Take a fresh look at your lifestyle.

4 Essential Things You Must Do for a Successful Move to Europe

Fountain on Vosges square (Place des Vosges), Paris, France
Mistervlad / Shutterstock.com

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared on Live and Invest Overseas.

My expat tale began very close to the start of my life. I was only 8 years old when we moved from Baltimore to Ireland. It’s not your typical expat story, and, when I share it, I feel I need to start at the beginning.

From Ireland, where I had been an involuntary expat, I moved to Paris by my own choice when I was 14, then went to university back in the States … where I felt like an expat all over again. After graduation, I moved to Panama for a job … before finally returning to Paris.

My goal had always been to move back to France as soon as I got the chance. It only took 11 years.

Thanks to all of those moves, I’ve been able to refine into four points the main things you’ve got to figure out before and during a move overseas. You can almost break it down like chapters.

These are, for me, the most significant things you’ll need to deal with when it comes to taking the plunge.

Let me elaborate.

1. Consider What to Take and What to Leave

Couple using a laptop computer while sitting on the sofa with their dog
PeopleImages.com – Yuri A / Shutterstock.com

We talk regularly in these dispatches about what to take with you and what to leave behind when making a move overseas, but I feel we don’t give the whole shebang its due.

It’s a big deal to say goodbye to big chunks of your life — a house where you may have lived (and raised a family) for decades … your book collection … your car … the dishes that you love … the perfectly comfy armchair that took years to find.

These things become a part of us. Yes, it’s materialistic, and we’d all be better off if we could shed all our earthly possessions. But, let’s get real … most of us like our stuff.

It’s an emotional process to sort through a lifetime and make fatal judgments that sentence your beloved treasures to an untimely death. It’s hard and exhausting. I’ve had struggles with downsizing during every move I’ve made.

All that said, I wholeheartedly recommend getting rid of as much as possible. I’ve seen too many people spend money on shipping things that ended up making no sense for one reason or another — including my own family and myself — in the new destination.

Think About Your New Home

Senior taping a box to get rid of
Andrii Zastrozhnov / Shutterstock.com

One of the biggest reasons your things won’t work in your new home is size. This is especially true in Europe. You own things that fit the proportions of your current home — likely far, far bigger than any home you might own in Europe.

They’ll just look crammed in if you try to bring them over. You need to think through every item. Your kitchen cabinets will be smaller, so you might not want to bring your giant turkey platter with you, for example.

Plus, keep style in mind. If you’re living in Florida with a palm tree-themed rattan living room set, it’ll feel out of style anywhere but the tropics.

What should you keep for sure? Anything of sentimental value. And be honest with yourself, because if you get rid of some trinket that you thought you could live without but realize you miss, it’s a regret you won’t be able to shake.

Also keep books or any other language-specific items. Those cost an arm and a leg in foreign countries. Likewise, laptops and anything that uses a typing keyboard — those are language-specific. A Spanish, French, or Italian keyboard is practically useless to an English-speaker.

And, when you’re in the middle of a downsizing session and having trouble being ruthless, remember that anything you don’t take with you, you get to buy anew. Shopping in your new home is not just fun, it’s a great way to get to know the area.

You’ll have to shop around, ask folks where to find things, figure out the lay of the land … and you’re guaranteed that whatever is for sale won’t clash with whatever kind of decor theme your new home needs.

2. Adjust to the Environment

Woman riding her bike by the beach at Bocas del Toro.
Nacho Such / Shutterstock.com

This is a funny one, because some of these aspects can be harder to acclimate to than cultural ones … yet we lump it all in under “culture shock.”

In Ireland, my mother and I realized a couple years in that we were succumbing to seasonal depression. At the height of winter, we might only see the sun for a few hours a day … if it managed to peek out from behind the clouds.

In Panama, I could never get used to a mono-season — I so missed a change in temperature. Now back in Paris, I’m struggling to get used to the hours of daylight — too few in winter and too many in summer.

Similarly, forming new habits to adapt to your new environment can be tough. If you’re used to driving but give up your car in a move, you suddenly need to get used to walking, biking, or reading bus and metro maps. If you’re used to a pretty predictable diet, the local gastronomy might be an upset.

And moving to a hilly city, a sandy beach, or a mountaintop where the air is thin will be an adjustment if you’re not already used to that kind of terrain.

My advice here is to be aware of yourself. You need to recognize that your mood is dipping in the winter or that your schedule is all out of whack because you’re no longer able to wake up with the sunrise. You need to be able to identify the issue and then figure out a fix.

Take a weekend trip to see some sun. Change your schedule to wake up earlier or later and be flexible enough to do so.

3. Adjust to the Culture

Tables of traditional outdoor French cafe in Paris
Ekaterina Pokrovsky / Shutterstock.com

This is getting used to the people and the way they live. How friendly do they seem? Is small talk done or not?

Meal times are likely to be quite different. The French have set meal times: lunch at 1 p.m., a snack at 4 or 5 p.m., dinner no earlier than 8 p.m. It’s hard to find food between 2:30 and 5 in France, so you have to make sure you don’t miss lunch. Spaniards might not sit down for dinner until 10 p.m.

Business hours can be erratic, too. In Europe, the lunch hour is still worthy of closing for. Many regions all over the world still practice siesta hours, working until lunch and then closing until early evening. In Europe, no work is done on Sunday; banks might open for a half day on Saturday if you’re lucky.

And the rest of the world does holidays differently, too.

Most of Europe shuts down for the month of August, and everyone vacations. In France, school holidays are six weeks on followed by one or two weeks off, so many families travel every six weeks. The rest of the world not only uses all their vacation days, it would never occur to them to work through a holiday.

Learn to Be Flexible

Senior couple in cafe
Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock.com

You’re likely going to be living in a new language in your new home.

And another of the big culture shocks that you’ll have just about everywhere in the world? The customer is not king. Customer service is at its best in the States and can be non-existent in other countries. This is, of course, a gross generalization, but you take my point.

When it comes to adapting to culture, just be flexible and lighten up. It’s advice I wish I could better take. Get out of your head, don’t take yourself, others, or interactions so seriously. Just take it all as it comes. And laugh at yourself.

Which brings me through to the final point — the goal of all this.

4. Appreciate the New

Plaza de Las Flores square in Murcia, Spain
saiko3p / Shutterstock.com

Everything you went through was to get to the good part. Honestly, it will likely take more than a year for you to really, truly, fully appreciate your new life.

Thinking it through, I’d say in the first 12 months living in a new place, you go through all the stages of a rollercoaster relationship. You arrive in the honeymoon phase, and everything has a shiny gleam to it. Everything is novel and fun and reality hasn’t quite sunk in.

That can last anywhere from, say, a week to three months, depending on how much you try to accomplish right off that bat. Then, from months three to nine, give or take, you might really question this whole thing.

In my metaphor, these are the divorce discussions. You wonder how you could have ever been so crazy as to move here. Why had you ever thought this charming? You start to doubt it all. You might even start to look into moving back. Or at least think about it.

But if you stick it out a few months longer, you both pull through, and you realize one day, in a flash of a moment while doing the most mundane of things, that you are blissfully happy.

You look up at the architecture … or you walk along your favorite stretch of riverbank … or whatever it is that reminds you like a lightning bolt why you fell in love in the first place. And you can’t help but smile.

These are the golden years. Once you make it past the panic and doubt, once you finally feel settled in your new home, you can finally enjoy the final phase of any good relationship: a comfortable, peaceful, deeply felt satisfaction.

Expat Lessons From Moving Overseas: The Challenges You’ll Face

senior couple traveling in with a map
PintoArt / Shutterstock.com

I waited over a decade to return to the city I love most in the world. I had moved a half a dozen times, and I had gone through all these stages in each place. I felt prepared and knew just what to expect (cue hubris). I never thought I would feel that what-have-I-done panic about moving back to Paris … but I did.

I should have known you can never escape that would-be regret. I now consider it inevitable.

I had only been here five months before I found myself pregnant. I intended to have our lives more set up before we threw a spanner in the works. And my pregnancy wasn’t great.

So I was a new arrival, had barely settled into an apartment a few weeks before morning sickness set in, without family or friends, trying to relearn the language that I was so rusty in and reacclimate to the culture that was now foreign again. It wasn’t a great time. And for the first time since I was probably 10 years old, I wished desperately to move back to the States.

Of course, that wouldn’t have helped me; I would have had to reacclimate in all the same ways there. But I panicked. And it’s only been the last few months that I feel I’ve come through to my final, fourth point: absolute appreciation.

I’ve had several moments where I grinned like a fool on the street realizing all I had. I am so excited that this is my real, everyday, normal life. It’s like a dream. And whenever I have a moment of doubt or frustration, I just think back to those moments.

Bonus Expat Tip

Couple in Europe
kudla / Shutterstock.com

One bonus piece of advice: Never stop being a tourist, but don’t act like one.

Do all the tours, go to all the sights, eat all the stereotyped food, and enjoy your new home like every day is a vacation.

But go further. Don’t stop at the café right next to the famous site. Go down the alley and find the hole in the wall. Talk to the waiter in the local language. Try something just because you’d never heard of it before.

Always keep the wonder of your new home alive, but always dig deeper.

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More