Carl – Expat American

“Clueless” expats in the UAE

February 14, 2012 By Carl Leave a Comment

An Arab Emirates publication is publishing a report that says that 72% of the expats in the country are ignorant of the language and culture. Although I’m used to “clueless” expats (China is full of them), I’m still shocked by this high number.

A massive 72 per cent of expats living in the UAE don’t understand the country’s customs and traditions, potentially leaving themselves open to breaking the law, a new study has revealed.

A survey by 999 Magazine, the official English-speaking magazine for Abu Dhabi Police and the Ministry of the Interior, quizzed 2,000 expats from various nationalities about their knowledge of customs and traditions.

The overwhelming majority admitted they know little about their host country, despite most having lived in the UAE for more than a year. Only 28 per cent of respondents said they had any real knowledge of the country’s local customs and traditions. Similarly, only a third of the respondents set aside enough time to find out about the UAE’s culture, while the rest were comfortable with occasional glimpse. In fact, 11 per cent confessed they never really bothered trying.

Link: Expats clueless about culture

Filed Under: Countries Tagged With: Middle East, UAE

India: The next big Expat destination?

February 13, 2012 By Carl 1 Comment

I’ve lived in China for over three years now, and during this time I’ve read many, many articles about Americans and Westerners going to China for jobs and adventure. Now, the New York Times has an article called Expats Flock to India Seeking Jobs, Excitement. Does it indicate that India is the next major destination for international expats?

Mr. Mehwald is part of a growing number of expats flocking to India in the last few years eager to tap into the opportunities the country has to offer, witness its rich transformation and sample a way of life often very different from their native countries. Foreigners, of course, have flocked to India for centuries, as colonizers, missionaries, volunteers and escapees from persecution in other countries. This new wave is made up mostly of well-educated migrants from wealthier, more developed countries, leaving behind slow economies in search of job prospects and opportunities they can’t find at home.

I have no idea, of course. But over the past few years, China has become a less appealing country for expats who don’t speak the language. In the past, non-Chinese could find jobs as “foreign experts,” and language was not much of an issue. But now, Chinese citizens are filling the top jobs, and non-Chinese are expected to speak Chinese. So it makes sense to me that as opportunity declines in China, those who seeks jobs outside their native country would turn to the other major developing country.

At the Indian consulate in San Francisco alone, the number of visas granted to Americans to work in India almost doubled, from 23,085 in 2009 to 47,929 in 2010. And those numbers don’t include Americans of Indian origin who have applied for special visas. In the same period in Beijing, there was a 51 percent jump to 32,932 Indian work visas granted. In the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, that increase was 27 percent to 20,550; in Shanghai, a 30 percent rise to 24,382.

Other countries across the globe reflected the same trend. The number of Indian work visas issued in Singapore soared by 33 percent from 21588 in 2009 to 28650 in 2010. In Europe, the Indian visa office in Paris doled out 41 percent more work authorizations in the same period, while Berlin saw 48 percent more Germans clamor to work in India, granting 49,104 visas.

Opportunity. Need. A growing expat culture. Those looking for adventure and reward abroad might want to consider India.

Link: Expats Flock to India Seeking Jobs, Excitement

Filed Under: Countries Tagged With: India, Next Big Thing, Opportunity

Great advice for renewing your driver’s license while living abroad

February 4, 2012 By Carl Leave a Comment

I need to renew my driver’s license, and so I’ve been trying to figure out what the laws and regulations are. As usual, despite the high number of American’s living abroad, the laws and regulations assume that all American citizens only live in the US, always. Unless they’re part of the military.

While doing research, I came across this funny blog post from an American living in Spain, entitled How Not To Renew Your Driver License In Your Home Country If You Are An Expat. He has the best and most practical advice. It’s all you can do, as far as I can tell.

So I get to the DMV office and there is no one there, but they still give me a number and forward me immediately to a certain agent with my newly printed number displayed above his desk. It’s an asian gentleman named, unfortunately, Hang. He looked at my expired license and asked if I still lived at that address in Raleigh, to which I stupidly replied….

Erik: “No, actually I’m living in Spain.”
Hang: “So you’re not living in North Carolina?”
Erik: “No. Spain. In Europe.”
Hang: “You’re in the [military] service?”
Erik: “No, I just live there.”
Hang [looking belligerent]: “We can’t issued drivers licenses to people that are not residents of North Carolina. We get people coming down from New York City who lose their ID, and come in here wanting us to issue them a new one. We can’t do that.”
Erik: “Well, the truth is that I work in North Carolina, pay NC taxes, and visit often.”
Hang: “You work in NC? How?”
Erik: “The internet.”
Hang: “What do they speak in Spain? Spanish?”
Erik: “Yes.”
Hang: “I bet it’s a different accent than around here, though, huh…”
Erik: “Yep.”
Hang: “Hmm… Well, your situation is certainly unique. Let me talk to my supervisor.”

About this time, I glance at Marga and she’s got her, “Good God, my husband is an idiot!” look on her face. (She gets a lot of practice with that look.) I begin contemplating where the next town’s DMV office is so we can go there to renew my license with an easy falsehood.

Finally, Hang returns and has concluded that my situation is enough like a military employee (working for the US, living abroad, and needing to renew paperwork locally) that I should be treated as such. He gives me my eye test and issues me my new license. By complete chance, I happened to be wearing the same t-shirt as I had been in my previous drivers license photo eight years ago. I love that shirt. And all is well. Just barely.

So, to all other expats that are renewing their documents in their home countries: LIE!

Filed Under: Advice, Tips Tagged With: Driver's license, Practical issues

Ignore the smog, and exercise

September 7, 2010 By Carl

Most of us expats live in cities, I suspect. I doubt you’ll find very many Americans hanging out in the rural areas of China, India, Russia, South America, and Africa. The big opportunities are mainly in cities, even if just to network.

That means we have to deal with pollution. Air pollution, especially. You can drink filtered water, but no matter what else you do to safeguard your health, you’ve got to breathe the air.

A question we expats often have is whether or not it’s healthy for us to exercise outdoors. When the Air Quality Index in Beijing is over 200 (and considered dangerous), I’m not always sure it’s even a good idea to take a stroll. Well, a recent study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives has an answer:

Go ahead. Do it. Exercise.

Entitled Do the Health Benefits of Cycling Outweigh the Risks? the study focused on bicycling, but I don’t see why the results wouldn’t apply to walking, running, playing tennis, or whatever else you might want to do in the smog. Basically, the study says yes, the benefits outweigh the risks. Although it’s not good to breathe in the pollution, exercise improves your overall health and it’s better for you to exercise in the smog than it is to not exercise at all.

As the authors state in their principal findings:

We quantitatively compared the health benefits from physical activity with the risks related to air pollution and traffic accidents between cycling and car driving for short trips, distinguishing the individuals who shift modes of travel from society as a whole. Estimated inhaled air pollution doses were higher in cyclists. The risk of a fatal traffic accident is higher for cyclists than for car drivers. Substantial benefits of physical activity have been demonstrated, including decreased cardiovascular disease and mortality.

For the people who shift from car to bicycle, we estimated that the well-documented beneficial effect of increased physical activity due to cycling resulted in about 9 times more gains in life-years than the losses in life years due to increased inhaled air pollution doses and traffic accidents. For the society as a whole this can be even larger because of reduced air pollution emissions. If the risk presented to other road users is included, the risk of a fatal traffic accident is virtually the same for cyclists and car drivers.

This study is an academic research paper, so it’s not a fun or easy read. I didn’t understand it all (and I skipped the math bits). Nevertheless it’s good to know that the research is showing that it’s better to exercise.

Another interesting item: exposure to air pollution is actually higher in cars.

Photo credit: Simone Ramella

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: Exercise, Pollution

Interview: Gerardo Robledillo of Expatistan

August 16, 2010 By Carl

Although he’s not an American, Gerardo has created a very useful site for American Expats: Expatistan. The site collects pricing information for large cities around the world and lets you compare costs. It’s not perfect, but it gives you a quick grasp of whether your cost of living will increase or decrease, and by how much. Another great thing about the site is that the price information is crowd-sourced, which means that the site should get more accurate the more it is used.

Where are you from? What’s your background?

I was born in Madrid, Spain. I lived there for the first 20 something years of my life, although I spent a lot of my summers abroad working and studying to improve my English. In retrospect, this was the best way that I could have possibly spent my summers. It gave me the urge to travel, and opened my mind in a way that most of the people around me had not experienced. As for my background, there’s nothing really exciting there. I have a MS in Computer Science, and I have been working as Web Developer ever since I finished it 7 years ago.

Where do you live now, and what led you to move there?

I’m now in Prague, Czech Republic. I guess that some of the responsibility of me being here must go to my wife, a Czech girl. Although to be honest, I moved here on my own, before I even knew her. After we met, we also lived in other cities. But we were never as happy as we have been here, so we decided to move back.

Where else have you lived overseas? Which places would you like to live in again?

I’ve lived in Madrid, Prague, Frankfurt, Barcelona, and then Prague again (if you consider ‘living in a city’ as spending more than 3-4 months there). I wouldn’t mind living in Barcelona or Madrid again, if the situation in Spain improves. I don’t want to go back to Frankfurt, though. It’s too boring for me there.

You run a site called Expatistan, which crowd sources cost of living information for cities around the world. Where did you get the idea?

Yes, I have created and I run Expatistan.com. The idea, as usual, came out of necessity. Even though I haven’t lived in so many cities compared to other people, I’ve considered moving to many more. In each case, the question was the same, how much money would I need to keep my current standard of life? How much more expensive is it there than here?

You can find a lot of forums with scattered data from 3 years ago. But that is tedious and the image you get is anything but comprehensive. You can also pay for some big consulting company study. But, well, you have to pay. And then I wouldn’t trust those big companies. I couldn’t see the actual prices of items, just rankings of cities. It wasn’t transparent at all. And I always had the feeling that those companies had their own agendas when compiling the indices. After all, they cater to other big companies, not to “average” expats.

So, I realized that what I wanted didn’t exist. And judging by the number of questions that I always got from friends about prices in my city compared to theirs, and by the number of people making those questions all over the internet again and again, I wasn’t alone. Something like Expatistan wanted to be created.

Since I have the skills, the motivation, and it would be fun to build, I started to work on it. Stealing hours of my sleep, and weekends from my wife.

Recently, Lifehacker wrote a post about Expatistan. Did that bring a lot of traffic to the site? And how did it affect you? Did it help you get better numbers for the cities?

Yes, it brought a lot of traffic. It killed the small server where I was hosting Expatistan. I had to get a new server, ramp up the configuration of my web server, and make some emergency fixes to use the cache even more intensely than I was doing before. It seems the website has stabilized now, but for some days, it was reaaally slow. I was a little embarrased about it, actually. I should have had the application ready to scale up by pressing a button. Well, you live and learn.

The good thing is that a lot of people got to see Expatistan. And a nice percentage of them have been entering prices. Something like 6% of the users are entering prices for their cities, which is awesome. I went from around 20,000 prices in 200 cities entered in the previous 6 months, to around 40,000 prices in 400 cities in 3 days. The data almost doubled in 3 days!

I also received a lot of comments and emails (76 emails in the first 2 days after the mention on Lifehacker). Lots of useful feedback, really nice words, and encouragement. It has also been going around in Twitter and Facebook quite a bit.

How has living abroad affected the way you think about life?

You realize how many things that you never gave a second thought to and assumed were normal, actually are not. Little things but also bigger ones. The way that you hold your fork, the kind of food that you consume, the attitude towards animals, or how to handle the education of kids. There are lots of things that you just assume are done in some way because that’s the way it is. Well, actually it turns out that it is not true. You can do everything in a million different ways. Living abroad allows you to see some of those different ways of doing things, and some are better than your way.

Any good sources of information for expats that you can recommend?

If you happen to live in Prague, expats.cz is the place to go. Then, each city has their local forum for expats, which is usually pretty active. And the best source of information is other expats. Just make a search on Google for the city you want to move to, and you’ll likely find an expat forum there. Show up in the forum, and start asking. In my experience, expats are very extroverted, and they love to help. So just ask around.

What’s your advice for someone who dreams of living abroad?

If English is not your native language, study it. If you already speak it, then start looking for a job while you still live in your home city. It may take months, but it’s worth it to land with a job secured. I know too many people that burnt through their savings while trying to find a job in their dream city overseas, and ended up unhappy and having to return back. Even if it means that the move will happen some months later, try to find a job (or at least land some interviews) while you are still at home. In the worst case, you will realize that you wouldn’t be able to support yourself in that city you wanted to move to. It’s better to realize that beforehand, and then try to find another city to move to.

When I wanted to change cities I came up with a list of 4-6 cities where I would like to move to. I would start a little research on the internet to find out how living in the city actually was. I would also start looking at local job boards, and to apply to jobs that seemed like I could fancy. After a month or so, that initial list of cities would have been trimmed down to 2 or 3. Then, for as long as it would take, I would keep searching for jobs in those 2 or 3 cities. Using online job boards, looking for companies in the city and contacting them directly, and using my network of friends. In the end, when I had a job secured in the city, I moved, knowing that I would be able to support myself, and that I would be living an expat life (as opposed as a tourist life).

What memories and wisdom have you gained, which you will carry with you wherever you live?

There are nice people everywhere. And as many ways to understand life as there are people on the planet.

Filed Under: Interviews, Locations Tagged With: cost of living, Expatistan, where to live

Tip: Take probiotics for digestive health overseas

August 9, 2010 By Carl

Delhi belly and Montezuma’s revenge are bad enough when you’re on vacation. But if you’re an expat living in a developing country, concern about food safety becomes a daily worry. If you get sick, you might miss work and important meetings. And you’re not going “back home” in a week or two, where the food is generally safer — you’re staying, and might get sick again. Plus, when you’re on vacation, you’re often more prepared: When you go travel in a poorer country, you take your medicines with you. Live there, and you get more lackadaisical, or the medicine runs out. Or you lose it somewhere in your apartment.

As an expat, you need to be on guard all the time. But it’s impossible to know if your food is safe, and even “common sense” is not much help. The worst food poisoning of my life came after eating at a 5-star hotel, and I’ve often found that I get sick after eating at “nice” hotels. On the other hand, I eat street food in China all the time. I love the chuanr, the middle-eastern style lamb skewers sold during the summer time, the baozi (steamed buns with meat), the liangpi (a cold noodle dish similar to phad thai), and the mala tang (a spicy/numbing soup with vegetables and meat that you have chosen yourself).

And I never get sick from the street food. Not much, at least.

My secret for digestive health is probiotics. I hear they’re all the rage in the US now, but I’ve been taking them for years. My brand of choice is the Whole Foods 360 brand, which provides a massive dose, is economical, and comes in 250-count bottles. I bring a few bottles back to China every time I return from the US. What I’ve discovered is that if I run out, I will start having lots of digestive problems after a few weeks.

If you’re overseas and have digestive problems, I highly recommend you get some Acidophilus pills. At the very least, yogurt should help: Just be sure to buy a brand with live cultures. You should start feeling more “solid” inside and have to worry a lot less about what you eat. As someone who gets intestinal problems fairly easily, I can tell you that it’s a big relief.

Photo credit: Average Jane

Filed Under: Challenges, Expat life, Tips Tagged With: Diarrhea, Digestive System, Health, Probiotics

Interview on Expat Alley

July 22, 2010 By Carl

There’s an interview of me on Expat Alley, my favorite expat blog. Tom Frost, an entrepreneur who lives in Uruguay and Argentina, writes the blog and I enjoy his writing for its wit and insight. I read a lot of blogs that are information based, about technology, marketing, China, and so on. Tom is one of the few personal bloggers I like to read, just for his thoughts and observations. He often makes me laugh:

I need to get pissed off and need to get pissed off now.

Then I look out the window and see the sun shining, cows in the pasture and yes, the dog crapping in my yard—which makes me smile because the dog wags his tail after his work is done. It is apparent that his intestinal problem begins and ends in my yard. Perhaps he has realized that if he separates the negative aspect of his life with a physical barrier (the road) when he crosses back to his house he returns to his zone of positivity. It is sort of like the barrier that I have with my internet connection. I can cross into the negative news zone, do my business, and then return to my non-internet life and wag my tail.

Read the interview with me if it interests you. But please be sure to read Expat Alley on a regular basis.

Link: Carl Thoren interview

Filed Under: About Tagged With: Expat Alley, interview, not famous expats

An amazing story

July 15, 2010 By Carl

This isn’t about life as an expat, but it’s too damn good not to share. In 1971, Les Braunstein, who was the original singer for the band that became Blue Oyster Cult, crossed through the Khyber pass on horseback — and lived to tell about it, obviously.

It was 1971. I’d been traveling in Asia for several months, and to have an adventure, and to impress a girl, I’d bought a horse named Herat so that I could ride through the Khyber Pass from Kabul, Afghanistan, to Peshawar, Pakistan.

This was more complicated than it sounded. I would be passing through tribal regions. I would be taking a horse out of Afghanistan, which was illegal. I’d probably have to bribe my way across the border. Beyond that, I was advised that bandits in the pass would shoot me and take my horse and valuables.

I didn’t think they would. Also, I had decided, against advice, not to carry a gun—I wasn’t going to out-gun a Khyber tribesman. Anyway, I was sure I’d be OK. I was a young American fool.

It’s a great story, with a powerful ending. You can read it here, on WorldHum: American Fool in the Khyber Pass.

Filed Under: Famous expats Tagged With: Adventure, Afghanistan, bandits, cherries, Khyber Pass, Les Braunstein, survival

New fees for consular services

July 7, 2010 By Carl

If you need extra passport pages, or need anything else done at your nearest embassy, hurry. Fees will be changed on July 13, 2010 — with most of them being raised. Some of them a lot.

Here’s the full list:

What especially annoys me is the new fee for having pages added to your passport. US $85! That’s up from zero. I can understand needing to charge something, but hey: It’s just a few slips of paper. They often add them on the spot while you wait, I believe. They say these fees are based on a cost of service survey that they conducted, and I’m sure they put a lot of thought into this, but no matter what, $85 is a lot to charge for simply plunking some paper into your passport. Maybe they just want you to get a new one, so they make the fees similar? That seems likely to me.

The fees for some of the legal work have also been raised dramatically. I can’t comment on whether they’re appropriate, however.

What’s amusing is the new fee for renouncing your citizenship. I guess it didn’t cost you anything previously if you didn’t want to be a US citizen. Now they’re going to try to get $450 out of you before you go. I’m curious what happens if people refuse to pay.

Here’s the official notice: New Consular Fees in Effect on July 13, 2010.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Fees, US Consulate

How to have a better vacation

July 2, 2010 By Carl

I really enjoyed a recent article from The Boston Globe called The best vacation ever. Drake Bennett, the author, writes about the scientific research into happiness, and how that can be applied to taking a vacation.

(Christoph Hitz for The Boston Globe)

Basically, think of your vacation as having 3 phases:

1. Planning before the trip
2. The trip itself
3. Your memories afterwards

Something surprising to me was the finding that people are often least happy during the trip itself. That’s because you’re dealing with all the confusion and frustration of travel: how to get places, where to eat, deciding what to do. It’s not always fun and relaxing. Another surprising finding is that length is not very important.

For psychologists and behavioral economists, vacations are a window into the still only dimly understood mystery of human pleasure, a field known as hedonic psychology. Their research, along with other work on prototypically pleasant (and unpleasant) experiences, has begun to yield a portrait of your mind on vacation. And if the findings tell us anything, it’s that we might actually need some help. When we guess the best way to spend our free time, it seems that we often guess wrong.

There are untold shelves of books dedicated to the art of maximizing our time at work, but no corresponding literature on maximizing our leisure time. Even asking the question of how to “optimize” a vacation seems fundamentally un-vacation-like. And yet people constantly puzzle over how to get the most out of their valuable time off: poring over guidebooks, checking the forecast, looking up online reviews of hotels and restaurants, arguing with spouses over where to go and what to do, and when.

The problem, say some social scientists, is that people do all this — and spend thousands of dollars — with an incomplete understanding of what qualities make an experience enjoyable. Take duration. A longer vacation seems, by definition, better than a shorter one, and having lots of paid vacation time is a highly valued job perk. But when we recall an experience, and how it made us feel, it turns out that length isn’t terribly important.

A Dutch study showed that going on vacation boosted mood, but did nothing for how people felt afterwards. My personal experience is that I used to feel depressed after coming back from a vacation, and I think it was because I was coming back to my regular life of working in a cubicle, doing a job I didn’t like, while dreaming of a more adventurous and interesting life. Now that I’m living in Beijing, my daily life is more interesting and challenging, and my life overall is more fulfilling. So the vacation relaxes and rejuvenates me, as it’s supposed to, rather than revealing to me how unsatisfied I am.

For me, the biggest practical take-away of the article is to focus more on taking short vacations and weekend getaways, because the peak experiences matter more than the length. That will be a hard adjustment for me to make since I’m in the habit of trying to go to a new country for 2 weeks or more.

The article is full of other good advice as well, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Filed Under: Travel Tagged With: happiness, vacations