Couple of questions.
How come you're expats?
I've always wanted to move somewhere warmer and being from Brynmawr the choices are endless.
Do you miss Wales?
Do you think you'll ever move back?
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Couple of questions.
How come you're expats?
I've always wanted to move somewhere warmer and being from Brynmawr the choices are endless.
Do you miss Wales?
Do you think you'll ever move back?
Had a few council estate jobs (I'm a council estate massive too) and the generosity was second to none :wales:
I left Cardiff for London which I hated then got the chance to go to Hong Kong and then just stayed overseas ending up in Oz. Miss Wales on occasions but there’s a big world out there
Talking of ex-pats, I discovered today that the 6th largest French city by number of population is......London.
There's a place called Brynmawr outside Philadelphia. It's very posh. They call it Bryn-mar.
I met a beautiful girl about 20 years ago from Ohio (West Virginia really) which prompted my move.
Absolutely the loveliest and prettiest woman I’ve ever met.
It’s absolutely absurd to me how we come to be, but come to be we did.
I miss Wales like crazy.
I spent 3 years in London and a good while in Australia with spells back home in between.
Hiraeth is still a very real as for me.
I tried to move us back after my mother died.
Something like £65,000 was required in the bank to show you could support it or a job for 6 months.
I had a crack and commuted on the train to Brizzle every day from Lliswerry in Newport...which meant a bus into town at about 6.20 to get to a train to Temple Meads and another train or bus from there to Clifton.
Come back to DC over that Christmas period to see the Mrs and basically quit on the idea.
Still hope we can do it one day!
Married a brilliant and beautiful American of Polish/Swedish ancestry who, after 39 years of marriage, is a wonderful mother to our three children. We live in Nebraska, which has bitterly cold winters. I like to go back every now and then to get faggots and peas in the market, or fish and chips on Caroline Street, but no, I will never move back. There's a reason why people risk life and limb to get here and why hundreds of thousands are rushing the southern border. It's a great place. I'm a lucky guy.
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Not sure if I qualify as a full blown expat but I’ve spent many years of my life outside of the UK. Work driven for me, mainly on secondment to transfer or start up businesses. Currently on a 3 year stint in Poland but previously I’ve done the same in Japan, Ireland, California, Canada, Holland & India. I love the change & challenges.
I was working in London at the time. My contract ended and I just decided to be a bit cavalier and get a one-way ticket to Hong Kong (I already sold my property in Cardiff).
I met a mainland Chinese girl, we got married, had a son and fifteen years later I'm still here in China.
I don't think I could ever afford to go back home, I certainly wouldn't get any meaningful employment at my age in the UK.
I went back to Cardiff for my mother's funeral just over 2 years ago. It was the first time I had been home in more than 10 years. I rediscovered what a fantastic city Cardiff is. I used to take things for granted when I was living there. The friendly and helpful nature of the people, particularly in customer service, was very notable.
Doesn’t ‘ex pat’ seem a lot more nicer than ‘immigrant’:hide:
Wish I moved to Aus but the mrs is too tied to her family.
Sacrifices you make eh!
I moved to a place called Cardiff in my mid twenties .Lovely City.
Weather much nicer than my native Bonnie Scotland .
Great opportunities there well , run my own successful business, have integrated fairly well with the natives despite some of them having a gripe about some hand ball incident that happened years and years ago....
Standard of local football is shocking though. You need a neck brace to watch hoof ball.
I would recommend Cardiff to anyone .
How come...... I liked the Basque Country whenever I had visited.
It's near France, The Pyrenees, The coast.
The way people socialise and their attitude to food is healthier than it is in Wales imo.
No fighting.
No beefcakes.
At the same time, there are elements that remind me a bit more of Wales in terms of the landscape and the people.
There are things I don't like about here and miss about wales....
There is a culture of accumulating and safeguarding money at the expense of others. Many people send their kids to private schools so as to avoid "the scum" of this world. Many people think it perfectly normal to pay a foreigner peanuts to clean up THEIR mess at home and iron their clothes so they can project and image of immaculate order.
.....which is basically what I miss about home..... I find people in Wales a little more carefree and down-to-earth on the whole.
I miss speaking welsh. I miss Lansbury Park :) and lying on the felt-lined garage roof in summer..... but that's probably getting overly nostalgic. I miss countryside. ....family and friends obvs.
I experienced the expat lifestyle in Sydney but from the Lebanese expat community for just over 6 months, it always entertained me that people would move to another country and band together and not really let outsiders in, it was there i saw Racism from both sides, the girl i was dating was subject to it from whites which used to push me to the edge and often beyond with a number of " squaring up to the person " and even a few incidents on punches thrown ( much to her dismay as i couldnt leave it ), it was funny, she would always say " leave it, its just how things are, we all have different and have different opinions and it will never change ", then when i would go to her family / community things i would suffer the same, the older generation would make remarks ( some i couldnt understand, but i know were racist from the GF outburst back at them ) some in English that i could, She had a very strange view of it, directed at her she would just brush it off without a care in the world, directed at me, it would cause the anger in her would bubble over, i never understood that
about 10 years ago, i was going to purchase a house in the South of France, had it all lined up, spoke to the mayor who had to ok the purchase, the estate agent put me in touch with a group of local expats in the area, what a bunch of clowns, they were honestly attempting to recreate " back home " but in the sun, they were mental, they were the reason we didnt buy in the end, I didnt want to be part of that
Sometimes we're too close to things. If there were a housing subdivision named Crvc Hlavc, and some Czech immigrant wanted to tell me all about it I don't know that my interest would be overflowing. Welsh references are so rare, though, they do catch my eye. There is a Cardiff-by-the-Sea in California — probably no more interesting a fact than Nebraska has a Prague.
How come you're expats?
> I met a lovely Irish woman in a bar in London, fell in love, changed my life - she wanted to go home so we went, 25y ago. TBH I think of 'expat' as applying to people (usually white professionals) who live abroad but intend to return home. I'm not one - I'm an emigrant (from GB) / an immigrant (to Ireland).
I've always wanted to move somewhere warmer and being from Brynmawr the choices are endless.
> Well Dublin ain't warmer or drier than south Wales!
Do you miss Wales?
> Only in a nostalgic sense. I like coming back, but these days it feels like visiting not coming home. I've lived away from Wales since I was 18 (France -> England -> Kenya -> England -> Ireland) and all I have left is CCFC, a few people & memories. And I started following the City when I was in London.
Do you think you'll ever move back?
>It's possible but unlikely. I'm an Irish citizen now, most of my friends are here and Ireland is my home.
There is an Englishwoman in my town who emigrated to the United States as a war bride eons ago. She still says things like "love" and "car boot" and "rubbish bin," all with a completely intact Kent accent. Sometimes I think they hold onto these things as sort of trademarks. When in Rome, is my attitude.
In her defense, she is absolutely lovely.
Cardiff is a great place. As always, you have to be absent for a long time to appreciate it properly. I suppose when you trudge in and out of it a dozen times a year, Cardiff Market loses its charm, but I love visiting that place with its wonderful food stalls and that iconic fishmonger where I have many happy memories of my dad buying me bags of cockles. Even the council estates, so dreary and taken for granted when I was growing up, take on a fresh aspect after years away. Their narrow, winding streets are actually quite charming, if inconvenient, and being as they were built before cars became common possessions, everything is within walking distance.
Yeah, we're thinking about Texas, although in one of those life twists my daughter and her husband just bought a summer home in Puerto Rico and now the missus is talking about retirement on the Caribbean. I don't know that I could live happily in a non-English speaking country, though. I need my radio, an addiction that took hold long ago with Radio Luxembourg and Jimmy Clitheroe.
I went to Vietnam originally to head up a business school. I never saw myself and still don’t think of myself as an ex pat. I view the ex pats community as a bunch of folk who are boozers and can’t leave ‘home’ behind them and so band together forming cliques which are not easy to associate with.
Besides which a lot of the ex pats are Australian and a pain in the arse especially when they’ve had a beer.
We live in Phu My Hung district in Ho Chi Minh City which is mainly Vietnamese and have a place in the country near Ba Ria Vung Tau where I am ‘the foreigner’. If you pitch up there and ask in the market for the foreigner they’ll likely send you to our place.it’s kind of nice but like living in a goldfish bowl sometimes.
Married a beautiful woman in 2014 and we have a very handsome young boy.
We bought a new house in Radyr using zoom and my sister to act as our intermediary and we’re moving to Cardiff as soon as we can get the paperwork sorted out.
The Spouse visa is a triumph of bureaucracy. She even has to have current medical certification which confirms she doesn’t have TB and we have to produce a file of photographic and other documents which prove we’ve been together since 2010
The education and healthcare systems are dreadful and you can’t get anything done unless you pay tea money. Even the women in the bank when you take out cash or make a money transfer want you give them a ‘nice tip’.
The police are equally as corrupt I had to get a stamped copy of my residence permit. It took 4 visits to the local People’s Committee. As soon as the cash appeared so did the stamped copy. Whenever I get pulled up by the ‘yellow dogs’ vang chai I have a 200,000 vid note folded with my licence and that’s twice what the locals will be asked for.
It’s the way things are. Can confirm It’s really different to living in Canton….mostly
But. If I could have a conversation with myself when I was 20 I’d tell myself to get an English language teaching certificate and fk off around the world staying as long as I wanted and using the qualification to fund myself.
As someone said It’s a big world out there and I recommend everyone should get out and see some of it.
You might just like it.