Say no to Lux-bashing!

When you live in a country where so many people come from somewhere else, people introduce themselves differently.

Most people, by their nature, prefer to keep vital family information to themselves and usually don’t share intimate thoughts with someone they’ve just met. You never know who might be in the secret police, who might be the school head mistress or who might be married to your boss. 

Here, however, I keep meeting people who seem to think it’s perfectly acceptable to give me a brief history of their entire life and then blurt out a diatribe of nasty comments about living in Luxembourg.

I recently met a mum who’d alighted here a year ago and was obviously not enjoying herself. She moaned about the school her kids went to (not a Luxembourgish one). She moaned about how far she was from home. She moaned about how hard life was in Luxembourg. She didn’t moan about her husband’s salary I noticed.

There is not much you can say to someone who bombards you like that.

I can remember arriving and feeling totally lost. Everything from driving to filling out forms in French felt alien and somehow “wrong”. But a few months into the move I took myself in hand and said: “Do you want to embrace this difference or do you want to go home?”

I came to the conclusion that if I was going to treat everything as an uphill battle I might as well pack up and leave now.

There is nothing wrong with admitting defeat or missing home. We all have days when we curse the traffic, poor customer service or the fact we forgot to put our bins out. We all have days when we talk to a family member or hear from a childhood friend and wish we could teleport ourselves back to our home town.

Lux-bashing is not cool

This is not an excuse to Lux-bash though.

If you’ve just arrived in Luxembourg and you feel jittery about the move, don’t spend time criticising everything in the country you’ve moved to. That won’t make anything better, and I speak from experience.

You may be far away from home, you may have made some difficult choices, and you may never get the hang of the way people use roundabouts here.

Laugh about it, because you will not be able to single-handedly change someone else’s culture to suit your own requirements.

Remember there is lots of help at hand, websites dedicated to explaining the terms of a rental agreement, the education choices you can make for your children, things to do and places to see. Even the SNCT has an easy step by step pictorial guide on what happens when you go to the control technique, minus the picture of an angry man whose car has just failed.

Keep your cool and ask for help. If you don’t know where to ask, check out the many forums dedicated to parenting, meeting other people, renovating a house or buying and selling furniture in Luxembourg. Someone will know the answer.

Lux-bashing is not a good look and it will only get you so far. There’ll always be someone willing to join you, but you’ll find most foreigners living here stay precisely because the pros far outweigh the cons.

Open your heart and let Luxembourg in. Take on the good things and try to handle the bad ones with humour. Most of all, embrace the new adventure you’ve just started out on.

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(Sarita Rao, wort-en@wort.lu, +352 49 93 459)