I’ve cracked it! I’ve cracked the code for international relocations. I have to admit, when I started to write this post, I was feeling a bit down in the dumps; the endless list of things we still need, and then subsequent deliveries and installations and returns and replacements (IKEA, I am looking at you) was wearing me down. But having taken some time to sit in the poolside cafe to analyse and write about my situation, I feel far more positive and motivated again.
An expat lifestyle looks great in photos, especially if you are in the tropics while your family endures a frosty winter back home. But it isn’t always all sunshine. Literally, I mean that while friends and family in the UK gear up for summer, we are heading into Mumbai’s monsoon season, which will last between 4-6 months depending on who you ask. We had a brief taste of it last Saturday, when a 5 minute dump of rain sent most people running inside and brought out the familiar, steamy smell of poached flowers and damp palms. (And the odd mosquito).
More figuratively, I mean that uprooting your life (and subsequently trying to plant it somewhere new) can be quite the emotional rollercoaster. To help me ride the ups and downs, I have decoded what it is to relocate successfully and happily. In its purest form, successful relocation can be boiled down to three key elements:
Friends, Finances and Facilities. That’s it. Three Fs as the foundations of a happy life abroad. I think that if two out of the three are in place, it’ll be a good experience. If all three are there, I’ll never want to leave. They are listed in order of priority, as far as making the most of a place is concerned, but in reverse order as far as how easy they are to come by.
Friends. It makes me so nostalgic for previous expat placements to think about friends. In Taiwan, Beijing, New York and Yangon I made amazing friendships with so many wonderful individuals with whom I am still regularly in touch. Even a three-month study exchange in Germany 16 years ago left me with a lifelong friend and confidante (although these days I mostly just bombard her with inane motherhood questions and Z-list celebrity gossip on WhatsApp). Friends that I’ve made abroad have been integral to my experience of a place; together we’ve explored the sights, sounds, smells, tastes of our surroundings, and I tell you, there’s no bonding experience like the shared solidarity of settling your digestive system into a new culture. I think there is something about living in a place where you look totally out of place that paves the way for fast friendships. Fair hair and blue eyes will always invite questions in Asia, from local people and foreigners alike, and, as long as you are receptive, can quickly break down some barriers. I suppose the most significant ‘friendship’ I’ve made abroad is with my husband, worthy of an honourable mention, at the very least!
While not the main trigger, a lack of friends was a factor in our decision to leave Yangon when we did. COVID had wiped out around half of the expat community in Myanmar, and the coup led to a further exodus. On top of the lack of a medical system for Jasper and the issues with cash (more on that under ‘Finances’), we were constantly reminded of the life we’d had during the pre-pandemic, pre-coup times, or as I now see it, the Friendship Boom. The Friendship Boom was when Yangon was at its most appealing to expats; when we could rally a 30-strong expat hockey squad to take on the Myanmar navy team, could serve cocktails to 50 people we actually knew at our in-home bar, and could walk down the aisle of a domestic plane greeting people left and right like it was a school bus.
Friends (and/or family) are so important to my enjoyment of a place, but making new ones is hard. And by hard I mean stressful. And a little tiring, if I’m being honest. And that was before I was a mother. I am beginning to see how and why, with motherhood, come friendship circles that convene around the common interest of ‘being at the constant and immediate beck and call of one or more small person/s’. When time is limited, it makes sense to socialise where your little person needs to be anyway. That said, it’s hard enough trying to present your very best self to a potential friend without a nagging limpet suctioned onto your leg. When both of you are partially engaged in not letting your child do something irreparably damaging, it’s almost impossible to maintain a conversation. It’s taken me 4 weeks just to ascertain some peoples names and identify their offspring, let alone to exchange numbers. Here in Mumbai, an added challenge is the number of didis (nannies) thrown into the equation. There is a lovely mother-of-two with whom we have been carpooling (as we don’t yet have a car, we are actually more like sponging) for the summer school run, but while some days we are able to chat for the 10 minute drive, on other days it can be any combination of me, her, Jasper’s nanny, her son and his nanny, her daughter and her nanny and the driver. A car load of Jasper, his Didi (nanny) and someone else’s driver isn’t helping my friendship cause.
Still, I must persevere. And I must find a way to participate in conversations rather than just staring, wide-eyed at some of the revelations. In my experience, much of the camaraderie that exists between parents is built on collectively discovering the horror (and joy) of what you’ve signed up for in having a baby, but between full-time, live-in nurses for newborns, multigenerational households, arranged marriages and 24/7 didis, I am struggling to find common ground. I am nervous to invite anyone round to our house, not only because I wouldn’t know what to offer them by way of vegetarian/ hypoallergenic snacks (one mother hasn’t yet introduced egg to her 18-month-old, which makes me nervous about what else they haven’t been exposed to), but more because it seems Jasper’s nap schedule is all out of whack with the night-owls they breed here. I also don’t know if an early evening aperitif would be an appropriate invite, or if they are all tee-total, and I don’t want to ruin Jasper’s prospects by getting a reputation as Jasper’s mother, the wino. So you see, it’s a minefield. But one I must navigate. And soon. I have all but hired myself out of a job with a new helper and driver starting next week. Without the excuse of social engagements, I will just be hanging around like a bad smell while the household gets on and runs itself.
And so to the second element: Finances. By this, I don’t mean earning lots of money, although that would be nice too. I mean smooth access to the money you have or are earning. If you are on holiday and you need to withdraw money, you baulk at the extra fees but you pay them, because, hey, you’re on holiday. But if this is the case every time you go to an ATM, it becomes a chore. Similarly, constantly having to swallow exchange rates and global transfer fees can leave a nasty taste in your mouth. Joining the local financial ecosystem is a game-changer as far as feeling settled is concerned. But in today’s world of digital banking and mobile wallets, it’s not as easy as just opening a bank account (which in itself isn’t always easy if you don’t have the right KYC information or connections). There are so many ways to pay, which is great. But there are also so many ways to pay, which means about 10 new apps in your phone, 10 new passwords, and 10 new interfaces to navigate.
Besides the fact that if I am not kept busy earning money all I seem to do is spend it, the main issue I currently have with my finances is that I am entirely dependent on Dylan. I am using his card for everything, which means that according to India’s very secure banking policies, every OTP (for every single online transaction) goes to him. It certainly curbs your independence when every item you buy has to be essentially approved by someone else on its way through the check out. Not to mention the guilt I feel at interrupting Dylan in an important meeting because I am trying to order a new set of clothes hangers. The idea was to take some of the load away from Dylan so he can focus on earning enough money to support my spending habits, not that I would add to his stress by alerting him to every rupee leaving his account! I am working on getting my own bank account and various payment apps, but it has been slow progress on account of the fact the bank accidentally registered Dylan’s phone number to my account, leaving us stuck in an eternal loop of timed-out OTPs and frustration.
Access to money, or rather, the lack of it, was a trigger for us leaving Myanmar. Following the coup in February 2021, the ATMs ran dry as people well-versed in handling a military dictatorship hoarded cash. That the military repeatedly turned off the entire internet to the country, thereby disabling any digital payments or ATM function only compounded the problem. And heightened my uneasiness. When I look back, it was the uncertainty around access to money that earned me the most grey hairs (and that’s on top of having a 2 month old baby in a country where the medical system has collapsed, intermittently being disconnected from the outside world and random explosions in the streets). I was working for a bank, so I knew how strained the cash reserves were, and was fortunate enough to have access to sufficient USD or Myanmar Kyat to tide us over until we left. But we also had people working for us, for whom salary payments were increasingly difficult to access in cash as they were used to. We paid them digitally using KBZPay, a mobile wallet, and increased their salaries by 8% to cover the rising fees for withdrawing cash from cowboy agents and opportunists. But every month I would see their distress over being unable to hold the cash they’d earned, or unable to send it back home to family members in whose villages there was no digital payment infrastructure. Not being able to pay for the things you need is stressful anyway, but somehow it was worse when we knew we had the funds, we just had no way to access them.
In the not-too-distant future I will need to get a job. But before I do, I want to be set up with access to the necessary funds to fuel my ever-growing list of creative pursuits. It’s hard, in a country like India where you are surrounded by stunning fabrics, beautiful crafts and, let’s be honest, affordable labour, not to fancy yourself as a fashion designer, interior decorator, jewellery designer or ahem, travel blogger. I love being able to use local fabrics to make western clothes. It may surprise you to know that I was the proud owner of not one but two Myanmar-fabric dirndls in Yangon, made purely for Oktoberfest parties by a local tailor with a very niche skill. Now that I can leave Jasper safely and happily in the care of his didi, I want to take advantage of the opportunity to flex some creative muscle here and bolster all our wardrobes with some matchy-matchy fusion pieces. I just need the liquidity.
Many of the things I need money for, fit into the third and final of my three FFFs: Facilities. By this I really mean Home Comforts. And not just the home comforts that we were maniacally ordering from The British Corner Shop while stuck in Myanmar through the pandemic. Facilities covers anything and everything I need to function as the human being I want to be; it includes appliances, furniture, groceries, transport, sports facilities, technology, subscription services, personal care items and the odd treat. The reason I say it’s probably the easiest to establish in a move is because in reality, I don’t need that much to be able to function, and what I do need is usually quite easy to find quickly. Sometimes for a price, however. We are the humble owners of an unnecessarily premium toaster and kettle set from Smeg, for example, because without traipsing all over the city, we couldn’t find a middle ground between shoddy and $300.
Granted, we have had some big sporting facility wins, such as the swimming pool, tennis courts and children’s play areas, that allow me to gloss over some of the more minor grocery shortcomings. Such as frozen peas. Allow me to vent briefly on how low the bar is set for a pea to make it into a freezer pack here. This wouldn’t be an issue for most of us, as you’d barely notice a funky pea nestled on your spoon. But Jasper consumes his frozen veggies pea by pea, kernel by kernel. And he thrusts the brown, wisened ones at me with disgust and disappointment should they make it onto his plate. Last night, having finished preparing his dinner with time to spare before he returned from playing downstairs with his friends and didi, I chose to sort through the peas and sweetcorn to remove any potential offenders. If ever there was a cry for help, that was it. Help. Please send friends before I go back to sorting peas.
There are some bigger items that still require my attention. And my time. Although just how much of my time, I find very hard to define. Everywhere I have lived runs on different time. I don’t just mean time zone, I mean concept of time. In Myanmar, for example, anything after 3pm is the evening, while in the UK, that would still be the afternoon. Here, time is broken into periods of ‘before’ and ‘after’ a fixed time. Especially for home deliveries or services. A carpenter, for example, will come to hang paintings ‘after’ 3pm. An IKEA delivery will happen ‘before’ 9pm. An electrician appeared ‘after’ 12.30 at 4pm. But when I applied this principle of ‘really quite a long time after’ to the carpenter, I was still out at another appointment (a fixed appointment) when he arrived at 3.10pm. Other vendors prefer to break the day into 2 halves - 1st half and 2nd half. But given that the working day doesn’t start until 10/10.30 in most places, I have no idea where the half-way point is. Most days I find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time at least once, without ever having known what time I was meant to be where. Yesterday was a belter; pasta delivery after 4pm (arrived at 8.15pm), cushion delivery after 5pm (arrived at 7pm), carpenter was due to confirm after 10.30am if he could come after 3pm but never did and showed up anyway at 3.10pm, laundry was due after 6pm and narrowly missed the pasta arriving at 8.10pm. IKEA arrived before 9pm at 8.30pm to pick up a damaged item, telling me that the replacement was coming ‘today also’. It is still MIA. By the time all the comings and goings had come and gone, I was spinning. It’s a wonder Jasper got to bed before 9pm.
So there you have it, the fundamentals of relocating, in three easy Fs. I would say at this point, 6 weeks in, I am pretty happy with how the Facilities are coming along, am increasingly frustrated with our Finances and have a long way to go with Friends. That puts us at about a 0.75 out of 3, which explains why I was feeling a little out of sorts earlier this week. I am sure I will look back on this in a few months time and wonder what I was ever worried about, but if you need me before then, I’ll likely be in the kitchen working as Jasper’s private chef. Until we hire a cook, that is.
Photo: FabIndia giving a small taste of the potential for amazing, brightly coloured clothes in this country.
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