Does your talent lie in travel or in living abroad? Though some people are good at both and others not cut out for either, the skill sets involved are surprisingly different.

There’s a great passage about the difference between being a born traveler and a born expat in Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert’s sequel to her astonishingly successful travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love.

Committed is a skeptic’s look at marriage from all angles, sparked by Gilbert’s decision to wed Felipe, the Brazilian man she meets in Bali at the end of Eat Pray Love. (Javier Bardem plays Felipe in the upcoming movie, which almost makes up for Julia Roberts playing Gilbert.)

The eight chapters of Committed have titles like “Marriage and History,” “Marriage and Ceremony,’ and “Marriage and Subversion.” The event that started Gilbert’s exhaustive look at this hallowed and maligned institution was that she and her boyfriend Felipe were pushed into marriage because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security suddenly decides that Felipe can no longer enter the U.S. Now if she were married to a U.S. citizen, suggests a friendly Homeland Security agent, things might be easier…

But the official hoops they have to jump through and the strains it puts in their relationship are anything but easy.

Gilbert’s experience mirrors some of what I’ve been through—marrying for immigration purposes to a foreign-born lover you’re already committed to, so hey, Why not make it legal so that your lives are easier in the face of capricious and punishing laws? And then the fun (aka trouble) begins, especially if you both have different ideas of just what marriage means.

Although the book is a kaleidoscopic exploration of just that–what marriage means–I’m not finding what I was looking for in Committed. For my tastes, there’s not enough about cross-cultural relationships, or about how a relationship can change (and not always for the better) when you make it official. But of course that’s not the book Gilbert set out to write, so I can’t really fault her for not writing what I most want to read. As many writers have noted, when you don’t find what you want to read, well, then go write it yourself!

What I did find in Committed, on pages 216 – 221, was a sharply drawn description of the differences between a born traveler and a born live-abroader.

Here’s the background: Gilbert and Felipe, her Brazilian honey, are homeless, waiting to have his visa approved so they can both return to the U.S. and start building a life there together. They’re wandering through Southeast Asia, and after six months of such travel and of being with each other night and day, tempers are fraying. Gilbert has been hurrying them from one cheap hotel room to the next, trying to keep their anxiety at bay, when she realizes that that technique doesn’t seem to work for her partner. Gilbert writes:

“Like a fussy baby who can fall asleep in a moving car, I have always been comforted with the tempo of travel. I’d always assumed that Felipe operated on the same principle; since he was the most widely traveled person I’ve ever met. But he didn’t seem to enjoy any of this drifting.

…The reality about Felipe, as I was beginning to realize, is that he’s both the best traveler I’ve ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds—all of which pretty much define the act of traveling. Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume that the man is not fit to be a traveler at all.

But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe’s traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that renders him peerless: He can create a familiar habitat of reassuringly boring everyday practices for himself anyplace, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in the space of about three days, and then he’s capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint.

This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but live. Over the years, he has folded himself into societies from South American to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere utterly new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local.”

So how about you? Are you more of a traveler, like Gilbert, or a born expat, like Felipe?

Photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s ubiquitous travel memoir, is now a movie starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert. If the trailer is any indication, the film emphasizes the glib aspects of a memoir that teeters between messy real life and staged epiphanies. In the film, our first glimpse of Roberts/Gilbert, reacting to the prophecy of the requisite toothless holy man, shows a flash of Robert’s patented self-satisfied smirk. This doesn’t bode well for the film, which opens August 13.

Here’s the trailer:

For those three or four people who’ve never heard of Eat, Pray, Love, suffice to say that it’s self-realization and travel porn for the thinking woman.

Despite my reservations, I won’t be able to resist seeing the film anymore than I could resist reading the book. Critics were less than kind. Maureen Callahan called the book “narcissistic New Age reading.” Lev Grossman said the author was “trying too hard to be liked.” Grace Lichtenstein said the only thing wrong with the book is that “it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie.”

I agree with all of those critics, and yet I tore through Eat, Pray, Love, reveling in Gilbert’s incisive descriptions of far-flung locales and internal states, spouting select quotes to my friends, and giving the book as a gift to more than one (woman) friend. Gilbert is compulsively readable, and if afterwards I felt a little queasy about the fast food feast I’d just wolfed down, in the midst of the meal I thought I was absorbing valuable nutrients.

And the film? Well, Javier Bardem plays Felipe, the Brazilian guy Gilbert falls for in Bali. I’ll go just to hear how a Spaniard tackles a Brazilian accent.

Dear Miss Move Abroad,

I want to thank you. I read your book [Living Abroad in Costa Rica]  in December of 09. At the time I was going through some rough times (death and divorce), and I decided to travel to Costa Rica to just get some relief. I was dazzled by it. I was there seven days, the Central Valley (San José and the Arenal area), and the mid-Pacific area (Jacó, Quepos, Manual Antonio), and you’re right, it’s a little bit of paradise.

I truly want to live there or try it. I live in Minnesota and except for summer cannot stand it. At present I work as a metal worker. I am a shop foreman in a steel/aluminum plant with 30 men under me. I have always been a man of the left (social democrat, democratic socialist, trade union type). I want to simplify my life, I am done with the rat race, and I just cannot do it any more. I want to live intentionally. If you know any community or communal style living, like a religious or spiritual group, I may be interested.

I am 58, and have about 4 years before I can get Social Security, but have a bit of money in my 401k plan (I lost a fair amount in the stock exchange). How much would I need a year to live, renting a house somewhere in a town outside San Jose or around La Fortuna? I have in mind a smaller two-bedroom home with a small yard for my Collies. Could I find something for $500 – $600 a month? I would also need to buy into the national health insurance; would that be about $60.00 a month? I own two motorcycles–I would ship both to Costa Rica, also mountain and racing bicycles.

Could I do it all on $1,600 a month, or about $20,000 a year?

Thanks,

Dan

To read my detailed answer to Dan, and to see the added suggestions of many expats living in Costa Rica, head on over to my Costa Rica blog.

Photo of footbridge on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula by David W. Smith.

Dear Miss Move Abroad,

I plan to move to Panama next year and wanted your advice on how best to bring my possessions with me. I want to bring my cars, my appliances, and most of my furniture. I plan to ship a container from Miami to Panama, but hear that getting a container through customs can be a headache. Any advice?

Canal-bound

_______________________

Dear Canal-bound,

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that read:

DESIRE

ACQUIRE

DISCARD

REPEAT

We all live within that cycle, but we can resist it if we put in some effort.

My advice to you is to pare down. (If you know now that paring down for you is as likely as rock-hard abs for Santa Clause, then skip to some concrete advice on shipping to Panama).

But why lug your old life with you to a new country, especially when you have to pay so dearly for the privilege? And you will pay–thousands of dollars for shipping, high tariffs (duties on imported goods), and time and energy navigating the bureaucracy.

The easiest way to bring your possessions into Panama is as checked luggage on a flight. But most people–even adventurous souls who decide to pick up and move to another country–have a lot of stuff that they’ve accumulated over the years.

If you’ve lived in one place for a while, I’ll bet that you’ve been meaning to purge your belongings–to have a garage sale or take a few trips to the Salvation Army drop-off station.

It feels good to pare down, and a lot of people who move abroad do so in part because they want to simplify their lives.

You can start simplifying long before you make the move, by thinking carefully about what possessions you can’t live without, then selling or giving away the rest.

“I thought about selling all my favorite things, all the great stuff I’ve collected over the years, and I just couldn’t do it,” says Mary Ann Jackson, who moved to Costa Rica in 2004. “But I wasn’t going to lug it all with me, either. So I gave it all away to friends. Now I can visit my stuff in their houses.”

But ok, if you want to ignore my advice and still bring all your stuff to Panama in a container, then here’s some practical tips on shipping to Panama, courtesy of Our Man in Boquete, a German-born jazz-loving former airline pilot who relocated to Panama in late 2009.

Photo of skateboarders in Panama City by David W. Smith.

by Randall Wood

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the West African nation formerly known as Dahomey: it is infrequently mentioned by the international press in a continent where no news is good news. A French colony until the 1960s, Benin is a tiny nation tucked under the Elephant Ear of West Africa, and is best known for being one of the continent’s stronger democracies.

I live in the city of Cotonou, whose name in the local language (Fon) means “River of Death.” And regardless of what Cotonou is today, it will forever retain the soul of a slaving hub at the mouth of a river that carried an unfortunate cargo down to the waiting slave ships.

For the moment, Cotonou is my home, and this message comes to you live from the River of Death.

In the three years I’ve lived here I’ve drunk whiskey with kings, been the victim of a mob throwing coconuts, surfed a couple of decent waves, and rubbed elbows with a culture that three years later, I still barely know and perhaps never will.  This is, of course, the thrill of travel and of living in a foreign country.

The expat life in Cotonou isn’t bad. Benin is essentially a safe country, especially compared to Nigeria, our neighbor to the east.  Here, you are at constant risk of annoyance, hassle, and occasional petty theft, but physical aggression is rare, very rare and frankly, I’m safer here than I would be in any large American city (see exception at end of article).

Cotonou is less a city than a large village; large parts of the streets off the principal arteries are sandy and potholed. “Downtown” is little more than a few dozen shops and a traffic jam, and most Africans do their shopping in the sprawling, chaotic Dantokpa Market, at whose heart lies a vibrant Voodoo fetish market.  We can get better tasting croissants and pastries here than in Washington DC, but we’ll wait for weeks before one of the local supermarkets has cream cheese.  We’ve got talented leather workers, tailors, and artists, but can’t get the parts to fix the air conditioner. And though we successfully dodge the bullet of the European winter, it’s frequently so hot outside that we sweat while toweling off from the shower.

Cost of living

Benin is expensive. The country produces little in the way of agricultural products, and as a result, most of what we consume has been imported at great expense. I’m speaking about expat staples like milk, wheat flour, jam, butter, breakfast cereal, cookies, and such: they’re not cheap. The dependence on imports makes just about everything expensive, from gasoline to bread to shoelaces to butter: it all comes in on ships.

We also have the option of the local food.  The Beninese diet is similar to the cuisine across much of the continent: starchy pâte, a sticky, doughy blob usually made of pounded yam, corn, or manioc, over which a spicy vegetable or meat sauce is poured.  It’s spicy, and too heavy for every day, but not bad when I do eat it.

Dinner parties, orange sand beaches, and infinite minor hassles

Cotonou’s two biggest defects are that (a) everything is harder to accomplish than it should be, and (b) there’s not a whole lot to do.  We don’t even have a movie theater (and never will, given the thriving market for pirated DVDs).  As a result, the expat community takes care of itself in the old way: endless dinner parties, cocktail hours, and invitations.  I’m not complaining, and it’s a healthy reminder of how communities behaved in the days before everyone sequestered themselves in their personal pleasure palaces with their video game consoles, broadband Internet, and other toys.  It’s a revolving community as the expats rotate through, but participating in such a diverse and friendly community is pleasant.

Weekends I’m at the beach surfing (there’s a halfway decent bar break along the coast), or relaxing on the orange sand beach. Evenings I walk the dogs around the neighborhood’s sandy streets, read and write. It’s a simpler lifestyle than the one I lived back in the States, but it has its advantages, and I personally find elegance in simplicity. I also experienced the Harmattan for the first time here, an awe-inspiring meteorological phenomenon born in the Sahara desert: the wind turns 180 degrees during two months and comes from the Sahara, bearing a fine sand that settles everywhere and darkens the afternoon skies.  I sometimes think that experiencing things like this are why I travel, although putting down a shot of whiskey with a king is a pretty cool reason too.

The fact that everything is harder than it should be, though, is the one that slowly eats at your soul: parking, driving through chaotic traffic, arguing with the same people over the same prices every single time, dealing with lousy service, bureaucratic processes that seem both pointless and endless, and the infinite minor hassles that accompany every single transaction is tiring.

Tiring, too, are the repeated power outages, water outages, cell phone outages, the system resets at the Internet provider, the fast broadband that’s actually slow, the saturated cell phone networks, and the phone lines that don’t permit easy calls.  I think back to the days before these services and remember I should be grateful.  But the constant outages are wearing, and in sum lead to the only remedy possible: travel to someplace else once every 4 months.

Benin: birthplace of Voodoo (aka Voudoun)

I mentioned Voodoo. It’s Vaudoun, actually, but yes, Benin is the birthplace of the world’s most misunderstood religion.  Haitians are the second most populous followers of Vaudoun, but it’s because the slave trade carried Beninese to the Caribbean island that Haiti gained the religion.  If you’re thinking “Serpent and the Rainbow,” you are way off; Vaudoun at its roots is an animist religion with strong ties to the natural earth, and a belief in good and bad forces that would be recognizable by anyone who ever watched a Star Wars movie.  Large parts of Benin believe in Vaudoun, but there are lots of Christians and Muslims as well, and everyone seems to live together in a peace much of Africa (not to mention the Balkans!) should envy.

Legacy of the slave trade and modern-day slavery

But there’s no escaping the legacy of slavery here.  You see it in the disorganization, the mistrust, the difficulty with which the Beninese work together toward common goals.  As a white American who experienced the story of the slave trade in middle school textbooks and who thought of the whole story as ancient history, it is eye-opening to see the impacts of slavery in the 21^st century, and to learn that slavery is in no way ancient history in one of the countries that experienced it first hand.

In fact, slavery continues to this day, and not just in Benin.  Throughout Africa, families “lend” their children – sometimes permanently – to construction projects in the city.  These children are poorly paid, sleep on the ground, and remain uneducated for their entire lives.  Call it what you like, but slavery in some form remains a real part of life here.

An elegant austerity

But let’s go back to the fact that three religions and a half dozen ethnic groups have been able to live in relative harmony in one of Africa’s stronger democracies. Benin: quiet, mostly unnoticed, little understood.  It has suffered mightily, and never makes the headlines. Life as an expat here can be frustrating, but not necessarily dangerous. It’s expensive and somewhat boring, but in its simplicity and sparseness it brings elegance to austerity. And from the point of view of a foreigner trying to get a job done, I’d say that being at the center of such a whirling, swirling mass of humanity trying to better its situation is amazing. Life at the mouth of the River of Death is actually pretty peaceful.

Will we next see vacation home for swarms of winter-evading European retirees?  Not likely.  It’s the kind of place that sends you eventually on your way with more questions than answers, and the conviction you understand less of the world than you did when you arrived. In short, Benin will change you, as it has changed me.

——-

(1) There’s one notable, horrible exception.  Peace Corps Volunteer Katie Puzey was assassinated in her sleep in March, 2009.  A stellar volunteer, well-loved by her community and extremely well integrated into the village where she lived, the motives for this atrocious murder are not yet known, and to date, justice has not been rendered.  We will not forget!

Randall Wood is the co-author of Moon Handbook Nicaragua and Moon: Living Abroad in Nicaragua.  He currently manages a $300M development program in Benin and has lived overseas for over a decade.  This article appeared simultaneously at www.therandymon.com).

Dear Miss Move Abroad.
I’m an executive and I travel a good deal for my work. I’ve visited 41 countries on five continents. I’ve had the dubious pleasure of meeting many so called “expats” and have come to this conclusion: Most expats are losers who can’t cut it at home. I’ve yet to meet an expat, anywhere in the world, that makes me say to myself, Now there’s a winner!”

You’re Miss Move Abroad, so I don’t expect you to agree with me. But I dare you to print my letter.

Been There, Met Them

Dear Mr. Been,
How did you know that I can never resist a dare? That’s probably why I’ve lived in so many different places over the years, loser that I am.

But believe it or not, I can see where you might come to your conclusion. Many people flee their home country to escape—from the law, from child support payments, or from their own unfathomable selves. And it’s true that in expat communities all over the world you’ll find some pretty shady characters, people who come for lax law enforcement, the cheap drugs, the discounted sex. Those who in their home countries are either unwanted or wanted (think notices on post office walls).

This, however, is only one of the many varieties of expat, and your views make me suspect that you’re a Layover Larry, with your experience heavy on airports and underlings. Have you ever been to the homes of your colleagues overseas? Do you stay on after your business is concluded, to see what the place is like without your “work” filter operating? You may also be unwittingly narrowing your experience of a place. Do you work hard all day in a sequestered setting and then spend your nights in an expat bar surrounded by herds of expaticus alcoholicus complaining about the natives as they slowly slide off their barstools? Needless to say, these folks aren’t the best representatives of the expat species.

If you take a little more time and seek out other kinds of expats, you might find Peace Corps volunteers, academics or scientists chasing after their subjects, students on a gap year abroad, artists and writers looking for new material or a place cheap enough so that they can concentrate on their vocation rather than on being a wage slave, students of the language or culture, parents who want to broaden their kid’s horizons, or retirees who can finally live where they want regardless of work opportunities.

And Mr. Been, if I may ask, what exactly would cause you to exclaim, “Now there’s a winner?” Seeing yourself in the mirror? Does a person have to match up exactly with your version of success to be worthy? Sounds like you’re ripe for a long-term experience in a radically different culture, if only to show you that there are many, many definitions of success, many of which will look nothing like yours.

It’s the last day of your vacation. Far from being ready to go, you find yourself wondering: What if the flight home leaves and I don’t?

If you seriously consider what it would be like to stay behind every time you travel, you may be a closet expatriate for whom a week at the beach or 10 days in Europe just don’t cut it anymore.

You find yourself dreaming longer-term dreams: a top-floor apartment in an old-world capital. An open-ended stay in a ramshackle village on some forgotten coast. Opening a bed-and-breakfast in a mountain town.

More and more of us are doing it. Between 1966 and 1996, the number of Americans living abroad grew from 70,000 to 4 million, according to the U.S. State Department. By 2006, the number was an estimated 6.6 million. And those are the official counts. Other expats are living under the radar, having dropped off the map.

If you’re past the dreaming stage and want to check out a place for its long-term potential, here are some tips on how to do it.

Stay put. If you’re thinking of moving to a particular place, you’ve probably been there at least once or twice. This time, choose the town or city you liked best and stay there. Rent a villa, find a cheap hotel with a kitchenette or stay with friends.

If you dash around too much you’ll never get a sense of the country’s rhythm. And rhythm is all. It may be love at first sight, but if the beat of the place doesn’t move you, this affair won’t last.

Do everyday things. Forget the monuments, the guided tours or running those Class IV rapids. Instead, get a haircut. Do your laundry. Go with the woman next door to pay her electric bill. Shop for food and make dinner. Gossip with the man selling fennel root. Take in a church service or go to the all-you-can-eat fundraiser for the town’s fire department.

If these activities are difficult because you don’t speak the language, that tells you what you would be up against if you moved there without some language study.

Sit and watch. Find a good perch at the center of it all, and stay there. Have some props — a drink and a book — to make you feel less conspicuous. Practice the lost art of noticing. Does everything shut down between 2 and 5 p.m.? Does the town consist mostly of older women, the men and younger people having fled to the city in search of work? Is it so hot that people work the edges of the day, leaving the midday for naps in the shade?

Take photos of mundane things. The state of the roads. Highway signage (or the lack of it). The prices on menus. What’s available at the local market. The lines at the bank. The cleanliness of the beaches or streets or fields. The smiles or scowls on locals’ faces. The wildlife and insect populations.

Back home, these shots will remind you of the quality of everyday life in your dream destination. Memory plays tricks on us, and once you get home the trip will soon be shrouded in a fog of generalization. We tell friends the trip was life-altering, but we have forgotten (or altered) the particulars. This will help.

Talk to other expatriates. Find them in the market, at Internet cafes and on that traditional expat perch, the bar stool. Ask them when and why they came to be there and how it’s turning out for them. And then listen.

Try not to let your own excitement amplify their positive comments or mute their complaints. Nod when they say making the move was the best decision they have ever made. But also really hear it when they tell you it has taken three years to get permission to renovate the old castle they bought for a song. Or that they’re so starved for English they go out of their way to use the one bilingual ATM in town, just to savor the words, “Would you like a receipt?”

Wherever you go, do some of the very non-vacationy things listed above and you may come back knowing that, yes, you really do want to make the big move and soon. Or you may return with a newfound appreciation of home. Sometimes all it takes to value what you have is to seriously think about giving it up.

And consider what author Alain de Botton discovered on a trip to Barbados. “A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent,” he wrote in “The Art of Travel.” “I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.”

This article by Erin Van Rheenen first appeared in the Los Angeles Time.

Photo by Robert Doisneau, 1966