10 Annoying Things About Living Abroad: An Indian Perspective

Packing bags, jumping on a plane and going to live in a completely different country is unquestionably exciting. The adrenalin rush you derive in exploring a completely different place, finding new connections and surviving in complete freedom away from your safety nets is unparalleled. But then when you are done with moving into and decorating your new apartment, getting various residency permits and utility connections and meeting all the new colleagues at work, slowly but surely, the adrenalin settles down. For some it may  take a few weeks while few months for some and along with starting to like several aspects of your adopted country, several other things start to annoy you. Having relocated twice within a year, first to Tokyo and then to Hong Kong,  I would say that sometimes the ‘living abroad’ experience is as annoying as exciting. Looking at several ‘living abroad’ articles on the web mainly from westerners traveling to the ‘exotic’ east, I decided to add an Indian perspective to the list.

1. Struggling to explain what is vegetarian and find vegetarian food is probably the biggest challenge faced by vegetarians. When you get tired of eating salads/sandwiches or pasta/pizza and decide to get a bit more adventurous, most restaurants will throw up some boiled vegetables, some green grass like stuff and rice; and you are supposed to like it – aren’t you a vegetarian? Yes, I am vegetarian, but I am not a goat to eat all that grass!

2. Cleaning your apartment, washing your dishes and doing your laundry all by yourself can be a daunting task for us Indian prince and princesses used to domestic help and mom doing all the home-management. Domestic help can be pretty expensive abroad in the developed parts of the world. You keep procrastinating the cleaning but then when your home resembles nothing more than a pile of rotten garbage, you have no choice but to face the I-spent-the-whole-day-cleaning-my-apartment-Sunday.

3. Realizing you no longer glorify being alone as solitude, you feel plain lonely as making those weekend plans never seemed more difficult. Everyone around you seems to be busy in something, while your mobile phone which used to annoyingly ring every now and then back home, now rings so rarely that you sometimes forget your own ringtone. It takes an awful lot of effort in rebuilding your social network just so that you don’t have to stay in your tiny apartment on weekends.

4. Festivals like Diwali and Holi never seemed so miserable because the only constant reminder of the upcoming festival are some automated emails in your inbox selling you insurance and wishing you Happy-Diwali-by-the-way. You never miss family and friends more than in these festivals as you enviously read all those facebook statuses and stare at all those pictures wishing you were in them.

5. Waiting for the traffic light to cross the road or standing in a slow-moving queue in MacD will surely make you miss all the chaos back home and the amazing efficiency with which such a chaotic system works. But now you need to wait for the traffic light for road-crossing even if there is no car for miles. Equally annoying is waiting in a long queue for a packet of french fries as a customer makes up his mind whether to have double cheese burger or BLT burger. In India you could’ve just given your quick order jumping the queue while the other person made his mind up.

6.  Your long distance relationship in India dies while friends start to fade you out as you no longer seem to be in their daily life. You try hard but even you fail to find time to touch base with all your dear ones back home out of worrying about your own woes abroad. You start feeling that all your relationships back home are on the verge of either deterioration or going into oblivion. Even your deep friendships may turn into an occasional touch base through whatsapp or facebook.

7. You feel its high time to hit the gym and cut down on your diet when your self esteem takes a hit seeing fit and healthy people around you making you wonder why you never thought of it before. The prosperous in India are usually obese and don’t really make a big deal about a few extra kilos. But when you don’t get the reaction you expected from the girl you just asked out on a date, you know it’s time to work out. Already being Indian male doesn’t help in a world where white is considered more attractive and in addition with all the rapes in India in the media, the only way to protect your esteem appears through the gym!

8. People just don’t seem to get your Indian accent even if their English capabilities are native and especially if they are not quite good at English. When you are forced to repeat more than twice or get false nods and smiles when you crack a joke, you realize how serious language issues actually are. As even English speakers refuse to understand you, you find yourself giving up hope in your struggle to learn the local language.

9. Falling sick is probably the worst thing that can happen to you when you are alone abroad. Assuming you were sensible enough to have your insurance and figure out before hand which clinics accept your insurance, when you go to a clinic you end up filling forms asking several annoying details of your condition which makes you wonder that if you give all the information then what is the doctor supposed to do! You miss your Indian family doctor who used to know whats bothering you by sometimes just looking at you and feeling your pulse.

10. Culture shock is suddenly not what you just read in books, it is your reality. Not only do you need to adjust to above the surface differences like language, customs and behavior but also will face a fundamental conflict in beliefs, values and prejudices. Indian culture being quite complex and unique, the conflict is even more aggravated giving you a feeling of being isolated from the world around you. Culture shock cannot be explained, it can only be experienced. Seemingly fascinating at first glance, it builds a slow frustration that can totally mar your happiness in your adopted country.