BORGED! Expat moves from New Zealand to Norway to be acquired by Cisco This week's expat has two lessons for us. The first concerns life in remote countries beginning with “N” where the mountains and snow are pretty decent. Welcome to Oslo The second thing Kane Archer's tale of moving from New Zealand to Norway and back teaches us is what it's like to be acquired by Cisco. Over to you, Kane …
There do seem to be two types of ex-pats. Those who want to learn about the place they go, and those who want to make it look and feel like home. For the latter types I have to ask, why go?
As an ex-pat I couldn't agree more with the comments made. Learn the language, enjoy the positive differences and don't get hung up on the negative ones.
Sure, I still watch UK TV, it's nice to unwind in front of something familiar in the evening, but I try very hard to avoid Irish pubs, though, since they are usually full of drunken ex-pats whinging about UK football.
>For the latter types I have to ask, why go?
I want to ask those people "why stay?". For some reason Youtube thinks that because I live in a non-English speaking country but have my language set to UK English that I want to have expat vlogs in my recommendations. Giving every single one a thumb down doesn't seem to have done anything.
Inevitably there will be some bitchy title that'll get my back up so I'll actually watch the video to find yet another person moaning on about how XYZ is so backward and stupid here. I might even agree with them. But if you spend your days making and uploading videos moaning about where you have chosen to live I have little sympathy for you.
head to the middle East. It is all Real Madrid and Barcelona.
I was in a 4* hotel in Jordan recently. Getting them to change the channel from a re-run of a re-run of a 4yr old el-Classico game to see a premier league game was an impossibility.
I've encountered the same in Dubai, Doha and Bahrain. The sports bars often have the flags of Real, Barca, Inter, Bayern and sometimes Liverpool up on the walls. The rest? forget it.
Messi is a hero. He is in a lot of TV adverts.
Ironically, it is easier to see the likes of Man U (note to self to wash mouth out with soap), Arsenal (ditto) and Chelsea( ditto twice over) in places like Sao Paulo.
{I support a team in the conference ok!}
>Every one of these blokes says "stay away from other expats"
Expats that seek out places and ways to be around expats usually have one reason for doing so: to have a good old whine about anything and everything.
- If you go half way across the world only to seek out people that might have watched the same TV as you back home to become mates with you're doing it wrong.
- If you seek out expats to get advice on stuff like visas etc you'll usually come back with a bunch of crap stories and almost no correct information.
Could you ask a bit more about people's "stage in life" when they expatriate themselves? Are your interviewees aged 25 and childless, 40 with kids in tow, or 55 with kids all grown up? Expat life can be great, certainly, but I assume there's a golden age where you have globally-marketable skills (not too young) and a sufficient lack of home attachments (not too old / no kids). Or am I over-simplifying things?
Hey Tim - Cisco, like any huge multinational company, has both good and bad things going for it - their benefits for staff (and families) in the non-US sites are pretty good. But it's not a hugely agile company in terms of internal processes, however. When you're working for a smaller company you get used to things happening quickly and being able to implement processes/projects without toooooo much bureaucracy, something not so easy to accomplish with a huge corporate.
They bought Tandberg because their own VC offerings at the time were pretty woeful and the stuff Tandberg was putting out was generally very well regarded in the industry. As far as I know there are still quite a few Tandberg people working for the Borg, although many are/were snatched up by smaller companies.
Of course the culture at the company did change when it was bought out by the Borg but considering who the other contenders were who were looking at acquiring it... let's just say it could have been a lot worse :-)
We did the move purely as a temporary thing for around 5 years to earn a chunk of money to build our dream house once we moved back to NZ. That and just experience living in a foreign country/culture for a few years and do a bit of travel. We always intended to move back to NZ, being acquired by Cisco didn't really force the issue one way or another for us.
- Kane
"Let's just say that most Norwegians wouldn't know what a rugby ball if one jumped up and bit them on their attractively ski-toned posteriors."
Oh come on. When I used to work with Norwegians, drinks after work often turned into impromptu singing occasions, and they knew the words to *all* the dirty rugby songs.
I moved to Norway from the UK around 8-9 years ago. For me I prefer living here over the UK, people are nicer, didn't find it hard getting in like was said in the article. Pay is alot better, on moving I got around double what I got in the UK, this was while starting over, base pay. Now I'm at around 6 times what I got.
Most things are very expensive, notably cars, the tax on cars will be close to half of the cost of the car, unless its electric, then there is zero tax.
House prices were lower if outside of the main cities, but going are going up. Electricity is lower.
If I was given a choice to move back to the uk, with the same pay, so making in reality around 50% more taking into account of living costs, I would stay here in Norway.
The environment is a lot better. I live in the north of Norway now.
I moved without a family, now I have 3 children.
...because it's scary expensive. We're talking twenty quid for a six-pack of beer at the supermarket. And when I say beer, I mean Heineken. Drinkable beer is extra!
I was on holiday there earlier this year; I went to Tromsø to see the midnight sun, and had a great time. The scenery is fantastic, the people I met were friendly (although I wanted to see empty places, so I wasn't socialising much), the hill walking is great, if a little surreal --- I walked up the local mountain and about 900m up was trudging through the snow in shorts and a T-shirt and when i was passed a family with a six year old bounding up the mountainside, shortly followed by a couple of women in bikini tops --- and there's plenty of it. But the prices are terrifying. I got an Airbnb apartment which was astonishingly reasonably priced, but even self catering and buying from the local supermarket, the prices made me cringe.
...and I'm an expat living in Zürich. Yes, it's true. Norway is even more expensive than Switzerland.
You're not wrong about the costs, especially alcohol. The intriguing thing is that other than beer, the only place to buy booze by the bottle is the Vinmonopolet (literally wine monopoly) which is run by the Norsk government. It's very tightly regulated which is one reason the costs are so high.
First time I shouted a round at a pub for colleagues, the cost of it made me swear out loud. It was 4 times the cost of what it would have been in NZ.
Tromsø is fantastic - went there during both Winter and Summer. Really does feel like a city at the edge of the world. Dog-sledding under the aurora borealis is quite a surreal, mind-blowing experience.
My guidebook said that there is a cultural drinking problem, even more so than the UK; plus a marginalised indigenous population (I was really astonished to see homeless people in Tromsø). The combination is problematic. I don't blame them for taxing the hell out of it.
Incidentally, it's also the only place I've ever found zero-alcohol beer that was worth drinking. Also cheaper than soda.
... who finds things a bit cliquey - I'm also an expat Kiwi but in Germany, not Norway, and compared to how things are in NZ, here it's very much more restrained/closed off. Hard to get accepted in a group of friends etc. Once it happens, you're golden though and they do tend to be much more likely to help you out with things, watch your back etc. rather than just 'people to go get wasted with'.
I wonder if it might be something to do with the influx of foreign workers coming into these Euro countries which makes the natives a little cautious/annoyed until they get to know you?
In Norge at least there are (or were) a lot of Polish and Romanian workers flooding into the country who are much cheaper to hire than Norwegians for various (typically manual labour) jobs. This was looked on as both a good and bad thing depending on who you talked with, and whether they needed plumbing, electrical or building work done ;-)
To be fair there is a bit of that here in NZ as well with various Asian, Indian and Pacific Island immigrants. Many people here tend to be a bit stand-offish toward them until they get to know them better.
Just a thought, anyway.
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