Considering how many years I have been living abroad, and how many countries I’ve lived in, it should come as no surprise that I have been acquainted with more than a few expat communities. No matter what country/city I’ve found myself in, there have been a fair few expats, and they tend to find each other P.D.Q. After all, most people, maybe I should say humanity in general, tend to be a social species. Sure, there is the odd lone wolf, and I am one of them.
Mostly.
I’ve never really joined any of these communities, exactly. That is to say, the groups usually organize. In the pre- and early Internet age, they would have a bar, restaurant, library, or somewhere else to congregate, and they’d meet each other there and they’d organize events, day trips, parties, or whatever to do together. I’ve never really considered myself a member of any of these more formal groups, but I often find them or get found by them and get to know some of them, and often some of these become friends. I then occasionally socialize with those friends, and that sometimes leads to my taking part in one or two of those events. While I never considered myself a part of the more formal group, I am by default a member of the community. In this way, I’ve noticed a few patterns.
For one thing, though all of these groups have differences, of course. For example, the expat community I found myself being part of in Oaxaca, Mexico (and BTW, any given city has more than one, even several, separate groups, some of whom might sometimes overlap) used Spanish as its lingua franca. There were other languages represented of course. There was one woman from Hungary, for example. But most of them were expats from other Spanish-native countries, so as a group we would speak Spanish. Most others I have encountered were English-speaking, but I was once part of a group in Jakarta, Indonesia whose lingua franca was Mandarin Chinese. This is actually what got me studying Chinese seriously, not, as you might have guessed, living in China.
But they all have more things in common than they have differences. One is that not everyone has to be an expat to be welcome. Not at all. These groups are always, in my experience, very welcoming groups. Anyone is welcome, as long as the person hoping to be accepted has at least a functional command of the group language. There are always some locals. As such, an expat doesn’t, as you by now would have inferred, an expat “member” doesn’t have to be a native speaker of that language.
Another is that speakers at lower levels get help with their language skills. Again – these groups are very welcoming.
They always have at least one designated place where they meet. This means that anyone with friends or acquaintances in that group who gets lonely for whatever reason, can go to that spot (often a bar for this very reason) and find someone to talk to, even if it’s not a close friend.
It was through particular members of some of these communities that I found myself in various bands. This happened in Oaxaca, Jakarta (connected to an English-speaking community) and Shenyang, China.
Well, Tbilisi, Georgia turned out to be a bit different. Something happened that I should have been able to predict but I missed it until I got here. That difference is that here, I work online, from home.
Until coming here, I always had or quickly found a job teaching at some sort of school. Usually, it was just an English or general language school, but I’ve also worked at universities, middle schools, and so on. But this time, I didn’t have a job to go to, so I didn’t have any colleagues to talk to at work, and I don’t even meet any students here as most of my students are in other countries. Turns out that, since I don’t get out and socialize on my own, I was here for almost a full two years before I made any friends. I could have made friends. I just didn’t bother to.
One day, I discovered a very small bar called Chapito’s Mexican Bar. This was a tiny hole in the wall, but they had decent tacos and very good margaritas, so I went and checked it out. Working there was a young man with whom I immediately started talking. I just went there for a plate of tacos and one or two drinks. I ended up staying for several hours, chatting with this guy. It isn’t /wasn’t very busy (I’m not sure if it’s still open; I think they’re in transition), so this guy had plenty of time to chat with me.
This guy told me about an English-language open-mic stand-up comedy night every other Sunday. He was pretty excited about it. He said that he performs at this event every chance he can. So one night I went to check it out, and this community surprised me. Most of the people there were Eastern Europeans, but the common language was English and at a surprisingly high level. There were also quite a few from the Asian sub-continent and a fair few Arabic speakers. I guess they used English because there weren’t enough speakers of another language to form a quorum. There certainly are now; the Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted in a huge number of Russians coming here to escape Putin’s government. But they came and joined this already extant expat community, which already used English. How this large of a group of non-native English speakers from all over the place managed to exist, I’m sure I don’t know, but that’s what it is. I find this wildly interesting. Another interesting thing about this group is that there are almost no Georgians in this group. In my experience, this is also very unusual.
All this to come around to an introduction to the following video. I finally got the opportunity to scratch yet another thing off my bucket list – I finally got the chance to try my hand at stand-up comedy. This video has a cartoony intro and outdo, but the bulk of it consists of my first and Second sets performing stand-up.
Why am I posting this? Am I not embarrassed by this? Well, no. As for the first question, because I haven’t produced any content for my video channel OR my blog in far too long, I’m not embarrassed because I’m telling you here now that it’s the first (and second) time I’ve ever even tried this. I’m not showing off my comedy skills. Rather, I’m showing myself actually doing something interesting. Possibly, it will encourage someone else to say, “You know, I could do that. I could do BETTER than that, and if this happy asshole can suck it up and get up there, SO CAN I!” And of course, you can.
Enjoy.
- P.D.Q. = Pretty Damn Quick, slang way of saying quickly
- Lone wolf = person who prefers to keep to himself rather than socialize
- By default = through lack of action; just because of an already existing situation
- BTW = abbreviation of “by the way”, introducing a related but not necessary point
- Lingua franca = common language chosen by a group of people from various native languages
- Infer = understand information given only indirectly
- Acquaintance = a person one knows, but not very well
- Colleague = co-worker OR someone who works in the same profession
- Hole in the wall – describes an open-for-public business that is surprisingly small and often difficult to find
- Check out = in this context, this phrasal verb means to go and see or experience something
- Asian sub-continent = part of Southern Asia that covers mostly India but also the countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka
- Try one’s hand = attempt doing something for the first time
