After I live overseas, I realised that some stuffs that people in Indo think would happen to people living abroad, are not true. Some are even ridiculous lol I tried to think and remember of all those things, and here are what I can think of:
1. Your English is definitely absolutely fluent perfect. Or as my friend puts it, "uda cas cis cus" XD
2. You forget your mother's tongue and even pick up western accent when speaking Indo. This is very common to see in Indonesian sinetron. The most memorable one was the one portrayed by Feby Febiola I think, in Tersanjung as Tante America.
Her performance was so ridiculous that it was memorable! Not only picking up western accent when speaking Indo is practically not going to happen if you don't learn to speak Indo overseas, her English in that sinetron was TERRIBLE as well. I can understand if you have that western accent, but that means your English must be perfect too!! If ur English is THAT bad, then there is no way your Indo has western accent! Gees... Do your research madam!
3. You can't find Indonesian food overseas. The fact is, prior to leaving Indo, I didn't eat much of Indonesian food. I.e. krecek, gudeg, Ayam penyet etc etc. I actually tried a lot of Indo food for the first time here in Sydney. As for the taste, of course some are really bad (I still remember that mi tek tek that cost me $10 a plate and tasted NOTHING like mi tek tek -_-"), but some of them are really good. So when my auntie in Jakarta offers me food, saying "you cant find this in Sydney right?', though I still eagerly accept it, :p most of the time I say "I can, but the taste might not be that authentic."
4. You like western food better than Indo now. Hmmmm... Not really... I don't know about everyone, but between me and my friends, we all still prefer Indo/Chinese food. We do like western food more than the first time we landed in the land of Oz, but we won't say our favourite is western food. We can crave, but we can't imagine eating it every day :l
5. You speak English all the time and meet more Caucasians than Asians. Well... Not in Sydney lol This city is SO multicultural, just name a nationality you want to meet and there will be one. Actually, if I go to Sydney CBD, I see more Asians than Caucasians. Of course this includes Australian Born Asians too, but you get the picture :) as for speaking English all the time, that really depends on your friends . I do speak 100% English at work, but my friends used to work for companies that have a lot of Indo people, so they spoke Indo at work and at home. And most of our friends are Indo too. So, really.. depends...
6. You must be filthy rich. Maybe the sound of living abroad is so cool? So some people who heard that I live abroad usually say, "Oh? How good, you have a lot of money. Must be very nice ya?". But in truth, I worked while I was a fulltime student in uni. In my last year in uni I even had 3 different casual jobs! It was pretty hard to juggle on my last semester. I was lucky to have a very understanding manager back then. Then after I graduated, I didn't get a full time job. Instead, I worked on 4 different jobs. A 3 days office junior job, 2 days of handing free magazines and 3-4 days a week in a supermarket. It's not as sparkly as people think it is.
So that's my list of things people think will happen to people living abroad. If you have other thought, let me know and I'll say if it's true or not :)
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