The Expat

“Where is the best place to live?”

People love to think there is a better life somewhere out there. They expect me to say: This Tropical Island or that City is THE best place to be. But honestly, I have to say: Nowhere. You always end up with yourself.

Sure, nobody wants to hear this. Thus, before I get frowns as a lousy conversationalist, I offer more entertaining versions: Open French restaurants on Madeira; add Balinese massages and Brazilian beaches and that would be a pretty good place. Bring German law & order to Madagascar, and let the Burmese do the cooking, that’d be good. Teach the Thais to speak some English and be less racist, then clean up the streets and it won’t be bad.

But really, any place is just as good as you yourself. People find happiness in the most unlikely places and circumstances. Life as a Buddhist monk is outwardly worse a punishment than prison but people do it voluntary.

Happiness is never over there, or then, and definitely not on the next island.

However, some Expat-myths need busting:

1. Living abroad is cheaper. Yes, but only if you can eat Ugali-Ugali (don’t ask) three times a day every day, just as the poor Kenyans do. If you want cornflakes and milk you will discover that they are more expensive than at home. Yes, you can build a house for 20k in Sri Lanka but it won’t keep animals out of your bed.

2. Life on tropical islands is easy going. Not a drop. Earning a local salary is nightmarish beyond a union member’s imagination. Doing business is inviting trouble with crooks and greedy officials. A visit to a Sri Lankan prison will deter you from doing business under the tax radar, let alone illegal stuff. It is hard to earn a foreign currency. If in the west 50% of all businesses go bust in the first year, it is 90% that go down in paradise. In each case naïve Westerners put their retirement funds on the line and lose it all, often including their health. The odds are so against you. The locals are helpful in the investment phase. After that, you will learn that money rules Rio more than New York. A common joke in Brazil: “How to leave paradise with a million dollars? Come with 5.”

3. The men/women are so whatever. Yes, but only if you have left your brain at immigration. Abound are the stories of guys/girls marrying local girls/guys and go on to build the biggest house in her/his village. Up-on completion he/she discovers that he/she actually is already married to the “house-keeper” and that the land deed is in his/her name. The whole village knew, and laughed. The local judge is his/her father-in-law, so you get kicked out of their own house, bye-bye, big time.

4. You can always go back. Yes, you can, but it is hard to move from Bali to Liverpool. A rule of thump amongst Expats says: ‘10 years or never”. You just don’t fit in anymore after 10 years and will feel an alien at home. Then, better be a true alien and never come back.

5. The East is more spiritual. Not anymore. The East has long succumbed to excessive materialism while California beams with meditation centers and yoga classes. In the hills of Thailand and Laos there are great meditation retreats but they are run by western monks.  The West has infected the East with efficiency and wealth (nothing bad there btw) but has taken the flame of impermanence to shine even brighter in the West. It is an ironic wink of the universe: In the end the truth always survives.

6. The locals are good people. No more or less than anywhere else, but be wary: Poverty is bad for morals. A common illusion is to praise the virtues of a people (“the friendly Thais”) but to take for granted that they can add 5 and 5 without a calculator, but they can’t. Chances are it comes out 11; and that is not funny after a few years, especially if you always end up paying more if you don’t double-check. Lying and cheating is an honorable qualification in many countries. There are few human rights for a foreigner but the right to pay the bill.

Now, obviously, I don’t fancy couch-potatoes, but if you go abroad be realistic and be smart:
- Don’t buy when you can rent
- Don’t commit when you can test
- Don’t marry a stranger
- Don’t start a business you don’t understand
- Don’t assume the law will protect you
- Don’t drive motorcycles
- Take your time. One year is nothing.
- Do observe yourself: Are you only going local, or are you going crazy?

Above all don’t hope to escape bad days, nasty people, arthritis or your private demons.

Have a safe trip.

Out of the plane I can hear “Geee-cko-Geee-cko” coming from the main building. This is Rangoon International Airport. It is quite and darkish.

French raiders in the hotel bar discuss the ‘great opportunities’ of Burmese antiques under the ‘current circumstances’.

My local contact secretly squirrels away gems for an escape abroad. He looks at the stacks of local bills and says: ‘This no good’.

Our lapidary keeps the doors open. No security is needed. Burma is safe, as long as you don’t mess with the generals.

First time visitors shed tears at the Shwedagon Paya.

A sign at the muddy river: ‘No foreigners beyond this point’. There is no brigde.

Hollywood-stile villas and new SUVs proof that economic sanctions don’t work for the upper 1000.

My taxi has wooden seats and a plastic bucket taped to the floor. It is half full with red slime. Many Burmese still chew betel-nuts, but they are not allowed to spit on the streets anymore.

Strings hang from upper apartments replacing electric bells.

Grand colonial buildings are occupied by the military. Specky shirts hang to dry from broken windows. Nobody is allowed on the sidewalk. They are serious: I get yelled at.

A local garage makes ‘new’ cars; by hand; one by one; out of scrap metal and an engine. They produce three per month at $1.5k

Drunken monks fight over cigarettes. Religion can be anything.

Burmese food is delicious, not just numbing hot or sweet, but individually cooked, untouched by industrial standards.

Nobody dances at a pop festival. VIP kids sit behind security and fences.

No ATMs, no mobile phones and no computers proof that economic sanctions do work for the lower 35.000.000.

A grainy TV show features stone-faced farmers dancing in shabby costumes. A subtitle reads: ‘Here they still live happily without foreigners’. So very thin they are.

For good and bad, Burma is past caged in a country and its people.

Terminal I in Bangkok

I used to despise overregulated western bureaucracies, Nile-long incomprehensive official papers, and I cursed when I needed a notarized birth certificate to get married.

Well, I thought it over! Our airport is shut down by mob, people drive unlit bikes in the dark on the wrong side of the road, the dead cow in the canal competes with the stench from the uncollected garbage, my neighbor runs a brothel, and I would appreciate a bit of the rule of law.

Make no mistake: overflowing sewers, poisoned rivers and spoiled food were once standard fair in London too. The city stank and killed. People were worth only the money they had. Peasants, untouchables, children and animals, all were slaves to others and their little food.

We have come a long way from marauding nomads. Many still have a long way to go, be it on a personal level or as a people. Even if the devil’s advocate claims the last century to have been “truly his” - that is not correct. Genocide is a new word but an old habit. We only started to see evil for what it is.

Bad stuff happens all the time but we are working on it. So, when you fill out the next form, remind yourself, that it is the price you have to pay to live in a better world.

Help the people who really got in trouble, pay workers, scrap or reduce VAT for December, pay health services, cut farm subsidies, allow more qualified immigration, invest in small companies, anything, but do not let the fat cats sleep one minute longer. Wake them up. It is market judgment day.

The Citibank sold my grandma a real estate fund as safe investment for her age. Now they froze the fund and ask her for new money.

Simple truth is they didn’t do their job. Out of greed and/or stupidity they ignored a basic universal law: Risk and profit are partners.

Let them suffer!

1. They have to work very hard to earn money.

2. Then they have to endure ignorant (cheap) or arrogant (expensive) sales people to drag stuff home and decipher maddening manuals.

3. Finally they get a headache from all the broken or unfashionable belongings in their garage and backyard.

That makes live hard work only: A garage full of old handbags, shoes, toasters and TVs, cupboards, tools and toys, tea sets, pans and pots, jackets and pants.

Mark that no good gem or jewelry will ever end there!

Don’t buy all that stuff.

It is only trouble.

These little fellows are such a handful that even a parent with no other responsibility sinks whining into the sofa every night; until the baby phone goes off.

To take care of a household, run errands, let alone earn money at the same time seems a Herculean task beyond human strength.

And yet, they do it every day.

Respect and awe.

OK, very good, and now:

Let’s get back to work!

A long while ago I was terribly sick with a slipped disk or lumbago or very bad back-pain. I suffered for months, got myself hooked on painkillers in booze, and then I lost my job and my friends too. Cause & Effect merged. Things can get so bad; you don’t know where to start repairing your life.

After some inner and outer travel I came to suffer in Bali. A friend recommended a famous local healer. OK, whatever, I’ll try it.

I don’t know about famous but the healer certainly was local, very local. At noon he was in underwear, fresh out of bed. His reception teamed with chicken and the office was an open-air carpet.

Children cried “Foreigner! Foreigner!” and gathered to watch. I was suffering my usual bad day, so I sat down in the mess and surrendered.

The old man studied and squeezed me, and poked my ears and eyes, all the while mumbling stuff in Balinese. He might have called the healing ghosts or just cursed the interruption of his nap I didn’t know, but the birds, children and chickens were dead silent. That made me kind of anxious.

To escape from anything spiritual and because it is common in western medicine, I started complaining about my body, how bad I felt and so on, but he cut me short: “Shush!”

As suddenly as he had begun voodoing he stopped, got up and plucked some leaves from a bush and started to chew them. I thought he was finished, but, oh boy, he just got started.

For appetizers he added some white powder to the chewed leaves, munched them a bit more and then spat the whole slimy mud into my face and on my chest.

The stuff burned on the skin, but I was kept busy with a much stronger sensation: Do you know the point on your elbow that gives you these electricity-like pangs? It turns out you got these points all over the body and when you push them real hard with a stick or something you get electric pangs that last minutes. You squirm and howl. Tears make the chewed leaves in your face burn even more.

Each of these, say, energy points becomes the center of your little universe until the current slowly subsides and that point becomes just a normal point on your body. Gone, no more pain there, good, next point. You squirm and howl and so on.

An hour later he had worked himself from elbows to heels, left to right. I was soaked in sweat, tears and chewed leaves.

Finally he said: “Finished”.

That was the first thing he said to me. The birds, children and chicken started to chatter again. I felt finished too. I could hardly stand.

We did have a long talk thereafter, and he explained to me that in his view the nerve system stores pain in those energy points, and that he “opened” them to release my old pain, like cleaning a hard-drive of old files, old memory of pain. He said I was breathing too shallow and holding my breath too often. That my body was dried up (true, I had only beer and coffee for years), that I needed quietness and massages, air and above all water, water and more water.

Was I healed? No, but I sure felt I had a clean place to start repairing. Which I did.

P.S. When I went again years later he send me away: “No sick. You go home.” No charge.

She was a very paranoid creature. Her world was a terrifying, hostile place and she was always in trouble. She’d call me with news like “They found Glukomoxamil in lemons!” or “The north pole shrank 5%!” or “Barbaristan has attacked Autistan!”

Those days on the beach in Brazil, I ignored all news. I read no papers and had no TV. And you know what? The world was doing just fine as far as I could see. I knew of no problems for months. The sun shone, the waves crashed, people did what they always did and I simply didn’t know. The stuff they mentioned on CNN was not visible on that beach.

One day my friend called me and said: “They fly airplanes into the world trade center.”

I laughed: ”Ja, ja, sure” and hung up. Paranoid stuff.