Filled with thoughts and dreams of one day escaping the American continent(s), I've often naively contemplated on the lives of ex-patriates and on perhaps becoming one myself. My first real attempt to escape was in the summer of 2006 when I went to Bangkok, Thailand with the intention of becoming an ESL teacher. Job connections arranged, tickets purchased, a taxi called, and a plane boarded. Long story short, after a month or so I decided it would be best not to establish residence what with all the militant Muslim incursions from the South, an ailing King (who died shortly after I left), and open sewers in the nation's capital. Once I quit the job I hadn't actually started, it turned out that I couldn't book a return flight for another three weeks and therefore I would have plenty of time to travel in Thailand and attempt to steer clear of touristy activities like see the world's third oldest venomous snake farm, and focus on documenting my interaction with an extremely foreign culture.
The only sciency part of this interaction was that I decided to visit during the Summer monsoon season. Growing up in Western Washington, I've always considered myself used to and even a fan of the rain, but the amount of rain monsoon season in Thailand brings exceeded far beyond beyond any realistic expectation I had of what it meant when someone says "a lot of rain." I could ramble on about how low and fast the clouds moved in and out over my humid hotel room or how the seemingly 50mph winds turned the rain completely sideways, but I don't want to digress from how I think ex-patriates may potentially cope with notions of home, work, and the field (having seriously considered ex-patriatism myself by this point).
Usually, the scientific or intellectual field expedition ends and people go back home. But when people make field and home the same place, how might their work, or perhaps more specifically, their politics of identity, change as a result? I can only speculate about how a white male, for example, could move from America or Europe to Singapore, take up residence for some 15 plus years and consider himself a local -- especially when scientific / intellectual work continues throughout those years using field now home as a data set. I do not feel entirely qualified to answer this inquiry with any certainty, but I think that ex-patriatism is the extreme case when work and travel influence home and indentity.
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Your description of the monsoon shows how being an ex-patriot is learned. The weather seems to suck up alot of waking thoughts when you are new. Hey, it looks nice, lets see a snake farm. That sounds like a good day trip.
On the big Island I learned never to assume that the small black cloud is harmless, especially at 1000 feet in early afternoon. A poncho won't help, you'll sweat to death if you cover up.
The first time it rained there I was alone in a house that had no glass on the windows, just frames. A shitload of flying cockroaches (see Buick circa 1973 for actual size)flooded the house. The sound of their huge bodies crackled against the walls and furniture and, once, my forehead. One climbed effortlessly to the top of a lampshade, teetering with flailing antennae, looking right at me as if to say "what the hell you doing here."
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