I have left very specific instructions -
1: Remove either the entire Left or Right arm from the body
2: Arrange for the cheapest incineration possible
3: Scatter my ashes wherever seems like a place I’d like
4: Mummify the previously removed arm in order to keep an insanely creepy heirloom backscratcher with a brass handle which MUST be passed down to any descendants, and displayed in their home, on a mantelpiece, for example.
Absolutely typical.
Friends of mine moved to Bristol for University, and despite promises of ‘university life’ and so on, managed to finish their degrees, get jobs, move to Brighton, and I’m pretty sure they live in a house made up exclusively of European expats who have essentially not managed to make any great British friends over the course of 6 years of living there.
As an Expat (Specifically, a Brit who moved to their country and made friends with them before they moved to ‘my’ country, I don’t think it’s their fault - personal experience shows me they have no issue making friends with Brits. It’s more that as an expat, you tend to gravitate towards others who have similar lifestyles/experiences, and those tend to be expats.
Wherever I’ve lived in the past, my circle has typically been made up of ‘internationals’ - all of us are just foreigners trying to make it in a strange land, and it is comforting being able to instantly click over shared experiences such as how fucking mental visa paperwork is, or how difficult it is to buy (product X) outside of your home country.
Join an archery club, find the local cave divers, get acquainted with the local Psychedelic Trance scene, find both an Indian and a Thai restaurant, and buy a massive sound system.
I’m at home almost immediately.
To be fair, as an American in Europe, you are a second class person.
This is largely due to you being an inferior class of human, and there isn’t an awful lot you can do about it.
I’d say just go home. Both countries win - France will be better off without an American, and America could do with some more people who have lived overseas to give it a sense of perspective.
Just be prepared for the fact that despite it all being great during a holiday, you’ll soon feel just as out of place upon returning to live full time in the US. You’ll find elements of French life, like free at point of use healthcare, fresh croissants, healthier food, more sensible attitudes to work, public transport, liberalism, absence of automatic weapons in the hands of schoolchildren, lack of house sized trucks, and so on, arte all things you miss back in the land of corn syrup and 100k MRI’s :)
I lived in Tokyo for 14 years, Singapore for 2, and Surabaya for 1.
I’ve never lived in my own country, and moving to rural Italy from Singapore was my entry into Europe. It felt completely different, but largely because it was the first time I hadn’t lived in a city in my life.
Adjusting to the very different speed of life was a bit weird, as well as the absolutely catastrophic state of Italian rural public transport, but otherwise relatively unchallenging.
Subsequently moving to Scotland was very interesting - once again I was in a city, but the sheer quantity of street crimes in Scotland was staggering - Friday nights (Fight night? wtf) were dangerous, and if you stood on a main street in any Scottish city between 12 and 3am you could see like police getting assaulted, massive fights, stabbings and so on.
As a young teenager I used to freely walk around tokyo all night without seeing anything similar, and even when I returned as an adult and did much more ‘night life’ type stuff I never saw anything similar.
Add to that things like regular house break-ins, people vandalising stuff in a way that they don’t in Singapore and Japan, car theft, and so on, it was pretty wild.
The only major upside was the huge quantity of readily available party drugs in Scotland - something which I love, but which carried death penalties in all 3 of the Asian countries I’ve lived in.