Arriving
Moving to a place you loved on holiday means unlearning the holiday
A fortnight somewhere is a sample taken at the best time of year, in the best part of town, with money to spend and nothing to arrange, and almost none of it predicts what living there is like.
By Manish Trivedi3 min read
A holiday is a biased sample and the bias is enormous
People frequently choose where to live abroad on the strength of having enjoyed themselves there, which is not an unreasonable starting point and is a very poor sole input. The visit happened at a chosen time of year, in a district selected for visitors, without work, without administration, and with a budget deliberately loosened for the occasion.
Every one of those factors is reversed by moving. The season becomes all seasons, the district becomes wherever the rent works, the days fill with obligations, and the money becomes finite in the ordinary way. What is left is the place itself, which may still be excellent and is certainly different.
The specific error is not choosing badly. It is expecting continuity between the two experiences, so that the ordinary difficulty of a first year is read as the place having somehow deteriorated.
The things you liked may be the things you now avoid
A visitor values the old centre, the terraces, the market, the crowds in the square in the evening. A resident of the same city frequently finds that district expensive, noisy, poorly supplied with the shops that a household actually needs, and full of people on holiday.
This is not a paradox. Districts that concentrate visitors reorganise themselves around visitors, and the ordinary infrastructure of living gets displaced by the profitable infrastructure of a fortnight. Somebody living there full time is a minority user of their own neighbourhood.
The practical consequence is that where you stayed and where you should live are usually different places, and letting go of the first is part of the transition. People who insist on living inside the postcard tend to pay a great deal for it and to enjoy it less each year.
Familiarity is real and it is shallower than it feels
None of this means prior knowledge is worthless. Having been somewhere repeatedly, you arrive with a rough map, some sense of the language, a few habits and a feeling of orientation that a complete newcomer does not have, and that genuinely reduces the initial shock.
The risk is that the confidence outruns the knowledge. Somebody who has visited a city six times feels like a near-local and knows the visitor layer of it thoroughly — the transport from the airport, the restaurants, the museums — while knowing nothing at all about how to register somewhere, what a lease means locally, or how a household is heated.
Recognising which layer you know is the useful move. Prior visits are a head start on geography and no head start whatever on bureaucracy, which is where the first year is mostly spent.
You are trading a refuge for an address
There is a quieter cost that people rarely anticipate. A place you loved to visit was doing a job in your life: it was where you went when you needed to leave everything behind, and it worked partly because it was not home. Moving there permanently consumes it.
That loss is real and it is worth acknowledging rather than dismissing, because it explains a specific and confusing sadness that can arrive a few months in. The place has not disappointed you. It has been promoted out of a role it was good at.
Some people manage this by keeping a different somewhere for escapes, which sounds precious and is quite practical. Others find the ordinary version of the place better than the holiday one. Both outcomes are common.
How to test the idea before committing to it
The obvious correction to a biased sample is to take a better one. Visit outside the season you know, stay in an ordinary residential district rather than the centre, and spend the time doing dull things: a weekly shop, a bus at rush hour, a look at what a doctor or a school actually involves.
Talk to people who live there year-round rather than to people who serve visitors, and ask about the parts that don’t appear in any recommendation. What is the winter like, how long does anything official take, what do people complain about, what would they warn a friend about.
And then decide, knowing that the answer may still be yes. Plenty of people move to a place they first met on holiday and are extremely happy there. They are simply happy about a different set of things than the ones that first attracted them, and the ones who anticipated that made the transition more comfortably.
Common questions
Is it a mistake to move somewhere I only know as a visitor?
It is a common route and it is not inherently wrong, provided the holiday impression is treated as one data point rather than as evidence about daily life. A longer visit outside the peak season, spent in an ordinary district, corrects most of the distortion cheaply.
Should I avoid living in the tourist centre?
Usually, for cost, noise and the absence of everyday shops, though it depends on the city and on how large the visitor district is. Living a short distance outside it often gives you the same access at a considerably lower price.
Will I stop enjoying a place if I live there?
Some of the enjoyment changes rather than disappears, since the holiday version depended partly on being temporary. Most people report trading a bright, shallow pleasure for a slower and more durable attachment, which is a reasonable exchange but not an identical one.
Reporter, Globetrotter Talks
Manish covers arriving, visas & paperwork, money abroad and the questions readers actually send in and is unreasonably interested in the detail nobody else checks.
