Global Journeys and New Horizons
Some people leave because they have to. Some leave because they want to. Most leave for reasons that take years to fully understand.
Living abroad is one of those experiences that sounds simple from the outside — you move, you adjust, you build a new life. In practice it’s messier, more disorienting, and ultimately more rewarding than any description prepares you for. The first few months feel like a permanent vacation. Then the vacation ends and the actual work begins.
The honeymoon phase is real. Everything is new. The grocery store is an adventure. The commute is interesting. The language barrier is charming rather than exhausting. You walk around your new city with the particular energy of someone who has chosen to be there — which is different from the energy of someone who simply ended up somewhere.
Culture Shock
Then culture shock arrives. It’s rarely dramatic. It’s usually quiet — the accumulation of small moments where the invisible rules of a new culture become visible because you’ve broken them without knowing they existed. How you greet people. The way you queue. When you talk about money, or don’t. The amount of space you’re supposed to leave in a conversation before responding. These things are never written down anywhere. You learn them by getting them wrong.
This is where the real growth happens. Living abroad forces you to confront assumptions you didn’t know you were making. Your way of doing things — which felt like the obvious way, the normal way — turns out to be just one option among thousands. That realisation is disorienting at first. Eventually it becomes one of the most useful things you know.
The hardest part is belonging. You become a person caught between two places. Back home, you’ve changed in ways that are difficult to explain. In your new country, you will always carry some trace of where you came from — an accent, a reference point, a different instinct about how things should work. That in-between position can be lonely. It can also be an advantage. People who have lived across cultures see things that people rooted in one place often miss.
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WAYS OF LIVING: THE ARCHIVE
NAO has been talking to those who made the move for love, work, reinvention, or simply to find what was on the other side. While their stories are different, the underlying experiences have more in common than you would expect.
Trailblazers of Change — Eline Dominic’s humanitarian work takes the concept of living abroad to a different level entirely — not just building a life somewhere new, but dedicating that life to something larger.
Marc Cinanni — Italian-Canadian. United Nations. Oxford. Ashram. And eventually a retreat in the Catalan hills. The long way around, but it got him somewhere real.
Myrthe Duursma — Her episode covers life in southern Spain and the experience of putting down roots somewhere unexpected.
Erik Nieminen — Built a life and a business across borders. One of the more practical conversations on the site.
Olivia Baudet — A story about movement, adaptation, and finding a way to be at home in more than one place.
Albert Frantz — An American concert pianist who won a Fulbright scholarship to Vienna and never left. He talks about the arts, universal healthcare, and why Europe gave him a different idea of what a life could look like.
Luisa Machacón — Colombian photographer and poet based in Amsterdam. Her book No Guardamos las Semillas explores what gets lost when culture meets concrete. Her story is about carrying two identities and making something from the gap between them.
Kwan Prasarnpan — A perspective from Southeast Asia on what it means to build a life across cultures.
Antonietta De Giovanni — Her episode covers the specific experience of building an identity in a country that isn’t the one you grew up in.
Vacances en Luberon — A restored farmhouse in Provence built around the idea that slowing down is its own kind of adventure.
Dessert First — Julia Gindra turned a creative passion into a business abroad. Her story is about building something from scratch in unfamiliar territory.