Quote:
Originally Posted by dmlandis
is it difficult to come back to the states after living abroad? ....What are pros and cons of coming back?
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Background - sixteen years living outside the U.S., all in Europe.
For me I immediately encountered two big road bumps when I read the thread title: "Expats" and "come home." The first, I am a
legal expatriate in the sense that I reside in a country that is different from the one of which I am a citizen, but I never use that word in any other sense. (Many other people employ it in a much wider sense, especially in regard to themselves.) And the second, I
am "home." When I have gone to the U.S., I am going to the U.S.
I spent forty plus years of my adult life living and working in Manhattan, never more than fifteen minutes from Times Square, though for one period I traveled on my job in the NE, South and Midwest and would be in various places for five to six weeks at a time.
For me two return trips (except for seeing friends) were at the bottom line negative experiences.
I began my life abroad with a six-month temporary stay in Funchal, Madeira in a garden apartment on a mountainside overlooking the city, harbour, sea and back to the higher mountains. Gorgeous and a radically different environment and ambiance than NYC (or any place in the U.S. I was familiar with.)
After eight months I had to come back to NYC to complete details of my right to emigrate into Portugal. I planned to stay ten or maybe it was fourteen days, and after visiting friends and getting my business done I felt so uncomfortable that one day I turned in my economy return trip and bought the last seat on a plane going back - a first class ticket.
My guess now is that my objections/discomfort really were in the main due to the fact that I had evidently rather quickly and thoroughly depressurized from my former NYC life to an extent that I had not appreciated....I was already so used to far, far less traffic and noise, more laid back social interactions and so much natural beauty always everywhere around me that I was in shock in the city. The ugliness and noise were shattering, and I felt literally battered by it! My feelings the last year I lived in NYC were certainly nothing like this extreme...but then I had no other living experience in many decades. While there was a lot of fact in what I was reacting against, the
depth of my reaction was due to my own circumstances.
After this I lived in a city of 20,000 on southern coast of Portugal and then tried three years in Cyprus before returning to the same Portuguese city.
I made a second trip to the U.S. ten years after I had left the U.S., and stayed for five weeks - most of it in the Santa Fe area, a day in Dallas and a couple of days in the NYC metro area. In Santa Fe I stayed on the edge of the city in a small development with on-site dining, next to city bus service but definitely outside of heavy suburbanization. Most of the people in the development were former residents of the NE or East of the U.S., and, thus, social interactions inside the development were essentially similar to my years in NYC. Going downtown and to shopping centers and listening to locals talking (I eavesdropped mercilessly) was really a better insight in many ways. My reactions on this visit were not as dramatic as that awful first one, but far more profound.
When I returned to Portugal, I woke up as the plane came in from the ocean and circled over Lisbon - I was so very, very happy to be back that tears ran down my face.
My observations: (My generalizations apply only to the countries I have lived in, regardless of what I hear or read, I do not mean these to be taken as applying to places other than the ones I have lived in.)
1.) This one is clearly very personal, and not one that I am generalizing or would generalize beyond myself. If you think of the old saw - "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." My own response would be: I
have lived there
happily, if not well sometimes, (and traveled there) for forty out of sixty some years. Now I have
visited too and would never do so again. Clearly my disconnect is virtually complete. The remainder of the list, however, are reactions shared by people.
2.) Walkability/transportation. Where I have lived and visited since moving (with a few exceptions) the idea of the necessity of walkable spaces within the city or town seems to be more taken for granted than in the U.S. Also the idea of being able to socialize outside on the streets is taken for granted here, and isn't something that needs to be specially developed or allowed for. It's a given.
3.) Health insurance, healthcare. I was always insured in the U.S. But twice I lost all my savings and still had to borrow money to cover surgery because the insurance provided by my employer turned out to be terrible though that was not evident from the literature we received...in one case the insurance company was clearly cheating me on the "prevailing rate in your area" and quietly made an adjustment when I complained to them and the state. I was not making enough at the time to afford supplementary insurance, had I even known that I needed it. Fees seem outrageous and doctors often uncooperative regarding insurance, Medicare, etc. in the U.S. The range of hospital care I received in NYC ranged from just-OK to good.
Here I have a rather limited private insurance, but medical fees are lower, so reimbursement is excellent; I have been able to afford to pay out-of-pocket for very complicated surgeries not covered by my policy and done in the most superb private hospital accommodations I have ever seen...the lowest U.S. price for the same surgery (I did investigate this possibility) was more than twice as expensive, most estimates were three times as expensive. The range of hospital care I have received has been mediocre to unbelievably wonderful.
4.) Crime. I grew used to crime as a presence and possibilty living in NYC - and have burglarized several times in various neighborhoods, and more especially when I lived for quite a stretch in a very rundown neighborhood. But it seems to have become a problem and obsessive fear of paranoid proportions now. Even in my old small hometown there are drug addiction and break-in problems as a part of the fabric of town life. To which I would add the frequent mass slaughter by nutjobs, the obsession with needing to carry a gun, the abundance of armed militias, the attacks over the years on medical abortion facilities and personnel - all these are a madness that emerged from the death of the America I could identify with.
It seems that many people are really thrilled by the terror of violence and not offended by it and they enjoy the self-righteous fist-shaking, the lamenting and flowers, teddy bears, etc, etc that have become a part of the spectacle of these murder sprees, almost like people who seek the rush of fear by riding on a roller coaster and then gasp about how awful it was.
In many ways the problem of race in the U.S. seems to have worsened even while it has also improved in some ways. I really can's see a solution coming from either whites or African-Americans, both sides are stuck.
Wherever I have lived here crime has been very low. Drug use is legal where I live now, and whereas that situation was one of the worst in Europe it has improved immensely. There are far fewer race problems where I live.
5) The political and social climate have become grotesque in the U.S. compared with the past. The lack of any objectivity about political/military/foreign policy mis-steps or blunders. The knee-jerk, frothing at the mouth hatred for other people because of their political leanings - or because of their fantasized leanings. Fortunately for the U.S. religion in the West was aggressively de-fanged and pushed out of a central place in government, otherwise by this point Christian vigilantes would be engaging in activities similar to those of the Sunni extremists. However, an opportunistic coalition of Christian conservatives with secular ultra-Rightists, bolstered by gangs of armed thugs looks still possible as the U.S. people seem deeply thrown out of orbit by changes across the world in the last thirty years.
When I was visiting in 2009, I found the picture of the U.S. on TV (not just the news, by any means) to be scary and repellent. I think a possibly even darker picture comes through scanning both the geographic and topical forums and threads in C-D. Nothing in the great sprawl that is the Right, nor the kind of squishy sticky bun that is the Left seems substantial or promising (in a positive way.)
This point #5 is a major contributing factor to the personal statement I made in point #1. I rejected Cyprus because it had far too much similarity with point #5 above. I live in Portugal because aside from its own pluses, it has fewer of the problems that make life in the U.S as it has developed in the past thirty-five years so unappealing. As is plain, I presume, I don't see a "back" to come to....it's vanished.
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