Thread: Has anyone moved to a new country? What are your stories?

Ok, I'll get the ball rolling. I am an Australian who has made a new home in Thailand. This is what can happen when you meet, fall in love with, and then marry a Thai girl.
My wife and I met in Australia when she was studying her masters degree. We tried to make a life for ourselves in Australia but it was just too hard for my wife. So we sold everything, house, cars, motorbike, and most of our possessions and moved to Bangkok.
It has worked out well for us. I am gainfully employed as a teacher in an Islamic school and my wife is an executive in a multinational corporation. The only down side is that we live with her parents and brothers. Nine people in one house (including my father in law's three wives)

So what are your stories? How many of us here have upped and changed countries? How did you get there and was it worth it?

G'day Mate,

Im back in Australia now but I previously worked for a European engineering outfit and was based in Malaysia for 2 yrs and Singapore for another 2 yrs.

From these two bases I worked shorter assignments in Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Japan, China, Columbia and Dubai... typically for one to three months each.

I loved living in Asia and have missed it nearly every day since I've been home

I feel like it does a person good to be outside their comfort zone for a while... sometimes well outside it. The experience changed the way I think and feel about many things not the least thing being the way it feels to be in a minority.

Not quite the same as moving permanantly... but a great experience none the less.

Greg Frazer

Well Nathan, 36 years ago I ended up here in California. My parents brought me here from Wales. But I grew to like it after a few years, sure was a different world though.I was 15 years old and gave my folks hell for leaving home. I have been home 5 times since then, twice in the past 5 years and it's almost like I never left... except my friends look so much older. Now that I've talked myself into semi-retirement I'm thinking it's getting time to pack up, sell the home and go back to where I came from. I don't have any family here in the States and the kids have moved. So I'm free . Only problem I have is my girl friend. She says she'll go, but I know the change can be hard on a person especially if you leave family behind. Tried that with my Ex-wife about 20 years ago. This time will be much easier and I own 2 homes back in Wales. One is close to my Mom and I would love to spend some time with her while I can. I made a good living here in California, but there ain't no place like home.

I'm actually looking at moving down to Belize in the next few months.

I completely overlooked the forums as a place to get advice on international living. Shame on me.

I'm an expatriot, I guess...

After I got my master's I decided it was time to give in to my wanderlust and headed off to Germany to "continue my studies" (i.e. drink a lot of beer and sit in a lot of gorgeous parks). It was a good life, but utterly dissolute...expatriots in Berlin are like parodies of what conservatives think "liberals" are...turtleneck wearing trust fundies siting around and self publishing novellas about their terrible travails trying to self-publish novellas in a foreign land. I preferred the underground punk scene--which gave me some very nice stories.

When the money ran out, I found a job in Japan because I didn't particularly like the idea of going back to the States, then when I got here I found it rather to my liking. Especially after finding the Perfect Woman (tm).

Life in Japan is different in bizarre little ways, but I'm experiencing the highest quality of life I have ever had. It is safe, clean, and easy...once you get over the little stresses like a complete lack of Mexican food, ridiculously overpriced beer, and a summer that makes me wish I had never been born.

I started learning Italian at the University of Illinois at the end of the sixties and fell in love with it. I went to work as a salesman but continued to read books in Italian. Flash forward 30 years. I went through a terrible divorce and lost everything. After the divorce, I moved to Seattle to be near my kids and found work selling cars. One day, I customer walks in and finds me reading Dante's Inferno and she says, "I'm so impressed that you can read Italian" and I said, "Oh yeah? How much will you pay me to read Italian? With that and a buck, I can take the bus." "I'm not kidding," she says, "I have a girlfriend who's a translator." The lightbulb turned on.

I thought, since I have to rebuild from scratch, I'd like to do it in Italy. I started working as a translator and, after three years, I asked my one of my Italian customers to help me move. I moved here in 2003 and remarried in 2005. I've never looked back.

The moral of the story is that I learned Italian because I loved it but I never thought it was worth anything because, after all, there are 60 million Italians who speak it much better than me. For 30 years, coworkers, friends and family thought I was weird because I always had an Italian book in my pocket, but in the end, my worthless skill saved my life.