’t find this to be true with hand gestures though. Loudly cussing seems disarming, while even pointing a finger will piss some people off to no end.

Another handy mechanism for avoiding hassles, grab a local newspaper each day and carry it around with you. Cheapest, easiest “don’t screw with me, I’m no tourist” cue you’ll ever find. Even if you are a tourist.

DO NOT drink like the locals

There are inevitable environmental factors that will disable you from drinking to your normal tolerance. Altitude, cigarette smoke, poor ventilation, high alcohol content, alcohol quality . . . things everyone else will be used to but you. Ignore this, and you are destined to be hugging a toilet bowl the rest of the night and fighting a painfully won stereotype of the tourist who can’t hold it together. This rule is ESPECIALLY important if people are throwing liquids at you that you’ve never heard of before and particularly avoid consuming anything coming out of the Balkans in large quantities if you’re unfamiliar.

DO take a hard line on your smoking habits

If you don’t smoke, be prepared to live as a secondhand smoker.

If you do smoke, be prepared to be encouraged smoke a lot more.

DO NOT take the American stereotype personally

It doesn’t matter where you are or how you present yourself, someone will make fun of you for being American. Unabashedly so. Without remorse. And you will be expected to take it as fact. Roll with it.  You will be at all times loud, stupid, aggressive, un-cultured and my favorite: over-sexualized, while somehow simultaneously being prudish, un-liberated and narrow minded. Other people may exhibit all these traits, but if you do it, it is because you are American. These are the double standards of the expat community. They are BS, but accepted true-isms that you WILL NOT combat by challenging them outright. Handle it with dignity and temperance. Generally these people are the bigger assholes and will reveal their true nature shortly. And in public. Take photos.

DO keep your patriotism under control

You do not need to accept responsibility or offer explanation for all things American. For example: Should you, hypothetically speaking, find yourself in a place where there are US servicemen and women stationed. And hypothetically a Marine shows up at an event you are at. And hypothetically all the women are treating this sweet Marine from Alabama like the unfortunate white elephant gift SOMEONE has to take home at the end of the night, remember that US Marine can take care of his damn self, and doesn’t need you to remind everyone to treat him like a person. Because when you, hypothetically, do tell everyone to lay off, they’ll assume you want dibs and then make you and the poor guy feel super awkward. Hypothetically.

A list of things you are also not responsible for defending, by virtue of being American:

·      Barack Obama

·      The War in Afghanistan

·      Capitalism

·      Reality TV

·      The current state of civil rights in America

·      Nike

·      The US Education system

·      The covert trade of US arms

·      Lady Gaga

·      Foreign trade embargos

·      FOX News Corp

·      Climate Change

·      The Twilight Saga

·      Oil prices

·      Any covert war, ever

·      Jersey Shore

Also, don’t try and talk to the politics of wherever you’re visiting. Unless purely as a sounding board. People may want to TELL you about the politics of wherever you are. They don’t want to hear what YOU think about it. Consider this: You’ve met some French (or British, or Japanese or Finish) guy at a dinner party and he starts off with “You know what’s wrong with your country? . . .” Yeah. 7 words and you’re already sure he’s a toolbag. A toolbag who you are certain doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Before he’s even said it. Don’t be a toolbag.

DO, at your first opportunity, embarrass yourself wholly

Nobody likes the guy who’s been here 3 days and is already trying to act like a seasoned local. He’s a douche, that guy. And no one will invite the douche to the brie next Saturday. That douche sits in his hotel room alone. Watching soap operas.

No, you are much better off if you acknowledge that you’re going to be that awkward new kid in school who doesn’t know the ropes and has no friends. And the best way to humanize yourself to your peers is by embarrassing yourself. Then recording it and showing me at a later date.

My recommendation is at your earliest opportunity, get behind a karaoke microphone. Safe bets are Journey, ABBA and most cuts by the King of Pop. My karaoke experience here in Zimbabwe began simply enough. A birthday party, attended by 25 young professionals from DFID, peer orgs and NGOs, Australian, Lebanese and Swedish embassies . . . took a hard drunk turn into a Chinese restaurant, whorehouse and karaoke bar.

Each room came complete with velour walls in crazy quilt patterns of jewel tones, red and silver velvet couches and your own deluxe private bathroom that smelled of cabbage. Hooked are you? Just wait.

The list of songs was terrible. And each was accompanied, not by their music video, but by soft-core Chinese porn. Woman in bathing suit playing in a fountain ::cut to:: woman in bathing suit on horseback ::cut to:: footage of 6 bengal tigers being hand fed milk ::cut to:: man with a blow out and mutton chops looking thoughtfully over the landscape . . . and then it dawned on me. “This is all meant to be sexy?!” Disbelief dissolved into flabbergasted acceptance once we stopped cueing songs for a while and the system automatically switched to footage of an old Victoria’s Secret runway show.

The whole thing was entirely ridiculous. And I think I earned my stripes by holding my own during Thriller and by filling in when the DFID guys forgot the words to Don’t Stop Me Now. (I mean, honestly. Aren’t you British? Pshf. Freddie would be disappointed.)

I encourage you to find your own path. This is by no means proscriptive. But you will at some point make a total ass of yourself. I’m inviting you to do it on your own terms.

And the last is:

DO say yes to (almost) everything you’re invited to

            Obviously there are exceptions to this rule. But for the most part, if someone has extended the invitation, you had better accept, regardless of what your “scene” is back home. If you want to make friends, and you do want to make friends, you’re finely tuned social reputation amounts to a whole lot of jack shit. If only for the purely practical reason that you need someone you can call at 4AM who knows where the good hospital is and who will come and pick you up. And no one wants to pick up the douche who’s too good for karaoke. Remember? He’s in his hotel room. Watching soap operas. Probably with his sunglasses on.

This is my list of expat DOs and DON’Ts for the social sphere.