Member-only story
Becoming a Local in a New Place
My personal story about making a new place feel like home
I have lived in 5 foreign countries and been an expat for 7 years. I see some people struggle with their new lives in a foreign place and I hope my experiences can help someone go through this transition. Later on, I will go into details about each of the times I have lived abroad.
I grew up in Russia in a city of almost 1,5 million people, just above Mongolia. When I tell people I am from Siberia, 70% try to say something funny about cold weather and vodka, 20% think I am from Serbia, and the rest even wonder if Siberia is part of Russia.
These days I am comfortable being in a new environment and talking to people from all sorts of backgrounds, but it’s been a long journey for me. Being geographically Asian, but culturally Soviet/Eastern European, I have always felt somewhere in the middle between the West and the East.
English is my second language and I easily get along with people from North America, the UK and Australia. Yet my life as an expat in the U.S. and London wasn’t extremely smooth. I got to understand and love a lot of things about them, but I never felt fully immersed. I feel like it is so much easier for the Commonwealth and American expats to feel connected with each other abroad. Obviously, for me it’s faster and easier to connect with Russian speakers.
