My blog was born after my expat move from London to Dubai when I wanted to create a space where I could share my experiences and hopefully help other expats going through the same transition. I thoroughly enjoyed growing up in Dubai, but fast-forward around 7 years and I’ve just headed out on my own new expat adventure. I decided to move from Dubai to Washington DC as a university student, and who knows where the next point of my expat move will be after this! I wanted to write this post to walk through why I decided to make this expat move on my own and talk about some of the emotions/feelings that I’m experiencing at the moment.

I guess I could have chosen the “easy” option and have chosen to either stay in Dubai or move back to London for a university education. I say easy here, just because it would mean moving to or staying in a place that I am extremely familiar and comfortable with. But instead, I decided to persue the education and experience I wanted, even if that meant moving across the world to a place I don’t know too well! I was also extremely lucky to have all these options, both academically and financially, which I recognize.

I had been to Washington DC a few times before as a tourist and had visited Georgetown University, the school I currently go to. But being a tourist and actually moving to a place are two extremely different things. I’m lucky that my older sister also goes to school in the same place as me, but other than that, we basically have no other family around us and are both adapting to a new place! As a teenager who is just working this out, it’s exciting, but also stressful and nerve-wracking a lot of the time.

Like the beginning of any expat move, I’m still getting to know the area around me. I absolutely love Georgetown and the Washington DC area! I’m also meeting really amazing people and am enjoying myself. However, there are also days where I feel homesick and riddled with anxiety, and I just have to tell myself that this is normal! There are some moments where I feel like I’m really settling in and getting used to life here, and the next moment I could be crying and missing home. I feel like these are the things no one tells you about making your own expat move abroad at such a young age!

This experience has sort of opened my eyes to a whole new area of expat life that I’d like to write about on this blog. In my last expat move, I moved abroad with my family, but this time I’ve moved alone. I think a lot of the expat stories I hear are about people moving with their families or moving to be closer to family, but we don’t hear too many stories about people moving alone. It’s a difficult experience and I’d love to share more about it! I’m still working it out day by day and do definitely not have the whole solo expat move thing worked out. Regardless, I’d like to use this space as a little sounding board to share my experiences and hear about other people’s solo expat move experiences.

So, from a college-expat-teen who is just trying to work things out and settle down in a new place, I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about what’s going on in my life at the moment.

See you next week for another post!