Imagine expat life with:

1. No email or internet, no Skype, no WhatsApp.

2. No international phone calls for less than $4/minute.

3. Only snail mail.

4. No low cost airlines.

5. The Atlantic ocean between you and your family.

6. One parents only family visit in one year, brothers and parents another year.

7. You go six weeks without speaking your native language or hearing it on TV.

8. You feel lucky when you meet a Uruguayan exile in Barcelona who fled the 1971 coup to live in Catalunya. When you ask how she gets along with Catalans, she replies in perfect English, "once you cross the ocean, you're always on the wrong side." You have it easy.

You can be a somewhere person or an anywhere person. There are costs and benefits to each. The surest route to discontent is to want contradictory things simultaneously.