I think it took me about a year and a half to realize I was an expat. While I like to toot my own horn enough, I also like to give props where I think they are due.
I can’t really tell you what I thought my husband and I actually were, but it wasn’t necessarily an expat. I guess in my mind expats were international working professionals, jet setters. Technically speaking though, an expat is a person living outside their own country (a short form of expatriate). Many people in Britain think of typical British expats as people who live an easy relaxed life in some warm country, meeting each other often for drinks and other social events, and having little contact with local people (OALD).
I realized that I in fact was an expat once I realized that I was seeking out resources and groups to help me make sense of what I was doing in Germany. One of the first sites that I found to help me navigate this world was Expat Blog.
Launched in 2005 by expatriates, for expatriates whose ambition is to help people living or willing to live abroad, wherever they are from or would like to go. Expat blog is the most active online community of expatriates, dedicated to all the people living or wishing to live abroad. It is a platform of expression and exchange, an information source about expatriation.
While it has many tools to help expats and potential expatriates, I find the blog directory and discussion forums most interesting to me. I seek out others blogs and forum statements to help me make sense of my own experience and share some of the voices I find when I write to help my topics be more dense and not mine alone, or to show that I am not alone in this opinion or experience. Expat blog has helped introduce me to a new world of online resources that the American women’s group that I attend sometimes says simply did not exist when most of them moved to Germany.
Beyond the blogging and forum experience they also offer guides, photo albums, business directory, classifieds as well as new jobs and housing sections that you can post at for free, without a middle person, or Agentur für Arbeit & immobilien in Germany. They also have links and resources for people moving to all parts of the world. Expat Blog is a great online community of other expats living around the world.
These are my thoughts and I was not compensated for this post.
livingtheamericandreamineurope.com 