It's funny how when people come to the US or Britain we call them immigrants yet when we decide to settle somewhere else we call ourselves ‘expatriates'. Maybe there's a negative connotation with the term immigrant in our minds and no matter where we go we'll never be ‘immigrants'! Well whatever we decide to call ourselves, immigrants or expats, I'm one of them. I'm a foreigner in a different country with a different and relatively exotic language all around me (okay not as exotic as say Chinese or Arabic but it's still not French). I get treated different and I react differently to certain facets of culture. There are certain things which can't be explained that are just different here in Poland compared with the United States. Poland is a country still ‘recovering' from being communist. What's interesting about their economy is that it is transitioning away from a controlled economy where the United States is slowing becoming one. I would still say that overall the US is more ‘free', but a word like free is so nebulous and broad that it's really unfair to use it. When you're an immigrant or an expat, everything you do and are in the new country suddenly concerns where you're from, at least when the country you go to doesn't have a whole lot of immigration. I can't tell you how many World War II conversations I've gotten into where the Polish are defending their position in the conflict. Poland and World War II is for a different podcast though, what I'm trying to say is that when I go for a beer the conversation surrounds where I'm from and how I compare it to where I am. So being an expat and not going crazy means you have build relationships with people so you can get passed all the basic ‘compare our lifestyle questions'. You inevitably have to go through that whenever you meet or hangout with someone new though. It's not always bad and sometimes it's interesting, but it's happened enough to me that I have my answers all prepared. I'm an immigrant that married into a family that is Polish. Something else very difficult is to find yourself in a position where you can't express yourself to your ‘new' family because you don't speak the way they speak and they don't speak the way you speak. And it really sucks because I'm incredibly clever. Polish is a tough language and I'm now coming to a threshold where a lot of it is starting to stick, of course soon I'll be going back to the states unfortunately. But the language barrier remains. I know my in-laws wish that we could communicate better and Lingq has helped with internalizing words but unfortunately it might have been too little too late if I'm planning to go back to the US for an extended period of time. I'll just have to keep lingqing I guess. I think people who complain about being different and being immigrants are whiners, in the end it's not that different. Of course I can list the thousands and thousands of tiny differences, but in the end we're all human, we all want the same basic things: life, happiness, love, freedom. Those things will never change.
A Backwards Guide to Everyday Life the Diary/Blog of Chris Sarda, Life as an Immigrant or an Expat?
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