Return
to the USA?
24 March 2000
On a travel bulletin board that I frequent, there was a person who has been living in Thailand for 4 years now and was debating on going back to the USA, joining a company, and getting a pension, or staying in a country he loves and continuing to teach English. Here is the response I posted:
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I am an Expat-American and agree with most of what has been written on here. I live in Eastern Europe. I haven't been to Asia yet, but it is on my long list of places to visit.
I spent 1998 traveling ALL of Europe. I fell in love with Eastern Europe and it's people. When I returned to the USA (due to lack of money), I easily found a job and tried to settle back into "regular" life. However, I realized that many of the people in the USA were a lot different than the person that I had become (as a quick note, I was born in the USA and, before I left for Europe in 1998, I had lived there for the first 31 years of my life). I found them to be too concerned about the materialistic things in life (houses, cars, etc). I also found that they were too concerned about themselves to bother with helping the less fortunate. Don't get me wrong, there were still good people out there, but it was different now. I admit, before leaving, I was probably just like them. They hadn't changed, I had. I also found the level of violence to be deplorable. I was living in Philadelphia (which is a great place), and, as with many large US cities, murders and/or shootings occurred nightly. Before I left the USA, hearing about things like that didn't bother me (probably because I was use to hearing about it) as much as they did when I returned. Being away from the violence of in that country made me realize just how bad it was.
Even before I arrived back in the USA, I knew that I didn't want to stay. I spent eleven months there, mainly working to save enough money to leave again. I guess the main reason that I wasn't totally miserable was because I knew that I would be leaving (I just didn't know when or where I'd be going). In October 1999, I found a class to obtain credentials to teach English abroad, landed a teaching job and left within a month. As I write this, I am sitting in my flat in a small northeastern Poland town, just having finished correcting tests. Am I happy? VERY! I love my job and my new life. I also love the people of this great country.
As of now, I have no plans to return to the USA to live. That might change some day, and I might return, or, I might just spend the rest of my life living abroad and visit that country. The USA is a great place, but, I am not able to find there what I need in life, as a person, to be complete. I realize that that is something inside of me that I need to work on, but, until I figure that out, I choose to live abroad. At this point in my life, returning is not even a consideration for me.
Cheers
