Living Abroad
Imagine, if you will, that you met someone who had never tried chocolate.
How could you describe how it tastes? For such a simple pleasure, it's almost impossible to put into words, isn't it? That's how I feel when someone asks me what it is like living abroad.
It's difficult to sum the experience up.
We're all generally in agreement that travel is one of the most enjoyable activities in life.
There's little to compare to the feeling of being in a new place, especially if that place is a foreign country.
All those new sights, sounds and smells which can never be conveyed to your friends and family back home through a collection of holiday snaps.
A heightened sense of awareness accompanies you when you are traveling, your senses come alive and each moment has a feeling of real worth.
Unsurprisingly, it is impossible to maintain these feelings of exhilaration when you are living and working abroad.
They subside, but, importantly, don't disappear.
Instead you have live with the sense that you are 'living a life less ordinary'.
For all the romanticism of life away from home, you find that wherever you go in the world people are the same - we all wake up in the morning and go to work.
The difference is, when you live abroad, day to day life is more interesting.
The commute to work isn't as stressful as you remember it being when you lived back home and the routine of going to the shop can turn into a mini adventure, especially when you are in a country where you don't speak the language.
Saying that, even if you do speak the same language you can be surprised at how the things that you would assume to be the same as your country seem so intriguingly different.
Winston Churchill famously noted this when he described Britain and America as being 'Two nations divided by a common tongue'.
Working for an English language school I meet people from a wealth of different countries.
Some of whom spend a considerable length of time living and learning English abroad.
They book English language course, study hard and live in the local community.
It's interesting to watch these students come 'into bloom' after spending time abroad.
You can literally watch a change for the better occur in them.
They develop a real world-view, become more open minded and grow in confidence.
Time spent in another culture changes you in ways that you couldn't imagine and would be hard replicated by any other means.
How could you describe how it tastes? For such a simple pleasure, it's almost impossible to put into words, isn't it? That's how I feel when someone asks me what it is like living abroad.
It's difficult to sum the experience up.
We're all generally in agreement that travel is one of the most enjoyable activities in life.
There's little to compare to the feeling of being in a new place, especially if that place is a foreign country.
All those new sights, sounds and smells which can never be conveyed to your friends and family back home through a collection of holiday snaps.
A heightened sense of awareness accompanies you when you are traveling, your senses come alive and each moment has a feeling of real worth.
Unsurprisingly, it is impossible to maintain these feelings of exhilaration when you are living and working abroad.
They subside, but, importantly, don't disappear.
Instead you have live with the sense that you are 'living a life less ordinary'.
For all the romanticism of life away from home, you find that wherever you go in the world people are the same - we all wake up in the morning and go to work.
The difference is, when you live abroad, day to day life is more interesting.
The commute to work isn't as stressful as you remember it being when you lived back home and the routine of going to the shop can turn into a mini adventure, especially when you are in a country where you don't speak the language.
Saying that, even if you do speak the same language you can be surprised at how the things that you would assume to be the same as your country seem so intriguingly different.
Winston Churchill famously noted this when he described Britain and America as being 'Two nations divided by a common tongue'.
Working for an English language school I meet people from a wealth of different countries.
Some of whom spend a considerable length of time living and learning English abroad.
They book English language course, study hard and live in the local community.
It's interesting to watch these students come 'into bloom' after spending time abroad.
You can literally watch a change for the better occur in them.
They develop a real world-view, become more open minded and grow in confidence.
Time spent in another culture changes you in ways that you couldn't imagine and would be hard replicated by any other means.
