Expat Round-up: Sourcing ingredients, weird phrases and Heidi

Right. Boil the kettle, make a cuppa and sit down and join me for a little roundup of expat posts from all over the place. Doing a round-up of a specific niche gives one a great excuse for trawling through the favourites in my blogroll as well as spending time reading some new discoveries.

First up is A Bavarian Sojourn—a beautiful blog with some interesting posts about life as an expat, such as the challenges of making a very specific cake for your seven year old’s birthday, when you’re in a country that doesn’t have the very specific ingredients you’re looking for. For me it was all part of the learning process—learning to adjust and learning to make your own of whatever you needed—and learning all the excellent internet links for sourcing the stuff elsewhere!

A Canadian mom on the Isle of Man writes a fascinating blog about minimalism (and so much more)—and one of my favourite posts of hers, Life as an expat in the Isle of Man is one of the best reasons why I love expat blogs—I have lived in the UK over 20 years and have yet to visit the Isle of Man and this post taught me a lot about what it’s like to move there and see it with fresh eyes and a North American background.

I’ll be honest, as an American I was intrigued: why would someone dislike living in America? Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t incredulous and I am certainly not naïve, I KNOW there exists people in the world who don’t like America (no ‘shock/gasps’ here) and I also know not all expats are as happy as they would like to be in their host countries, but I was simply curious. If you call your blog “Keeping the Glass Half Full” it must at least be a positive take, right? See for yourself, Samantha McGarry is a great writer.

For a blogger that always has an intelligent and witty thing to say about her expat experiences you simply must stop by The Iota Quota. My favourite expat post of the month from Iota is on Accents and how the Americans do love a British one. There’s a faint bittersweet taste in this post about our children growing up with a different accent to us. Yep, I can totally relate to that one, Iota.

And similarly, though less about accents and more or word usage, Expat Mum explores the effectiveness of talking sternly to a child while using weird phrases—well, weird to them, but perfectly normal to us.

And yet another new-ish-to-me blog that I love and don’t spend nearly enough time visiting, Three Years, One Stone, Then Home, written by Far from home mama. The post I’m highlighting from this blog is about one of the most interesting and revealing aspects of any culture—architecture: Reasons to love Switzerland #3. She writes about what she imagined every Swiss home to look like, but then shows us a very different house, much less Heidi and much more to her liking.

In a completely different part of the world, Circles in the Sand offers us a bit more on architecture, this time in the form of an expat compound in the middle of the dessert—what it was once like (giant sandboxes for kids instead of lawns) appearing at the edges of the busy spread of Dubai, and what it is now…an oasis of green and flowers.

Inevitably, I have found a post documenting the expat learning curve… Back to ‘what a phrase means’ and the cost of not knowing the meaning earlier, The Foreigner writes an amusing account of a familiar experience.

Do you have an expat post you’d like to share? Leave it in the Linky below for us to visit! And we’d love to hear from expats of all nationalities, all over the world!

About Michelle Garrett

Michelle Garrett is the author of The American Resident, where she blogs about making a life overseas, raising a blended family, herding cats, chasing chickens and attempting the Good Life in Essex. Michelle is a freelance writer.

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