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Being an expat requires an open mind and, just sometimes, a thick skin.
White expats tend to get ripped off in a lot of places, but we also tend to have a lot more cash than most of the locals so you can understand it a little.
I'm sure other ethnic groups get hammered as well, but I can't speak for their problems as I haven't experienced them - perhaps others could comment on their situation.
The trick is finding out the local prices and quickly as possible and simply refusing any mad prices ... but politely and with a smile.
An argument is pointless because the vendor won't give a rats as he only stands to gain, but his potential loss is either minimal or zero.
I tend to stand small rip offs as:
I can afford it
I can see how a man who can't afford to send his kids to school needs the cash.
I don't allow silly rip off, but I simply tell them I'm not a tourist and shouldn't be treated as one.
I absolutely don't stand being ripped off in larger shops where the con artist is just displaying greed.

As for not accepting local culture and tradition - Dude, you moved there - live with it or book a flight.

See?? You just did it! You told me to go home. "Live with it or book a flight." THAT is what I'm asking about. I'm not asking about opinions on gringo pricing or whatever. I'm asking about this EXACT thing -- expats telling other expat to leave.
WHY??

It's easy - we're expats.

When you move to a new place you have to accept local traditions, local ideals and local oddities.
   Moaning about them is pointless because they aren't going to change, and trying to change them is rude in the extreme because expats are guests in the place; that and moaning is extremely boring and annoying.
   Expats choose to live in another country with different cultural norms, so you either put up with the stuff you dislike or you choose to bugger off somewhere else.

As for the 'over social media' comment, that implies cowardice, but it's more likely the moans were on social media, so you get your answers that way.

Curiosity made me look at your timeline and blog, and they both seem to be full of intelligent comment about you life with not much by way of moaning and griping, more describing experiences without either of the aforementioned negative slants, so making me wonder why you started this topic on this forum.

I will offer one bit of advice regarding homesickness and finding expat bars and burger king - forget expat bars and burger king in favour of local bars and a local restaurant.
The longer you hang on to 'home', the longer it takes to be at home.

Many Expats complain about certain aspects of their host country.
For some this becomes an obsession and they genuinely think the country or its inhabitants are responsible for their unhappiness.
They are wrong!
Happiness starts within yourself. The sooner you accept and arrange yourself with the environment, the sooner you will be happy.
Complaining delays this process.

If you feel miserable and the people around you (who experience the same) not, then something is wrong with you, not them!

I meet plenty of expats and most are in the agreement that life is better here than their home country. A few though as less happy due to a feeling of being stuck here while there is less at home and they are in a position which is uncomfortable for them. It happens and so  they revert to type.
I can understand both points of view but I guess it depends on what is happening in their lives at that moment. But like being at home, if you stay from the negativity of people then you have a far better lifestyle than the rest.

And being selfish, who cares. I am here for me not for them and if people want to complain about their lives along the way, that great as long as they are buying....

Those two ideas come up a lot, about dual pricing, and that if an expat doesn't like some aspect of local life or culture they should just go home.  Of course the inconsistency is that then an expat would need to love or be neutral about every aspect of local culture, which is a strange place to leave off.  It doesn't follow.

One more idea connects with those, related to a third issue that comes up, learning the local language.  It's about integrating versus remaining a part of a foreign culture, just based locally in a foreign country.  In general the "integration" supporting perspective maps onto being positive, and the tendency to remain separate but connected in limited ways with being more negative, or at least balanced, expressing likes and dislikes for different aspects, versus completely positive. 

But there is no reason why those ideas would need to connect in those ways.  Someone could be in favor of fully integrating--learning the language, eating only local foods, possibly adopting the local religion, etc.--and critical of negative aspects.  Or they might have an interest in remaining active in foreigner-themed local ties, or eating Western foods often, and not interested in becoming language fluent, or not want to wear flip-flops in a tropical environment, and still be very positive about the local culture.  It seems obvious enough why sets of ideas pair up though.  Without integrating someone would always be a bit outside the local norm trying to balance that, and taking up most aspects of the local culture would lead to a more natural positive experience.

About that knee-jerk "like it or leave it" reaction, it seems like those expats are really defending both "their" adopted culture and their interpretation of how to best relate to it.  It's odd that it pushes into not leaving room for any criticism, in the most normal form, but then people don't tend to generally think through their underlying perspectives on most things.

You nail it!

Liked what you said.
Shahjahan

It's not necessary to go further than that, and it was already too much for most, but psychology has been an interest lately, so I will.  Lets consider a related idea from group psychology, how people relate to others in groups they identify with versus those they don't:

A large literature in social psychology shows that we process information about our in-group more deeply, we remember more positive details, make greater personal evaluations, and allocate resources more generally to those in the in-group. What's more, negative actions of those in the in-group are thought to arise from situational factors, whereas positive ones are thought to be inherent qualities of the individual, whereas the reverse is believed about members of the out-group.

Indeed, there is an emerging literature on "pathological altruism", suggesting that extreme compassion can have downsides such as difficulty passing judgment of right vs. wrong, and forgiving all transgression and failures of those in the in-group while acting highly protective and aggressive toward those in the out-group, even sometimes in the absence of actual provocation and injustice.




What I'd speculate based on accepting that is clear enough, isn't it?  Expats might well see other expats that believe integration is or isn't critical--whichever is the opposite of their view--as not belonging to some very vaguely defined group, related to shared perspective. 

Once already seeing someone as an outsider being more critical, even aggressive, could be somewhat normal.  So could painting people with such ideas with a very broad brush, accepting their general perspective as flawed in general, and not stopping with thinking they are mistaken on one point.  People are able to go from hearing "I don't really like Thai food" and "I don't speak much Thai" (here, where I am) to concluding they should get back to where they are from. 

To a lesser extent the negative also occurs, and people that don't favor integration (that don't only eat local foods or speak much of the language) see people advocating complete integration as apologists for real down-sides in local culture or circumstances (eg. corruption, safety issues, lower quality health care, unethical business practices, etc.).  The ideas don't completely connect (the sets aren't linked, eating the food versus criticizing those things) but the general perspective plays out that way, one is positive or negatively biased, and slight differences in position can easily lead to personal attacks.

Lately I've been considering all of this more in relation to politics, really.  To cite a specific, a friend just mentioned online that it's not important that Trump relatively directly implied there was a massacre in Sweden, some type of terrorist event, when there really wasn't one. 

For "liberals" this could easily be seen as a sign of freely making up things to support his positions and a lack of awareness of current events.  It doesn't help that his official spokesperson just more clearly stated there was a mass killing in the US that also didn't occur two or three weeks ago (in Bowling Green).

For a conservative it's easier to write it off as a slip, as meaningless.  It doesn't matter what he meant, per that perspective, it was just a mistake, he was thinking of another event somewhere else, or had read something completely different about Sweden that came to mind in the wrong context.

At any rate we can see the broader trend of people taking one side over the other and not really trying to see what the other side thinks, or why.  This example is interesting for being so trivial, and informative for that same reason, there is very little actual content to it.  When issues are more meaningful the same types of patterns and acceptance / rejection play out. 

I'll also share an interesting video on more background on that conservative / liberal divide, not so much about this reaction mechanism, but about what underlies the division.  This psychologist concludes that both represent general positions relate to factors like preferring change or continuity, or inclusiveness versus narrow group definition, that are grounded in personal attributes that may even be in-born, genetically pre-set as much as behaviorally determined.  It's not really weighing in on that so much, nature versus nurture, the point is the general divide in outlook runs pretty deep:

bkk tea blog wrote:

To a lesser extent the negative also occurs, and people that don't favor integration (that don't only eat local foods or speak much of the language) see people advocating complete integration as apologists for real down-sides in local culture or circumstances (eg. corruption, safety issues, lower quality health care, unethical business practices, etc.).  The ideas don't completely connect (the sets aren't linked, eating the food versus criticizing those things) but the general perspective plays out that way, one is positive or negatively biased, and slight differences in position can easily lead to personal attacks.

It's commonly far worse than that in so much as the attacker is commonly the expat who doesn't just not accept the country they chose to live in but often wants to turn it into the country they're from, then moans like crazy when they can't do it.

Dude, the expat moves to another land (commonly for the cash) but everything has to change to suit them and they often get racist and/or nasty about their hosts.
I've seen plenty of threads here with seriously negative comments that might well be true, but are really just part of expat life so it's "can't stand the heat" time.

I tend to like to see the positive:
Can't drink the water? Doesn't matter; bottled water is cheap.
Traffic is terrible - Use a taxi so someone else has the hassle.
Don't like the locals? Get to know them properly and see if understanding them helps (It usually does).

Other expats (including some that post on expat.com) are far worse, commonly insulting their hosts or host country - That lot need to seriously consider their suitability to live abroad.

You don't visit someone and tell them their house is rubbish.

Those are all good points, completely valid.  There is a progression some expats tend to undergo, isn't there, of liking some aspects of the culture and not liking others, and then becoming more bitter over time about not fitting in.  Or maybe they really like some options, lower cost of living, or warm weather, more than the actual culture, and that helps explain the problems.  I suppose to some extent all of what I'm saying is an interpretation, a simplified generality, and everyone relates differently in their own way.

Kind of a different subject, but where I'm from (rural Pennsylvania, in the US) complaining more than might be typical elsewhere seems to be a part of the local culture.  There isn't any one thing they are together on complaining about, it's not as if they're ganging up on immigrants or blaming corporations or a political party for economic issues or anything like that.  At least not as a group, not as a cultural aspect, not in the same sense I'm talking about, but some of that happens too.  People tend to talk about what is wrong with their lives, problems they encounter, or wrong with their neighbors' lives.  They pass judgement, much more than I've noticed in other places.

All of this couldn't possibly relate to those other points I mentioned because they're all in the same social group.  It's just a common tendency to gripe.  If they had more exposure to other groups, if they had immigrants or minorities there is significant numbers--they don't--they would surely extend it to them.  But as it is they're just white, middle-class people talking down others in the same range, or how bad their own luck is.

bkk tea blog wrote:

Those are all good points

Yes, but I'm far too humble to brag about it

bkk tea blog wrote:

and then becoming more bitter over time about not fitting in

There goes the winner - give the man a coconut!

Some expats simply can't cope with change so, without being nasty or generally horrible, it's time for them to go home.

I wrote a blog post discussing online group issues that touches on these same themes, even citing this case of a divide in perspective among expats as an example:



it's a tea blog, so the starting point is why people review tea in blogs, but the general theme is why people participate in online groups, which is more what it's about.

Those are all valid and important points. But there is one other point that also contributes to the knee-jerk "Take it or leave it" comments: the idea of expat scarcity/uniqueness.

In any given area, there is a certain threshold to the number of expats that can live there before the area becomes saturated. When the area is saturated with expats, crime against expats tends to increase and prices go up. Also, people lose their expat privilege. (Locals thinking they are cool/interesting and them getting special treatment for it). So, many expats simply don't want more expats "invading their turf," and are quick to be rude and dismissive to green expats, because they are afraid they will "spoil" their "paradise."

I get it. Being in the integration camp and married to a local, I get frustrated with some expats around me that give me a bad reputation. Many locals think of people who don't want to integrate as people who just spend all of their time in bars and exploiting the cheap economy. They are not viewed highly. There are so many times when people are downright shocked that I speak Bulgarian, simply because most expats never bother to learn the language. Again, it doesn't look good for the rest of us. So I can see from the integrated/non-integrated standpoint of why someone would say to just go away.

But at the same time, I see that it is possible to complain about a culture and be part of it. Heck- Bulgarians gripe about their situations day in and day out. But there are subtle differences to the complaining... for example- I complain that there is a lot of disorganization at the immigration office and different workers will require different paperwork. But when people complain that they don't speak English at the immigration office I get irritated. It is common knowledge that they don't speak English- hire a translator! That is on you, not them.

Sorry- that was a bit rambling. Maybe you can suss out a point or two

Thank you, all, for your thoughtful responses. 

SpiralCee wrote:

Has anyone else experienced displays of hostility from expats towards other expats? Most often this is from expats who have lived in a community for a long time against newer expats, like myself, who are questioning the status quo.

I am hearing comments, usually on social media and rarely face-to-face, such as:
Go back where you came from.
You don't belong here.
If you don't like it, go back home.

These hostile comments are usually in response to my questioning or criticizing a local custom or strange situation.
A simple example is complaining on Facebook about noisy fireworks at 6am. In Guatemala, this is a common tradition to celebrate a birthday. Wake them up with loud bangs! I didn't ask that this be changed. I just commented that it's irritating.
Another example would be questioning "gringo pricing", which is the practice of over-charging white people for simple things such as fruits and vegetables at the market or a boat ride across the lake. It is blatant discrimination yet many of my co-expats said that "it's just the way it is and if you don't want to pay an extra dollar, you should go home."

What are your experiences with this?

I'm jumping into the middle of this, so I've quoted SpiralCee's OP.

There are supposed be 200 expats in the area where I live.  You wouldn't know it by the rare times you run into one on the street, in a restaurant or store.  When I do and take the time top notice they look like expats or tourists I may go over and say hi, just out of curiosity.  I've had some interesting conversations.  I have lived in two cities in the last 8 years and neither is an expat colony though they both go their share of tourists.  In this country, I haven't noticed being treated different because the size of the place or the presence of foreigners, even in the capital of 9 million people.

I have met a few expats who are negative about the country, customs, people and government.  I may try to correct misinformation they might have but if they are people who would be unhappy and negative anywhere.  But questioning the whys and wherefore's of happenings can be educational and the information may help adapt.  Native friends and acquaintances are open to questions and are free with sometimes negative comments about local behavior, attitudes and customs.  I try to remain neutral but sometimes chuckle with them.  They are good sources of advice on how to go about having successful business and social interactions that may be new to you or are procedurally different from your home country.

I'm an expat largely for budgeting reasons.  Low living costs allow me to afford more luxuries like trips to other countries without worrying about every penny.  I did not come to change things but to live comfortably, enjoy my surrounds and not have to deal with the government hassle in my home country.  Oddly enough, I feel the government hassles me a lot less here.

My current problem is that I cancelled my maid last week when she called telling me she was on her way.  I had just gotten in from a 24 hour bus ride and hadn't even unpacked.  Without any complaint, she just turned around and went home.  If she shows up today, I can make amends in one of two ways, neither of which a native is likely to choose.  They'd probably just continue as if nothing had happened.  Taking either option I'm considering won't shake things up sop bad I'll be criticized for it.  It's compounded by the fact that the smallest bill I have is twice her weekly pay.  I find it hard to keep the right amount of cash on hand in denominations for which people have change including maids and taxi drivers or delivery people,

I'm not perfect by any means.  I can't expect others to be either.

Direct experience - none (at least, not to my face).  General experience, yes, of course; I would be blind to not notice when people (be they locals or ex-pats) get personal about "foreigners" and them trying to change things to how they are "back home", mainly because it's "better", or "fairer", or "discriminatory" not to change.

Personally, I moved to Holland because I like it there, not to have a better life; it is after all what you make it, not what others may (or may not) do to make your life better.

I tend to agree with Fred; if you've moved somewhere and subsequently find out that despite all your pre-planning and research, it isn't what you thought it was, perhaps another move may be your only way out.