Humorous expat stories

Expat life can be boring at times. You live in an exotic country in Africa or maybe Asia where they’ve got scrumptious food, interesting customs and fabulous festivals, and what do you do? You wake up in the morning and you eat your cornflakes, you go shopping for light bulbs, you go to the gym. Really, how exotic is that?

Feeling incompetent is a humbling experience most expats are familiar with. At home you might feel incompetent when you don’t know how to program your space-age electronic equipment, but living abroad all it takes to feel like a baby is not knowing the language and trying to buy bread or a screwdriver or curtain rods. In Ramallah, Palestine, I had no trouble at all feeling incompetent.

If you are, or have been, an expat living in a foreign country, you know that friends and family at home often have exaggerated ideas about how exotic or dangerous…