The Tux in the Backpack

Allow me to insert a more personal post on this Flashpacking Blog. It has to do with Flashpacking as well, of course.
The thing is.. maybe I don’t want to be a Digital Nomad. I know I am a nomad and that is not too likely to change, but maybe I want to be a slower, employed nomad instead of a digital one.

maybe it takes more effort...

There’s a lot of blogs and websites out there telling you how to “live your life making money online”:

How not to be location dependent; how to be an expert in social media, blogging, viral stuff, ebooks; how to be the ultimate digital nomad.

Many of them are very well done, and sure their authors make a very decent living out of it. But I’ve also seen a lot of bad ones, the “make a trillion online in a month” ones, where they show you proudly some Adsense receipt and ask you to give them your email address (if not also some of your money).

Well all this made me think that maybe a lot of what we see online is just a more advanced, refined version of the old crappy MLM and affiliate sites. I’m not saying this out of disillusion because I’ve tried and didn’t work for me. After all I’m living in a very affordable place at the moment (Budapest) and I’m making some little income. I could continue doing this is some place that I love and that’s even cheaper (like Thailand or Indonesia).

But as I’m trying to find out my next destination (and occupation) my thoughts go more or less like this:

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When traveling around – especially if in a country where you don’t speak the language – it’s easy to end up chatting to people who speak your language. Quite often they are visitors like you (doesn’t matter if flashpackers, backpackers or honeymooners) or foreigners that live there, expats.

While visitors, especially tourists, are often over excited about the place and can’t wait to share their fantastic experiences with you (oh, you must absolutely do that!), expats are more relaxed and often not too bothered to talk to yet another visitor like you.

So keeping in mind that talking to the locals would be the ideal solution to get to know more of a culture, here are the 10 reasons why expats are a better chat than tourists while traveling:

1. Expats just know more about the place, in any aspect. Simple and straightforward: they’ve been there way longer than any temporary visitor.

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