For most people, the life of an expat must be very difficult to imagine. Can you picture yourself, after all, picking up and leaving the country and culture you were born and raised in and spending the next twenty years, or more likely, the rest of your life in a distant exotic land? Why would someone choose to do such a thing anyway? Do they have wanderlust? Are they compulsive?
The truth is, becoming an expat creeps up on you before you realize it. And it is not a decision based upon allegiances or prejudices either: rather, if you just stay put somewhere for long enough your experiences will accumulate into a paradigm of living that you become familiar and comfortable with. In other words, your adopted culture becomes home.
Unless expats came to their host countries as children, they almost never ‘turn into’ a member of the culture they are living in, though they certainly can relate to that culture appropriately. An expat rarely hates his home country, but upon going back finds it odd and rather like a foreign nation. In order to become an expat, therefore, one pretty much concedes the feeling of having a true sense of where home is. It is quite difficult for expats to resettle in their native lands, though they may retain strong bonds to it.
Few expats have wanderlust, though that certainly does compose a strong subgroup. It takes a lot of mental stamina to settle here and there- any way the wind blows so to speak- and a special kind of person. Most expats have chosen a place and stay put. They even become provincial, in the way this expat is with Fukuoka, Japan. Ironically, for most expats life is all about stability, livability, and predictability- much in the same way as it is for everyone else.
