I never thought of myself as someone who runs away from my problems. I always thought of myself as someone who flies away from them. That’s why, the day after Donald Trump’s re-election, I decided to move abroad. I didn’t care where. I just needed to get out of Washington, D.C., where I had lived for 20 years, and ideally out of the United States, where I had lived for 44—and as soon as possible.
This had not been my plan. In fact, it was the opposite of my plan. Before the election, I tweeted this advice: “If you’re thinking of fleeing the country if Trump wins, don’t. We need more sane, responsible voters in this country, not fewer.”
That may sound hypocritical of me, but it isn’t. After the election, I no longer considered myself sane or responsible. I needed to flee the country if I had any hope of restoring my sanity. Responsibility was something I’d figure out later.
First I flew with my girlfriend to Puerto Rico. It’s technically not another country, but you have to fly over ocean waters to get there and its inhabitants speak Spanish, so it sufficed for me. I am not someone who travels often. My last excursion to another country was six years earlier, and that was to Canada, which had yet to become our 51st state. Puerto Rico, which has even less of a chance of becoming a state, was the island of garbage I had heard so much about before the election. Like everywhere else, it had garbage, but it had so much more: beautiful beaches, lush mountains, and (some) Americans who did not refer to themselves as “Americans.”
There, my girlfriend and I spent a week in December doing most unseasonal things: sunbathing, drinking piña coladas instead of eggnog, buying presents for ourselves and not for our families. But best of all, we didn’t follow the news, either on TV or on our phones. It was as refreshing as the Caribbean Sea we swam, snorkeled, and surfed in. Or maybe it was the Atlantic Ocean. Who knows? I had almost forgotten about the despair I felt on election night and no longer worried about what the future would entail.
Those Trump supporters were onto something. Reading is overrated.
Upon returning to cold, dreary Washington, I was even more determined to expatriate. I wanted to be in a country that hadn’t just elected a felon as president, which narrowed it down to roughly 192 or so. But my girlfriend had already narrowed it down to one–Spain–and so we began planning our next trip, the following February, just a few weeks into Trump’s second term.
We flew to Madrid, where, after talking with a friend who lives part of the year there, I was convinced we would find our new home. To prepare for the trip, I binged on the YouTube videos of a New Zealand expat named James Blick, who lives there with his wife and daughters and who films videos of himself frequenting various tapas bars and other locales in the city and throughout Spain. I say “other locales” because I almost exclusively watched the tapas content.
And yes, the tapas were better than the hype. We ate sardines and anchovies, complemented with sherry and vermouth, and did our best not to breathe in anyone’s face.
When we returned from Madrid, we started planning for another trip, this one spanning 50 days across seven countries in Europe. Surely this would give me a taste beyond tapas of what life abroad would be like. It would answer some questions, namely: Do I really want to do this?
And I did. Europe was wonderful to the extent that it didn’t feel like America. Unfortunately, much of it was similar. In Reykjavik, I saw more Americans than Icelanders. Every fourth head in the French Riviera seemed to have a New York Yankees hat on top of it. Many of these people, I suspected, were actually French, which was disorienting. Had I fled America only to encounter Europeans posing as Americans? The key, I figured, was to explore the rural areas of the continent.
After a week and a half in Spain and a few days in Andorra, we drove to a tiny village in southwestern France, where we would dwell in a 13th-century house for a month. Here I would live like a true local, albeit one who didn’t speak the local language or know any of the customs.
On our first night, we treated ourselves to dinner at the village restaurant, where I managed to get my order wrong. Not only did I not speak any French, but I failed to point at the menu accurately, confusing the waitress into bringing me not one but two dishes. But part of the joy of living in Europe, I soon realized, was being endlessly, hopelessly confused. That’s what made it interesting, and distracted me from the outrages occurring in my home country, which I did my best to ignore.
As much as I loved Europe, I loved being away from America even more. The problem with Europe was that there was no one in whom to confide my distress about American politics, except for my girlfriend, who was tired of hearing about my distress. Sure, the Europeans I met didn’t like Trump, but they had never experienced him as one of his subjects. I felt foreign when ordering “une salade Niçoise,” sure, but I never felt more foreign than when trying to explain to non-Americans how bad things were getting in America. They agreed with me, but they didn’t understand me.
It’s hard to remember how I felt when I returned to the United States after seven weeks abroad. I had contracted Covid while in Portugal and was exhausted during the flight back to Dulles. After longing to be in Europe, I now longed to be home, in my bed, where I could close my eyes and slumber and dream about anything other than life in Washington.
Unfortunately, I am writing this in Washington, where I still live. I often ask myself why this is, and I think I know why. I still want to move to another country, but I’m afraid Trump will invade it.
