How to Choose Your Next Expat Home

The snow pants were presenting a problem.

As was my Little Red Riding Hood pea coat, my cozy and fluffy sweater shawl, and my snow boots. Leaving Kyiv and moving to Tbilisi in the middle of winter meant that I had needed to bring all my winter clothes, even if just for six months. But here it was, June in Georgia, and I was getting ready to move again.

I just didn’t know where to yet.

I mean, I knew where I was going immediately. I had plans to spend the summer in Poland, completing a teacher training course. But come September it would be time to relocate again and sign a new contract. I just couldn’t make up my mind where.

There were two frontrunners – Oman and South Korea. Which is why the snow pants were presenting a problem. If I ended up in South Korea, where winter temperatures rivaled those in Ukraine, my winter clothes justified the space they took up in my suitcase. But if I ended up in Muscat, I would regret having had to lug unnecessary layers from Georgia to Russia to Ukraine to Poland to Portugal to Oman.

So the snow pants remained on the shelf, unpacked, even as my last bit of time in Georgia evaporated.

The snow pants were not just a logistical problem. Every time I looked at them, I remembered that my future was totally up in the air. An exciting prospect if you’re twenty-two, perhaps. Less so at thirty-two. Most people, especially non-expats, don’t really seem to get the problem.

“You have the whole world open to you,” people often say to me.

Yes, and that’s a problem. I am very fortunate that – due to many things that are complete luck — I have the opportunity to go almost anywhere in the world (besides the EU, thanks guys) and find a way to support myself. But the problem was – there wasn’t anywhere I wanted to go. And I didn’t really want to stay in Tbilisi either.

So I ended up with South Korea and Oman through half-hearted criteria.

1. A decent salary.
2. A semi-stable expat community.
3. A chance to work with young learners.
4. A place with big(gish) cities.
5. Not Eastern Europe.

To be honest, criteria number one was ruining any enthusiasm I had for finding a new job. Most countries that I was particularly interested in offered terrible salaries and rarely helped with relocation costs. And while my plans for the upcoming year were non-existent, I was developing a vague five-year plan and having some savings was an integral part of it.

So my head told me South Korea.

But still I didn’t pack the snow pants.

It’s hard to choose a new home and this was, to be fair, the first time I was doing it totally for myself. The few first months of my expat life I was traveling with a partner, and our destinations were based completely on where he was offered work. After I had lived in Kyiv for a few months, deciding to base myself there for another year was a relatively easy choice. But the rest of the moves I’ve made in the last three years have been short-term residencies. It’s easy to pick a new home for a month or three. But you’re committing to a new employer, a new city, a new group of friends; new food, a new climate, new public transportation problems, suddenly the stakes are much higher.

“Ok,” I decided to myself. “Oman sounds like more of an adventure than South Korea. Muscat it is.”

So I sat down with my computer, started Googling recruiters for Oman –

and emailed three South Korean recruiters instead.

Those recruiters are organized. I had interviews, got set up with the required paperwork, was sent encouraging emails within days. It seemed like it was happening. I wrote on my Facebook wall asking advice from friends who had taught there, I went out to get Korean barbeque with a friend who had worked there, I read blogs about Seoul and researched the cheese situation.

I really tried to get myself excited about it. I tried really hard.

But the honest truth was – I didn’t want to go to South Korea.

Maybe I didn’t know how to choose a new home. How do people go about it in the States, anyway? We tend to move for education or work, if we move at all. So what are the criteria, really? When I thought about what I really wanted, it wouldn’t have been the list above. It would look something more like this:

1. A job where my skills and experience are respected, I am treated as a professional, and I can develop my career.
2. An adult salary so I can budget a lifestyle that actually includes saving and not just making it work paycheck to paycheck.
3. A place with a low expat turnover, so that I don’t have to make new friends every month and dating might be a little less tumultuous.
4. A big enough city so that I can pursue hobbies and interests outside of work.
5. A country that’s culturally very different from where I’ve been living the past two years.
6. A chance to restart without some of the baggage that has come with being an expat.

“It’s still Korea!” I thought to myself. “See, you should be excited about this. It checks all these boxes too!”

Still, I didn’t pack the winter clothes.

My suitcase was full, I reasoned, and snow pants are a pretty niche item of clothing. And my pea coat was pretty old and too big for me now. The boots, while comfy, weren’t waterproof anymore and really needed to be thrown away before any real snowfall. So I tossed them and donated a huge bag of clothes.

And I left Tbilisi without knowing where I was going.

I will not lie to you – I cried at the airport. Run-to-the-bathroom kind of blubbering. I loved Georgia and was sad to leave, but it was more than that. I was going to have to start all over again, somewhere three months from then, all alone in a place I hadn’t even picked yet. I was stalling with the Korean recruiters and I hadn’t even looked at any more Oman options.

I was not excited as I boarded my flight to Moscow. I had planned this five-day detour en route to Poland because I had a Russian tourist visa that was set to expire the following month. The visa itself was an ‘accident,’ left over from a 2015 visit to Saint Petersburg, which only happened because it was cheaper to fly there than it was to fly straight to Tallinn, where the bulk of my trip was to be spent. Saint Petersburg had failed to make a huge impression on me, but since the visa was expiring and I doubted I would ever jump through the bureaucratic hoops to get another, it seemed like a waste to be ‘so close’ to Moscow and not see it. It was just going to be a quick stop.

Just like my Saint Petersburg trip, I felt vastly underprepared for Moscow. My hostel reservation had been canceled ten hours earlier because the hostel had apparently closed, and with the World Cup going on it was madness trying to find anywhere affordable for five nights. My only friend in the city was actually back home doing a visa run. My Russian was rusty and my hair was unruly after months of living in Tbilisi, and I was worried I would stick out as an awkward foreigner, even in the sea of insane World Cup fans.

I’m here to check boxes, I reminded myself as the plane started to descend, and my stomach clenched.

We landed at Zhukovsky, a very new airport about the size of a Walmart and quite a bit less fun. I tentatively asked a security officer if he spoke English because I had a question about registration cards. He answered helpfully and wished me a good day. I steeled myself for a grilling at immigration. She didn’t even ask me how long I was staying. The bus driver laughed when he saw my suitcase and over exaggerated how heavy it was as he loaded it into the bus.

Zhukovsky is 36 kilometers from Moscow, and in those 36 kilometers something very strange happened. I started reading billboards and advertisements as we drove by. I saw words like дом and работа and хорошо, all perfectly average words in Russian but words that I knew. Being surrounded by Cyrillic was an immediate comfort instead of an alienating force.

My travel anxiety faded and was replaced by curiosity. I ditched my things at my hostel and quickly headed back into the center. I found Moscow fascinating. It was like someone had taken Kyiv, blew it up to the size of London, embellished it with French flair, and sprinkled in some New York City yellow taxis. It reminded me of many places, but it was still all its own.

I did check boxes in Moscow. None of them were my tourist to-do boxes, because very early on I realized I would be coming back to this city and I could worry about keeping busy then. Instead I wandered through different neighborhoods and imagined myself living there. Hanging with friends at speakeasies, taking selfies in the Red Square when it’s snowing, slowly improving my Russian at my local coffee shop. In the evening I browsed job listings and texted expat friends.

“I think I might move to Moscow.”

The only thing holding me back was the salary. This was the year I had wanted to save and save significantly. I was talking with one friend about it, comparing Seoul and Moscow, the salaries and my feelings, and he said, “I’m a big fan of going where you actually want to be.”

I guess that was the one box that Seoul never could check. And if you don’t have that one – well, what’s the point of the salary?

So привет, Москва. Я думаю что будет весело.