Going local

In 2009 our three year expat contract came to an end so we had to decide whether to stay or return to the US.    Staying meant that we had to “localize”, a term that sounds like some sort of creepy Swiss government mind reprogramming thing.   Certain that this wasn’t the case we decided to go down this road but then one morning in the shower I started singing, Trittst im Morgenrot daher, Seh' ich dich im Strahlenmeer, Dich, du Hocherhabener, Herrlicher!  Oh crap, I thought.  Maybe it was.   Maybe I’d start walking with my hands clasped behind my back and telling complete strangers on the tram how they should behave.   Fighting back the momentary panic, I soldiered on.  In fact, mostly what localizing meant was that we’d have less money going forward.  As anyone who’s been fortunate enough to have an expat contract knows, they’re an arrangement through which companies throw unnecessarily large quantities of money at people to get them to move somewhere.  In this case, essentially paradise on earth.  Paid housing.  Paid car (including gas).   Plane tickets back to home country.  Cost of living adjustment.  International assignment allowance.  It’s ridiculous really.  I’d have done it for none of that but I certainly wasn’t going to turn it down.  It essentially paid the college tuition of my oldest daughter.   Localizing meant an immediate weaning from the expat teat and living like all the other riff-raff around here.  That is, the riff-raff inhabitants of perhaps the richest country on earth.   The financial aspect  was not the deciding factor however.   The most significant consideration was psychological.  Staying here meant joining the Swiss social security and retirement system.  It meant getting local health insurance.   It meant no lifeline back to the US.  As we began thinking through the implications, it dawned on us that we were about to become, gasp, immigrants.