A year is the unit in which a place becomes legible

Everything important repeats yearly

A city presents itself very differently depending on when you meet it. Weather, daylight, what is open, what people do with their evenings, which parts of town are full and which are deserted — all of it moves on an annual cycle, and a resident who has been through one full turn knows things that no amount of research supplies.

This is the fundamental difference between visiting and staying. A visit samples a place at one point in its year. A long stay gives you the whole curve, including the months nobody would choose to visit in, which are frequently the months that explain the place best.

It is also why the first year is tiring in a way the second is not. Everything is happening for the first time.

The administrative year has its own rhythm

Beyond the weather there is a bureaucratic calendar that residents internalise and newcomers keep colliding with. Tax deadlines. Insurance renewals. School enrolment windows. The period when everybody moves house, which is set by local convention and makes flats scarce and removal vans expensive.

There are also the closures. Many countries have periods when a large share of the country stops — a holiday month, a religious festival, a stretch between public holidays — and offices, trades and shops close with them. Trying to complete anything official in that window is a lesson everybody learns once.

Local convention about all of this is rarely published, and one question to a colleague usually answers it. Ask early which months are useless for getting things done.

Housing and heat are seasonal problems

Buildings are designed for their local climate and often for the version of it that prevailed when they were built. A flat that is pleasant in September can be very cold in January or unbearable in July, and neither is visible at a viewing in the other season.

Heating and cooling costs follow the same pattern, and a newcomer’s first winter bill is frequently a shock, particularly where billing is quarterly or where a flat is heated by a communal system that charges by a formula. Ask previous tenants or the landlord what the annual cost looks like rather than judging by your first month.

Daylight deserves a mention of its own. Moving to a substantially different latitude changes how much light you get in winter and summer, and the effect on sleep and mood is real and widely reported. It is worth knowing before it happens rather than diagnosing yourself in December.

Festivals and the local social calendar

Every country has a set of dates that structure the social year, and participating in them is one of the more reliable ways to stop feeling like an observer. Some are national and obvious. Others are local, specific to a town or a neighbourhood, and considerably more interesting.

They also expose the shape of a society: which relationships are prioritised, when families gather, what is closed and who is expected to be where. A foreign resident who spends the major holidays alone in an empty city learns something accurate and bleak about their position, and one who accepts an invitation learns something else entirely.

Accept the invitations. Ask what is customary to bring, since the answer is specific and getting it roughly right is appreciated more than it should be. If you can, offer something from your own tradition in return, which turns you from a guest into a participant and is almost always received well.

What the second year feels like

The commonly reported experience is that a second year is substantially easier, and not because anything external changed. You know what is coming. The bureaucratic dates are diarised, the winter is anticipated, the good months are protected, and the shops, the doctor, the mechanic and the route to the airport are settled questions.

That is also, for many people, the point at which the place stops being a project. The energy previously spent on figuring out how everything works becomes available for actually living, which is what a long stay was for.

It is worth knowing this in advance, particularly during a difficult first winter. A great deal of what makes an early stay hard is simply the absence of a completed cycle, and that is a problem that solves itself with time rather than effort.