A round-up of our favourite blog posts over the past couple of months: Dog-sitting in Switzerland; being an outsider in Spain; studying abroad is no holiday; seasoned travellers experience culture shock too.
When our social media feeds are flooded with images of laptops poolside and work meetings in tropical locales, it’s easy to lust after the notion of becoming a digital nomad. Unfortunately, the reality is that it can often be a lonely endeavour. Without the structure of a workplace, it can be difficult to make friends, integrate with the local community, or even establish a sense of self or place.
Freelance writer Lucy Ferguson found an unusual answer to this problem, when she began looking after a dog named Kira during the work-week. “I haven’t had the easiest time integrating in Switzerland,” writes Lucy in her blog post. “I’ve found some wonderful, welcoming people via the hobbies I’ve taken up, but there are many situations in which I still feel like an outsider. But when people smile at Kira, and then at me, that’s not the case.”
That's not the only challenge of working abroad. Even if you've fully adopted a new country as your home, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's accepted you. Although she’s lived in Spain on-and-off for years and speaks Spanish proficiently, Andrea Palmer still struggles with being dismissed as a guiri (a slur used for foreigners in Spain).
“Being a non-Spaniard doesn’t exempt me from good sense or taste. Just because I don’t speak with a perfect accent doesn’t mean I haven’t put in the time or effort. Enjoying the security and comfort of people who speak my language while I’m living in a very different culture doesn’t suggest I have no interest in getting to know the locals,” she writes in her latest blog post on the topic.
Working abroad isn’t the only travel experience abroad that can be overly romanticized, as Juliann Li discovered studying abroad in France. “The experience you are signing up for is not an extended trip for which you will receive academic credit, but rather an academic term that will include with it stress, anxiety, and more day-to-day work than you might have experienced even at home,” she writes in her post on study abroad’s biggest secret.
Travel it seems, will always have the ability to surprise even the most experienced of travellers. Just ask Katrina Keegan. She thought she'd bypassed culture shock on her latest year in Russia—but she was in for a surprise when she realized that it had been with her along.
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