"Anyone with money can live abroad. It’s a sort of an extended holiday. The true test of an expatriate is holding down a job, learning a language, paying taxes..."

"... passing a local driving test, negotiating the culture, truckling to unbudgeable authority and now and then enduring the gibes of co-workers. I was conspicuous in Africa as a muzungu and as an ang-mo-kui (red-haired devil) in Singapore, and very often an English person would begin a sentence, 'Well, you Yanks….' There is also an existential, parasitical, rootless quality to being an expatriate, which can be dizzying: You are both somebody and nobody, often merely a spectator. I always felt in my bones that wherever I went, I was an alien. That I could not presume or expect much hospitality, that I had nothing to offer except a willingness to listen, that wherever I was, I had no business there and had to justify my intrusion by writing about what I heard. Most travel, and a lot of expatriate life, can be filed under the heading 'Trespassing.'..."

Writes Paul Theroux, in "The Hard Reality American Expats Quickly Learn" (NYT). And that's a free-access link, which I'm giving you because I love Theroux's book "The Mosquito Coast," and the book is connected to the topic under discussion, as he explains. Also there's a great Mark Twain quote and a pretty decent JFK quote. So, please read the whole thing.