What expats miss most about home

The run-up to Christmas is one of the best times to be in the UK. The festive lights come on as the dark nights draw in and sometimes it seems that the country was built specifically for the season: cosy pubs, petrichor-perfumed forests and carol concerts in village churches basked in candlelight.

For those living abroad, the days can be bittersweet – a reminder of all the family, friends and traditions that they’ve left behind. There were many things I loved about living in Switzerland, but there were some things I really missed about home and that feeling intensified over the festive season.

One of the most basic was the tea. The British shelf at the local supermarket sold one brand and it was as dull as dishwater. Whenever my mum visited, her suitcases were filled with PG Tips.

A good cuppa, it turns out, is an almost universal preoccupation among British expats. “We have a British shop (although since Brexit, it’s now mostly an Irish shop) and I can get loose leaf Yorkshire tea there,” says author and language tutor Jenny Wilson, who has lived in a suburb of Brussels for 17 years. “It’s a 25-minute drive, but I stock up on my loose leaf tea, Mr Kipling French Fancies and Irn Bru and we’re all set.”

Wedding stationer Florrie de Havilland, who lived in Germany for seven years, managed to avoid that hassle in a novel way. “If I ordered something in the UK, I’d get it sent to my parents, and then they would unwrap whatever it was that I ordered and, if it was fragile, they would buy those 400 packs of tea bags and then decant them into freezer bags to use as bubble wrap,” she says.

Meal deals and proper coffee

It’s not just a decent brew that British expats long for though. De Havilland admits: “I did miss a good meal deal when I lived in Germany. It’s insane, but I missed them so much.”

“I cannot fault German bread. The only problem with German bread is that Germans think it is the be all and end all,” she explains.

“With a meal deal, you get your sandwich, your snack and your drink. In Germany, they do sometimes have custom sandwiches in the supermarket but they look absolutely dire. They usually have no salad, nothing colorful, and are packed into a thing that’s far too small. So you go to a bakery, and then it gets more expensive. They’re always an awkward size. One was too small for lunch, but two was quite a lot. The fillings are limited. They have cheese, they have ham, they have salami. And maybe, if you’re lucky, they have cheese and ham.”

Those who have found themselves in the UK from foreign climes, have encountered their own food issues. A rainy barbecue may be a British institution but marketing coach Karen Webber, who came to the UK from South Africa when she was 23, missed her home country’s braais, social gatherings around an open fire barbecue.

My own South African father’s were legendary, starting early in the morning with the ceremonial building of a structure out of old bricks and chicken wire, and involving several rounds of marinated meats.

“It’s not just the food, it’s the whole atmosphere around it, the whole social element, the fact that it takes hours and nobody cares,” says Webber. “It’s extremely laid back, and it’s just so part of our culture. I don’t think a barbecue and a braai are the same thing at all. Even if it’s exactly the same menu, it can’t be replicated.”

Our coffee culture was also a shock to US expat Taylor Giacoma, a musician whose latest song Here And Now explores the idea of not quite belonging. “It took me a very long time to adjust to instant coffee being a normal thing. I’m not saying that we don’t have instant coffee in the States, because we do – but you wouldn’t make a regular cup of instant coffee for somebody. I miss going in and getting a certain kind of coffee just anywhere. I miss getting OK coffee everywhere. I miss free refills on coffee. I miss never-ending coffee. Can you tell I like coffee?”

Under the weather

Surprisingly, the Great British Winter isn’t necessarily off-putting to those from warmer climes. “It’s always been romanticised,” says Webber. “When it snows, I’m still completely giddy, and I’ve lived here 20 years. I really love the excitement of Christmas and the lights and the snow.”

The lack of reliable sunshine, however, has proved a different matter. “I grew up by the beach and I remember there’d be a little bit of a breeze, and I’d go, ‘oh no, that’s definitely not a beach day. We’ll just do something else for now’,” she says. “Obviously, if you lived your life like that in the UK, you’d never do anything or go anywhere. I miss the ability to plan outdoorsy things without needing a back-up plan or to take several extra layers and a waterproof.”

Even people used to the cold find the British weather challenging. “There aren’t seasons here like we have in the States,” says Giacoma, who grew up partly in Upstate New York. “The hot and the cold. It sounds weird to miss the extremes, but I do miss a good rip-roaring thunderstorm.”

Having both lived in the UK for more than a decade, Webber and Giacoma seem to have learned to talk about the weather with pride. Wilson says she misses this in Belgium, “and the acknowledgement that it means so much more.”

It’s good to talk

Chatting about the rain over a cuppa is as British as you can get, but attempting to banter in another language can be fraught. De Havilland took intensive German lessons and worked while in the country, but craved everyday chatter. “They say that Brits love small talk and no other country does, but everyone has their own kind of small talk,” she says. “They never teach you how to start a conversation with people so I found that quite difficult and I had to learn by doing.”

Meanwhile, South African Monica Roberts, who lived for 15 years in the UK before moving to France to start a painting holiday company with her husband, says her use of the phrase “a monkey’s wedding” to describe rain on an otherwise bright day is always met with blank looks in the UK. There’s a cultural barrier even if there isn’t a language one.

Giacoma has experienced this too. “The word ‘quite’ means ‘very’ in American English – it never means ‘kinda’. Whereas in British English, as you know, quite more often means ‘kinda’,” says Giacoma. “I have stepped in this – I put my whole foot in this quite early on, unfortunately. So I learned. But I literally avoided using the word at all for years.”

Despite all this, if you spend long enough anywhere, it becomes your home instead. When Wilson comes to the UK now, she finds herself missing things about Belgium, including the incredible chocolate.

“For the first few years, I was always saying ‘we’re going home for Christmas’. And then, a few years ago, I said ‘we’re staying home for Christmas,’” she says. “And I thought, ‘that’s a moment’. But it’s not an overnight thing. It’s been years in the making.”