This Christmas and New Year’s Day I’m home with my immediate family, no traveling, just a normal holiday time. For us, “normal” this year is lighting a menorah one week and then putting up a Christmas tree the next. Then going to a restaurant overlooking Clearwater Beach for brunch on Christmas day. But compared to some past years…

The photo below was two Decembers ago, when we lived in Mexico. My daughter introduced her Mexican friends to our tradition of baking cookies. (We had an oven, which is kind of a novelty there.)

In Mexico the big holiday is Three Kings Day, the 12th day of Christmas. First we went to the local mall, where the kings paraded through on people in camel suits—that’s a photo from it at the top. Then that night we went to a real parade through downtown, with floats and bands and people throwing candy.

The Three Kings were the rock stars of the show. My favorites were the local beauty queens dressed up like Angels, though the ones dressed up like some Arabian Nights harem fantasy were fun too.

At night, our daughter was told to leave her shoes outside the door and the kings would put presents in them. She left some snacks in a bowl, with a note in Spanish to the kings. In the morning, score!

When my wife and I lived in South Korea teaching English, Christmas was a whirl of neon lights, electronic Santa gadgets, and cheesy music. All the commercialism, without much of that pesky religious part.

Mostly I remember hanging out with the other teachers we knew in Seoul and partying. In other words, it was just another typical day off, but with better food. One teacher was ex-military and had bought a turkey from the U.S. army base store. We drank wine instead of our usual crappy Korean beer.

I did get to dress up as Santa for the Wonderland school performance with my youngest class. (Yes, the school where we taught was called Wonderland.) I’m not exactly round, so that was the first and last time for that.

The place we taught English the first time was Istanbul, Turkey. Christmas there was…non-existent. I don’t have one photo from there that has anything to do with that holiday—only New Year’s Eve.

We went to a buffet brunch at the local Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza because it was the only place in our neighborhood with any hint of the holidays in place. We dined on food from home near what was probably the only Christmas tree in a 10-mile radius. Then we did what most expats seem to do over the holidays when living abroad: meet up with each other somewhere to drink. In our suburb of Istanbul, however, that meant beers with some Turkish friends in the mix too, at the Yesel Ev bar—-Green House.

If was a different story for their big holiday: Ramadan. That involved being woken up each morning by a guy beating a drum in the streets, eating meals hidden from the public view during daylight hours so we wouldn’t offend anyone, and eating lots of candy at the end.

What are your holiday memories in foreign places around the world?

I just spent the weekend in San Miguel Allende, perhaps the most popular place for expatriates in all of Mexico, but definitely the most popular non-beach location. There are somewhere between 7,000 and 15,000 gringos—most in post-retirement age—who live here at least part of the year. Nobody really knows for sure. They make up around 10% of the population and have had an outsized impact on the city in other ways, especially since most of them are quite wealthy in local terms. No doubt, they have transformed, upgraded, and beautified the city to an amazing extent. (Just check out this piece on luxury real estate in San Miguel de Allende for a taste.)

Upon getting back, I found this following reader question in the comments of an earlier post and I’m bringing it up here because it’s relevant in many other countries too that are magnets for expatriates.

My husband and I are coming to San Miguel de Allende for four months and will explore living in Mexico. Can you tell us if there is a “cultural” life in Guanajuato? We considered SMA because of theater/music/art etc… but are quite open to anywhere else. How is the day to day life? And would it be suitable for older people like us (not quite antiques but not as spry as we were before!)

Why we moved where we did

My family moved to Guanajuato for several reasons, one being that we wanted to become reasonably fluent in Spanish and knew there wasn’t much chance of that happening in San Miguel de Allende. I’ve been there four times now and always hear more English spoken on the streets and in restaurants than Spanish. I meet people who have lived there 6, 10, even 20 years and still aren’t close to fluent. They seldom need to use the language of their adopted country, so they don’t.

Also, Guanajuato is a university town, a young city. Its counterpart down the road is full of retirees. Yes there’s culture here—but home-grown culture. A local symphony, a multi-week music and arts festival, performances from Latino artists every week.

But Guanajuato is more of a walking city—a huffing and puffing city actually with all the steep hills—so people who have mobility issues or like to drive and park everywhere aren’t going to be as happy here. There are fewer elements of home as well, whereas in San Miguel you can do or get most anything you were used to before. But really for us, the question was, do we want to live in a real Mexican city or one that has been inextricably altered by the expats? One that is priced for Mexicans or one where the Mexicans are priced out of the historic center?

The Rest of the World

This is not just a Mexican question, of course. There are plenty of places just in Latin America where the foreign influence has been pervasive: Roatan Island in Honduras, Ambergris Caye in Belize, Jaco in Costa Rica, and Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, for a start. (You can generally figure out if a place has passed this tipping point just by looking at the real estate prices compared to the rest of the country.)

There are also plenty of examples in other parts of the world as well, like the “Costa del Concrete” in Spain or parts of the Greek Islands. There are also pockets spread throughout Asia, especially Thailand and the Philippines.

So do you want to “go native” completely, or do you want to be in a place where you can just interact with your own kind and not have to worry about pesky language or cultural barriers?

Perhaps the sweet spot is finding a place that’s somewhere in between. When I taught English in Turkey and Korea, both times I was in a suburb of the main city. So I could mingle with a few expats (mostly other English teachers), but we were just dots in a sea of locals. Because of that, I got serious cultural immersion but had a built-in social and support group.

As in where I am in Guanajuato, there are a lot of these sweet spot locations scattered around the world. Go find them yourself, learn the language, and get the benefit of far lower prices without completely giving up things you enjoy, like cultural activities and a good variety of food. The best part is, that’s another excuse to travel in a slow manner, spending enough time in places to really get a full impression. When you find your own sweet spot—one that never makes you feel like you’re in a theme park—you’ll probably know it’s the right one for you.

I’ve navigated quite a few countries in my time, but a few of them felt like different planets from a cultural standpoint, especially Korea, Japan, and India. There are just so many baffling customs and social rules that if you don’t get schooled a bit in the local ways, you’re going to offend, annoy, and alienate people on a regular basis.

I’ve always liked the various culture shock books that help you navigate all this, but there’s a new series out there for the Kindle with an unbeatable price: $1.95. Don’t be fooled by the price tag though: the information within will save you lots of embarrassment and make your time abroad run more smoothly, especially if you’re moving to one of the 20 countries covered.

The author, Bill Drake, ran a cross-cultural consultancy and he’s an avid traveler. His guides dive much deeper than any source I’ve seen for free on the web, so this is a case where two bucks is a hundred times better than nothing.

Cultural Dimensions of Expatriate Life in Korea is quite a mouthful, but it’s definitely $1.95 well spent. I checked this one out first because I spent 14 months there as an English teacher in the late 1990s. To say it was a struggle sometimes from a cultural standpoint is putting it mildly. Some expats couldn’t deal at all and they bailed out. Others coped by doing nothing but working and hanging out in expat bars, avoiding contact with most locals. Others just got bitter and were a royal pain to be around. The easiest course is to go with the flow, and this guide has plenty of advice on how to do that. Some examples:

Koreans often find it difficult to trust a business partner until they have gotten drunk together. Drinking together is seen as the only way to resolve a sensitive issue or to close a complex business deal. Although it is become more accepted to refuse to over-indulge, the attitude that the person who drinks less than his counterparts is hiding something or is afraid to let down his defenses is still quite prevalent.

It should be noted that it is customary among friends that one individual picks up the tab. Koreans consider the American custom of dividing the check somewhat barbaric.

The “seamless” integration of the individual into the group is considered a principal goal of the society. All forms of social training,indoctrination, education and conditioning have such integration as their core assumption and ultimate objective. In such societies, any evidence that a person is “individualistic” is treated as a social pathology.

I found the information throughout to be spot-on and consistent with my experiences there. I wish I’d had this in hand before I moved there and started working.

Less engaging but still useful is another one I read through called Educating Children in Expatriate Environments. It requires more hunting for the right nuggets in this one since the subject matter is so broad. Figuring out what to do with a pre-schooler in England is very different than trying to navigate high school in such different environments as Mexico, India, and Japan. Again though, it’s not hard to justify your $1.95 investment with the nuggets that matter.

Guides are available for a wide but oddball assortment of countries, from expat hotbeds like the Czech Republic and the U.K. to ones with far fewer travelers and foreign business workers, such as Nicaragua.

There are plenty of e-books out there with information like this selling for 10 or 20 times the price. If you’re heading to one of the countries profiled in these guides and you’ve got a Kindle, round up some change and go make a purchase.