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. 

Redefining First World Standards

Apologies for the long absence.  I would love to say that I’ve been busy enjoying the start of summer in Perth, lounging alongside the Indian Ocean with some good books and a Little Creatures Light Ale or Pipsqueak Cider (or two) in hand but alas I’ve just been busy with work.  This morning my trip to the bank to place a wire transfer has definitely jumpstarted me back into posting though because I have found something else to add to my list of things that Qatar is better than Australia at doing:

1.        Reasonably priced food and services.  I’ve gone from $27 pedicures at the Four Seasons in Doha to refusing to pay $60+ for no name hole in the wall salons in Perth.  Forget $25 entrees at Spice Market and $7 dinners at Thai Snack in Qatar because in Perth, Chinese takeaway will set you back $15 a person (excluding rice, an extra $5 per serving).  Slightly nicer but still casual restaurants in Perth will set you back a minimum of $25 per person excluding drinks for average food.

2.        Internet.  I could go on about this all day but I’ll stick to the basics of set-up and service.  Not only did ridiculously slow to get anything done Qtel in Qatar beat Perth’s Telestra at setting up my internet (about one month versus almost seven weeks) but my internet speed was significantly faster in Qatar versus Australia which you would think would be a more developed country.  Not only that, but after seven months of service, I finally got a correct bill from Telestra.  I only had one incorrect bill in Qatar.

3.        Mobile service.  In Qatar, I could be out in the absolute middle of the desert and still have full service on my phone.  Ok, perhaps my cell phone didn’t work well in my house, but all those concrete walls must have blocked the signal.  In Australia, we lose cell phone coverage all of the time, even in populated areas.

4.        I saved the best for last: banking services.  Today I went to place a wire transfer from my Australian bank to my bank in the U.S.  I arrived at my bank and was told that they couldn’t do it, unless I could figure out how to use their website to do the wire, since all the bank can do is use the same website I use at home.  After realizing that an international wire would actually require the bank employees to do some work, they then told me it was impossible (despite the fact they advertise forex on tv/internet quite heavily).  The coup de grace was when they suggested I go to Western Union if I wanted to send money overseas.  New item on my to do list: ‘find new bank.’

Australia, you might be absolutely gorgeous but your service sucks.  You might want to rethink your ‘fair go’ philosophy because it may be responsible for contributing to such crappy businesses and service industry employees that you don’t even compare to less developed countries like Qatar, in all of their frustrating bureaucratic glory.  I can’t wait to see how your economy does when there is a pull back in natural resources prices.  You export your raw materials, and import nearly all value added products despite your massive tariffs.  Isn’t that what a third world country is supposed to do?