My great-grandparents were Italian expats. They moved to the US nearly one hundred years before the Internet.
Expats without Internet! Can you imagine?! I don’t know how the hell they did it.
I, on the other hand, have come to rely on the Internet to solve nearly all of my expat-related woes. And I’m not just talking about e-mail. It goes *way* beyond that. Let me give you a few examples:
– REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE. The biggest misery for any expat is, most likely, missing his friends and family back home. That’s assuming, of course, that those same friends and family weren’t the reason that he fled the country in the first place. So how is one to keep in touch with his loved ones? Email, Instant Messaging and voice-over-IP calls (using services like Skype) are good options. But I recently discovered something even better. Something woooonderful! I discovered…video chat! Using software from services like Sightspeed (in my case), MSN Messenger or iChat, you can see and talk to friends and family—realtime!—through your computer screen. And it’s free! All you need is a high-speed Internet connection and a webcam. And a computer, of course. I’ve been video chatting with the US for months, and quite honestly…it’s almost like I never left home. I can join in a round of “Happy Birthday” during my nephews’ parties. I can trade barbeque tips with my brother. I can get lectured by my grandmother for being too thin. And it’s all “virtually” face-to-face. The burgeoning video chat world is, in my opinion, the greatest boon to expats since quinine pills.
– PLEASE! NO MORE BISBAL! Try as I might (and admittedly, I haven’t tried very hard), I’ve failed to acquire a taste for the syrupy Latino pop music that blankets the Iberian radio airwaves. For the longest time, I’ve wanted nothing more than to sit at my work desk and groove to some of my favorite radio stations from back home—or at the very least, a station uncorrupted by the likes of Bisbal, Chenoa or Bustamante. Then I began poking around the Internet and discovered the glorious world of Internet streaming radio! These are radio stations from around the world that broadcast directly through the Internet and out your computer speakers. There are thousands of them! Using a search engine like www.radio-locator.com/ or the “Radio” tab on your iTunes software, you can listen to blues from Chicago…or news from NPR and the BBC…or bossa nova from Paris. There’s even a station broadcasting from Antarctica—although I don’t imagine there are many Antarctican expats living in Spain.
– I’D KILL FOR A BUTTERMILK PANCAKE. I love the food in Spain. But I often find myself pining for foods back home. Carolina pulled pork! Or buffalo wings! Or a good ol’ American buttermilk pancake. Pining often turned into whining. But there’s no reason to whine. Why? Because if you’ve eaten it, then you can find the recipe on the Internet. Websites like www.epicurious.com have thousands of recipes just begging to be downloaded, printed and whipped-up on the Teka vitroceramica stovetop that you bought from El Corte Inglés. But…but…how can I make buttermilk pancakes if I can find buttermilk in Spain? Once again…the Internet comes to the rescue. Websites like http://chef2chef.net/kb/index/86-substitutions-other.htm will tell you how to make a reasonable facsimile of many ingredients that might be hard to find in your adopted country. Sorry, but they offer no suggestions for simulating vegemite.
– WHAT? ANOTHER BIRTHDAY?! During my first year in Spain, I spent more money shipping birthday, wedding and Christmas gifts to the US than I did buying the gifts in the first place. Then I wised-up, and started shopping “locally” via on-line stores like Amazon.[fill in the blank], www.llbean.com and countless others. This has saved me a lot of time and money—although I doubt that it will be much help to that guy from Antarctica.
– ALL I WANT IS A SOFT SHOULDER TO CRY ON. There are times when a distraught expat needs to comiserate with another who has walked in his moccassins. When this need arises, I find the expat blogger community to be an invaluable support network. Expat bloggers are tightly-knit group—but an open one. Joining is easy. All you need to do is find one good expat blog, and then check it’s sidebar. It’s likely to list links to dozens of other expat blogs. Then it’s just a matter of making the rounds each day and adding reasonably tasteful, intelligent comments to the various posts. You’ll quickly build a rapport with an expanding circle of virtual expat friends. And these folk—ranging from Canadians in Germany to Kiwis in Belgium to Italian/Turkish/Greeks in Canada—can be great sources of insight, advice and compassion.
But each expat must look within his heart and ask himself what’s more important? Knowing the correct use of the Spanish present subjunctive? Or knowing that one cup of warm milk mixed with one tablespoon of lemon juice will result in a passable substitute for buttermilk?
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