#mastoaiuto
Domanda rivolta soprattutto agli #expat: ho la carta di identità in scadenza ed al consolato di Barcellona non c'è forma umana di prendere un appuntamento però a breve dovrò andare in Italia e mi chiedevo se conviene rinnovarla lì. Qualcuno si è trovato in questa situazione e mi può dare qualche consiglio?
Boost appreciated 🙂
“What I hadn’t anticipated in becoming an expat, the icing on the cake, was that living as an outsider in Scotland gave me a unique slant on Scottish life. I will never be able to express the views of a born-and-bred Scot, but I soon learned the advantages to being a foreigner here. […] I am a hybrid — and my sense of national identity is quite blurred most of the time.”
Good luck! If you’re taking suggestions, I would recommend Valencia. Full disclosure: It’s the only city in Spain that I know well, but I know it to be very livable and walkable. The long park of the Turia River is an amazing asset.
Is there a word in any language for the sadness and ennui felt by people who have moved around lots and everybody they know and love live in different places, far from each other, and most of those people don't know each other so they rarely see them and are never surrounded by close people? #ThirdCultureKid#ExPat#migration#migrants#language#languages#TCK
@NatureMC This may be the closest. But again implies that there is an original location that you've been removed from, but the real problem is the dispersal of the friends not your location or move.
This morning's #bakery haul was very #pretzel heavy. A regular Pretzel, a Kürbiskernbrezel (pumpkin seed pretzel,) a Pfefferbrezel (pepper pretzel, a laugenbrötchen (pretzel roll), and a fünf korn brötchen (5 grain roll.)
My dad, my sister, my mother and myself walking along a path up in Puncak (the mountains south of Bogor where expats and well-off residents rented bungalows for the weekend).
1969 maybe? How old do I look there?
(and I'm not going to go into analysis of how our walking arrangement could be seen to reflect what was going on in our family at the time, fully unknown to me then of course)
One strange thing about being an #expat is I have almost zero political power. Living in Denmark on a work visa gives me zero access to the local political system. The US government doesn’t care about me at all. Like I can “technically” vote but the elections are over by the time my vote gets there.
What a lot of people don’t know is that most US institutions aren’t even capable of acknowledging my existence (banks, insurance companies, healthcare, SMS security codes, State taxes). I can’t renew a drivers license, maintain a library card and increasingly businesses have started to block VoIP numbers like Google Voice and Rebtel. Even if I can get someone on the phone, their computer system often cannot acknowledge the possibility of a US citizen not living in the US.
I recently had a major US bank (Capital One) tell me after escalating several times that it was impossible to let me log into my account. They had blocked all the Rebtel and Google voice numbers and the system had no solution. “Maybe log into the app next time you fly to the US with a prepaid sim”.
Fax is often the most reliable form of communication with any government or healthcare agency. Certified letters are often the only way to do anything with a bank.
It’s both a fascinating and humbling experience to effectively disappear. It’s also a damning indictment of how poorly designed modern software is to handle any deviation. Human overrides don’t exist anymore. It’s you and the employee plotting together against the machine.
Funny how white people who migrate to another country are expats, but brown people are migrants or refugees. An expat is somebody who is sent by a company or a government to another country. If you voluntarily go to another country, you are an immigrant. #expat#migration
I think it's white racism and classism if those migrating in the business and first class fast lanes don't acknowledge their status as such and think they're better just hecause they didn't seek asylum or because the legality of their stay isn't bond on an employment contract...