Extras from Expatriates: The Movie
“Oh man, you are sooo lucky to live overseas.”
I’ve heard this before, but I’ve heard it more often recently. “Ah yeah. Trump?”
He looks at me sideways. “No, I mean, living in Europe must be awesome.”
“Oh yeah. It’s pretty cool.”
He cocks his head. “It must be much better than living over here.”
If you are an American expatriate (living in a non-combat zone) then you have had some version of this conversation. In the first place, yes, living abroad absolu-frickin-lutely rocks…at times. No matter where you are living, there are some aspects of living there that are “better” than living in the U.S.
However, you know that your friend is romanticizing the expatriate life. And that is because they are basing their mental picture of your life on movies (and other intake) they have seen about expatriates. You do not judge this person, because before you moved abroad your mental picture was based on the same movies.
But you learned.
A Day in the Life: Expatriate the Movie
He rolls out of bed at a culturally superior time, we don’t know what time it is, but the sun is rising, because nobody in Europe would be so gauche as to get out of bed before or after the sun rises. That’s like, so Detroit. Before doing so he kisses his partner (not wife, so chained down), who is a woman (or man) whose beauty is a stunning and unique conglomeration of features indigenous to the area to which he has expatriated.
Then he puts on tan pants, a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a vest, and wanders down the cobbled road filled with peddlers and old women in bonnets washing down the street. He heads to the local bakery, where he orders warm fresh rolls in fluent wherever-he-is. Then off to work, passing by the great monuments of the city in which he lives (Prague: Charles Bridge and the castle).
His job is not important, but he will finish it early in the afternoon so that he can enjoy an evening with other broadminded expatriate (and a couple of local, just to prove his broadmindedness) friends, as they sip absinthe and discuss philosophy and complain over the edits demanded by their New York-based editors. They do so at a rustic café or pub and enjoy local and fresh food and drink.
As he walks home, there will be musicians playing on the street and, good-natured fellow that he is, he will drop a substantial amount of coinage in their hat.
A Day in the Life: Expatriate the Reality
He rolls out of bed at 5 am, murmurs a good morning to his bed mate, who can’t believe she has ended up with a person who gets up at 5 am. He steps on his cat’s tail, who screeches as though she is being skinned by a machete. Then he slams coffee before dressing in everything in his house, since it’s -10 degrees outside and the sun isn’t going to come up for another two hours. Before he can sneak outside, his cat gives his toe a bite as pay back for the tail stomp.
He walks a mile to the metro station, on his way passing a pub from which late night drunks stumble out in the early morning. He has to cram into the metro like a piece of human spaghetti. After traveling for a while in a metal petri dish, he gets off and buys a hotdog pastry in the main station. This will be the highlight of his day.
When he comes out at the main station he is not surprised, but a little bummed, to find that it is still dark. The tram takes him 20 minutes outside of the city to a place that never ever features in postcards (welcome to Jarov!). It’s there that he goes to work, a job he loves, but a job he, at times, wants to hold under the water until the bubbles stop. He makes a mistake in the local language, thus instead of asking for help with a document, he accidentally calls someone’s grandmother a whore. Everyone laughs.
He is allowed to leave work early because he has to accomplish a bureaucratic task of eternal aggravation. This will bring him to another part of the city forgotten by the passage of time, 20 minutes on the other side of Prague. It’s in this place that he is allowed a glimpse of the paperwork keeping him in this country.
At the bureaucratic office, an official who seems to hate him more than the Hungarian gang who kidnapped his dogs and broke his granduncle’s leg brings over a ‘package’ of documents tied together in a string. It is ten years of visa applications, criminal records, medical records, housing sheets, and notarized diplomas, birth certificates, payment statements, and work contracts. It looks like R2D2.
As he heads back into the city, he, by all costs, avoids the historical center because it’ll be crawling with tourists and he doesn’t feel like committing murder today. His bus gets stuck in traffic for twenty minutes, the woman next to him has a cold and a form of aggressive mouth herpes seemingly intent on taking over Europe.
By the time the expatriate gets to the pub to meet his friend, he is so desperate for a drink that he has four shots before he speaks. He has a frozen pizza, because his budget doesn’t allow for both alcohol and actual food.
Sound familiar? Life is life, no matter where you do it.
