Wanna-Be Expat

Photo Credit: chrisinplymouth

I wanna-be an expat. I want to live outside of my home and native land*. I want to experience another culture on a more long term basis than when we breezed through country after country on our round-the-world trip. But I am having a devil of a time defining it beyond that.

There’s all kinds of questions that need answering. Big questions that should be addressed before the finer details can be worked out.

Like where do we want to go? How will we make a living? How long would we go for? What about when we’re old? How would we manage health care? What about our families? What would we do with all our stuff? What about when we come back? Will we come back? How much money should we have saved? Should we just do it? Or do we need to plan/save/think about it more?

It all just keeps going round and round in my head and I end up nowhere, feeling like I haven’t moved an inch toward the goal.

That’s not true of course. Every lap a question takes through my over-active imagination the more brain cells it comes into contact with and the closer an answer is. I think my head acts like a Plinko** game. I stuff it full of questions and information that I have no idea what to do with and slowly it Plinko’s its way into the correct slot in my brain.

That’s what I’ve been doing – stuffing, and stuffing, and stuffing. There are 1,497,652 ways to become an expat and they are all stuffed into my head.

Look out…because before long all those bells and whistles, flashing lights and blinking bulbs are gonna start up and Bob Barker is going to declare me a winner!! I will be the Plinko champion and, with any luck, an expat to boot.

How about you? Are you an expat? How did you do it?

*Bonus points for knowing this reference!

** Seriously? You’ve never heard of Plinko? It’s the game on The Price Is Right where a chip is released at the top of a peg board and Plinko’s its way down to a final resting place…hopefully the $50,000 resting place.