Every single article about moving abroad says the same thing.
Build your network. Join the expat groups. Get to the meet-ups. Say yes to everything for the first six months. Download the app, go to the quiz night, put yourself out there.
And every single one of them is written by somebody who enjoys that. Which is fine. Good luck to them. But there is an entire category of person reading those articles with a slowly sinking feeling, thinking: I don’t want to do any of that, and now apparently I’m going to fail at living abroad.
You’re not. I’m one of you. I moved to the other side of the world and I’m having the time of my life, and I have been to precisely zero expat quiz nights.
Let’s get the distinction out of the way, because everyone gets it wrong
I’m a loner. I don’t get lonely.
Those are two different things and people mash them together constantly. I’ve found myself alone plenty of times in life. I have almost never been lonely. Being on my own is not a problem I’m managing — it’s the setting I run best on.
The other thing about me, and it’s the bit that makes this whole business work: I love to explore. It’s one of my fundamental natures. Drop me in a city I’ve never seen, in a country I know nothing about, with no plan and an afternoon spare, and I am a pig in mud.
So when I landed in Kuala Lumpur — a place I had never visited, in a country I could barely have described, after twenty-two years of not leaving Britain — the thing that would have terrified a sociable person was the thing that thrilled me.
Nobody knew me. Nobody expected anything. I had a whole city to walk around in.
I was in my element. Still am.
The bit I’m not going to dress up
It wasn’t all a lovely afternoon stroll, and I’d be a fraud if I wrote it that way.
Jacqueline had the job. I didn’t. And there is a particular flavour of boredom that comes from being in the most interesting place you’ve ever been while having absolutely nothing to do in it.
I tried the obvious things. eBay. Amazon. Making money on social media. All the stuff the internet promises will work. None of it took off, and I want that written down plainly because the internet is full of people telling you it did.
I was bored stiff.
What sorted it, in the end, wasn’t a plan or a life-hack. It was a doctor, in a consulting room, saying I should probably find something to do with my days. That’s the honest chain of events. So I went and found something — a reason to get out of the flat and be in a room with other people in it.
Which is a slightly funny outcome for a loner, and I’m aware of that.
The people you end up knowing when you’re not trying
Here is the thing nobody tells you, and it’s the reason this post exists.
If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t build a network, you get one anyway. It just gets built out of different materials.
Jacqueline. We met on a dating app in England four years ago. She made me happy so I stayed, she got the chance to come out here, and I said I’d come with her. We got married in Malaysia. She’s my best friend, and by my own honest reckoning she is most of my social life, and I am completely content with that. If that sounds like a small world to you, I’d gently suggest you count how many people you’d actually miss.
The security guards on my building. Twelve-hour shifts. One of them does seven days a week. Their English is limited, my Cockney doesn’t help, and none of it matters. I raise my hand, they raise theirs, every day, without fail. They carry the shopping to the lift and press my floor before I ask. They probably see more of me than they do their own families.
The lady in the KK Mart. I go in most mornings to top my phone up. We say hello. That’s the entire relationship and it counts for more than I’d have believed.
The bloke who runs the Mixue in the mall downstairs. The ice cream and drinks place with the little snowman on the sign. Lovely fella.
The church. I’m a Christian and I found a local one here. A Cockney and a Malaysian congregation could not be more culturally different, and it turned out the belief was the same and that was enough. Lovely people, every Sunday. That’s as far as I’m taking that — this isn’t a blog about religion.
Not one of those came from a meet-up. Not one required me to be sociable in the way the guides mean. They came from living somewhere and turning up regularly, which is the only networking strategy that has ever worked for me.
Nightlife, for those of us who don’t drink
I don’t drink and I don’t smoke. Gave both up at 31. I’m 54.
Every nightlife guide to this city assumes you want a bar. And here’s the joke: alcohol can feel dramatically more expensive here than it does in Britain. In my own shopping, bottles I regarded as cheap at home have sometimes cost several times as much here. A pint in a decent KL bar can also be expensive by local standards — quite a contrast in a country where everyday food can be remarkably affordable.
Meanwhile the food is about five times cheaper than the UK. A meal that would be fifty quid at home is nearer a tenner. A plate of nasi lemak is about five ringgit. Roughly a pound.
So the person who doesn’t drink isn’t missing out here. The person who doesn’t drink is winning by an embarrassing margin.
My nights out are street food markets and restaurants. That’s it. That’s the whole programme. I go out, I eat extremely well, I look at things, I come home, and I wake up without a hangover and with money still in my pocket. If that sounds bleak to you, you have never stood at a night market in warm air at nine o’clock in the evening with something grilled in your hand.
What things actually cost here, off my own bills rather than guesswork, is on the price page.
So what do you actually do, if you’re one of us
No list of hacks. Four things that were true for me.
Go and live somewhere, don’t go and network somewhere. The people arrive as a by-product. Guards, shopkeepers, the bloke in the mall — those relationships are made of showing up in the same place repeatedly, which is something a loner is superb at.
Find the thing that isn’t socialising but puts you near people. It doesn’t have to be a friendship group and you don’t have to want one. It just has to be a reason to leave the flat and a room with humans in it.
Take the boredom seriously. It’s the actual risk, far more than loneliness. If you’re the sort who’s happy alone, you will not notice you’ve been in the flat for three days. Have a reason to go out.
Stop measuring it against other people’s version. The expat blogs are full of brunches and rooftop bars and a hundred new friends. If that’s not your life at home, moving 6,600 miles isn’t going to make it your life here, and thank God for that.
The honest ending
I started this blog because there’s so much here, and people like me — coming for two weeks or two years — need somebody to tell them about it.
I didn’t come out here and become a different person. I came out here and became a slightly happier version of the same one, in much better weather, with a lot more to look at.
You don’t need to be sociable to move abroad. You need to be curious. Those aren’t the same thing, and only one of them can be learned.
