Expat Dictionary 101

One woman recently told me that she loved Anonymous Third World Country because for the first time, she “truly felt like an expat.”

Definition: she had a driver, cook, maid and nanny.

I’ve never had such an experience.   For me, feeling like an expat has been more a feeling of displacement, not belonging, and difficulty.  Don’t get me wrong, I love living overseas and there are thousands of wonderful things about this kind of life, but it is often difficult and unglamorous.

With the excitement of a transfer and getting to live in and explore a new country and its environs comes a lot of stress, hard work and waiting.  Every new visa means more than getting to be a tourist in a new country.  It means among a hundred other things:

• Quitting a job
• Selling a car
• Disposing of food / alcohol / cleaning products
• Saying goodbye to friends
• Closing a bank account
• Cancelling a lease, internet, utilities, insurance
• Filing a second set of local country taxes
• Packing a container to ship and two suitcases of belongings that you can’t live without for 1-3 months
• Updating an itemized inventory for container insurance
• Finding a new place to live
• Finding a new job
• Finding new friends
• Buying a car
• Getting a new driver’s license
• Setting up a new bank account
• Getting insurance
• Setting up internet and utilities
• Waiting 1-3 months for your belongings to come
• Finding your way around and locating grocery stores, dry cleaners, doctors, restaurants, hair salons etc.
• Living out of suitcases

My particular favorite circular reference is that you can’t set up a local bank account without an address and you don’t get an address until you can pay your deposit and first month’s rent.  Wiring money from another country takes 2-10 business days and when you have 30 days to get yourself into ‘permanent accommodation,’ it means you have a maximum of 18 days to find where you want to live, in case the wire transfer actually takes 10 business days.

H and I just moved into our new ‘permanent’ home after hours at the leasing office trying to locate our wire transfer.  And we were the lucky ones; the other family at the office had the same problem and went ‘home’ to their hotel room for another night, without the keys to their new rental ‘home.’  Unfortunately, H and I showed up at our new home to find that it hadn’t been cleaned, as specified in the lease, nor were there any linens for the bed or towels in the bathroom, also as specified in the lease. 

So H and I had an amazing night sleeping on the couch in the unclean apartment because a used rental couch without sheets seemed a lot more sanitary than a used rental mattress without sheets.   This was after a late night trip to the (thankfully) 24 hour Tesco to get beer and disinfectant to make one bathroom usable enough for the evening.  We either didn’t get enough disinfectant or beer though because we started to clean one toilet and stopped when we found dried vomit/excrement on the outside of the toilet bowl; needless to say I’m posting this from the closest coffee shop with internet and a bathroom.  Sadly I haven’t chosen a new gym yet or I could also be writing this freshly showered.  I know, I know, this blog should really be renamed, The Glamorous Life of Anonymous Expat. 

Gross Me Out

Last night, I was putting my dishes from dinner in the dishwasher when a flat brown inch-long bug came crawling over the edge of it.  I screamed and grabbed the closest shoe I could find (H’s flipflop, sorry H) and while continuing to scream, began swatting at it trying to crush it to death.  It quickly scuttled up the side of the dishwasher and took refuge in a crack between the top of the dishwasher and bottom of the kitchen counter.  I continued to try to stab at it but the flipflop just wasn’t small enough to get into the crack to do any real damage.  At that point my phone rang,

H: “Hi AE, how are you? (insert my scream)  Are you ok?  What’s wrong????”

Me: “H, there is a HUGE bug hiding above our dishwasher and I can’t get it out to kill it and it’s HUGE!  I can’t use bug spray on it because it’s our kitchen counter and I don’t want to poison us but, wait, I know, I’ll spray it with disinfectant.”

H (laughing): “AE, you can’t kill a bug with disinfectant.”

Me: “But I can try!!!”  

At which point I began squirting away at the crack, hoping to drown/poison the bug.  And let me just say, this morning when I went to check on the crevice, I saw the bug’s little antennae poking out of the crack and smashed just how I left them.  Hopefully it’s dead!

I am totally grossed out.  I got to work today and told one of my co-workers about my night and she kindly explained to me that the bug I saw last night was a cockroach.  She confirmed this by showing me a rather graphic Google image, DISGUSTING!  I e-mailed the realtor to get an exterminator in ASAP and she said what everybody at work has said: that they’re really common here, especially this time of year (flashback to our ant infested hotel room when we arrived in March?!).  And the realtor said it’s not the owner’s responsibility and that I should go buy some traps which I left work to purchase immediately.  

Of course the first kind of exterminating traps/spray I found in the grocery store was a rack full of rodent poison with quite realistic images on the boxes.  Being petrified of rodents, I stood there shuddering attempting to look through the boxes for bug poison.  Finally I located a rack of bug sprays, traps, gels, etc. and let’s just say if the quantity and depth of selection is any indicator, bug invasions are truly a problem in Western Australia.  As I examined the products to see which I wanted, I may have started to feel bugs crawling over me.  I am not cut out for do-it-yourself-exterminating!  

This evening, when I left work, I told my intern that if I don’t show up at work tomorrow, it’s because I accidentally poisoned myself with my DIY exterminating and that she should come to my apartment to find me.  We both had a good laugh about that but not good enough for her to volunteer her assistance, despite her skills from exterminating her own bug problems at home.

Let’s just say my apartment is now trapped and sprayed and I’m on high alert for any insect movement.  And now I have something to add to my very short list of things I miss about life in the Middle East: the wonderful compound maintenance men who sprayed the perimeter of my house multiple times a week (without being asked) resulting in ZERO unwanted insect/rodent/other animal life guests.  For you, I am forever grateful and wishing you were here to do the same!