The Small Ways Living Abroad Changes You

There's a word people say to each other in Switzerland: “Grüezi”. It simply means “Hello”.

What stood out to me when I first lived there wasn't the word itself, though, it was how often I heard it. When I walked into a shop, a member of staff would greet me with “Grüezi”. When I was out walking through a village or hiking in the mountains and passed somebody, we'd greet each other. These were such small, ordinary interactions, yet when they weren't what I was accustomed to, I noticed them. I noticed how friendly they felt. I noticed the sense of acknowledgement in something as simple as two people passing each other and saying hello. And then, somewhere along the way, I stopped noticing quite so much. It became normal.

When Something Different Becomes Ordinary

There was one place where I particularly experienced that feeling of being acknowledged: my local pharmacy. I'd walk in and see two of the pharmacy team talking together and, as soon as I passed them, I'd be greeted with smiles and “Hello Mrs McAlister”. Somebody would come over to help me and, while I was waiting, another member of the team might walk past, smile and say, “Hello Mrs McAlister”. Then somebody else would pass and, you've guessed it, “Hello Mrs McAlister”. It happened every time I went to the pharmacy.

I was a regular visitor thanks to my fun collection of dis-eases (that's a whole other story!) and McAlister certainly wasn't a common Swiss surname, so I was probably relatively easy to remember. Whatever the reason, being greeted by name and warmly acknowledged whenever I went in made a difference to me. I remember coming home one day and saying to my husband, “If I'm ever in a bad mood or feeling down, I'm going to make an excuse to go to the pharmacy because they cheer me right up every time”.

There was something lovely in that ordinary connection. It wasn't a grand friendship or a significant relationship in my life. It was simply being recognised in one of the everyday places I visited while living in another country. Those small interactions became part of my experience of living in Switzerland, and after a while I didn't really think about them as something I was learning from or absorbing. They were simply part of daily life. It was only when I went back to N Ireland that I began to realise some of them had become part of me too.

Taking “Grüezi” Back With Me

When I returned to my birth country of Northern Ireland to visit family fresh from living in Switzerland, greeting people had become completely natural to me. Obviously, I wasn't walking around Northern Ireland saying “Grüezi” to everybody. That might have been taking things a little too far. However, when I walked into a shop, I'd say hello to whoever might hear me. When my parents and I went for an evening walk, I'd smile and say hello to people as they passed us.

I wasn't consciously trying to behave differently or bring a little bit of Switzerland back to Northern Ireland. I wasn't thinking about cultural habits or wondering what I'd absorbed while living abroad. I was simply doing what had become normal to me. And that's what I find so interesting about it now. Most people responded naturally, smiling and saying hello back. Occasionally somebody looked visibly surprised or seemed unsure how to react, and that contrast made me more aware of something I hadn't really considered before: living somewhere else had quietly changed one of my everyday behaviours. It was such a tiny thing. I hadn't deliberately decided, From now on, I'm going to become somebody who greets strangers. I'd simply spent enough time in an environment where those small greetings were part of my everyday experience and I'd started doing it too.

Sometimes Going Back Shows Us What's Changed

About six months later, I returned to Northern Ireland to visit my family again. This time, when we went out walking in the evening, I noticed that more of the people we passed seemed to look towards us, smile and say hello without me necessarily being the one to speak first. The atmosphere felt different to me from the previous visit. At the time, I wondered about those earlier encounters and the idea of one small interaction rippling onwards, and yet I couldn't know what had changed or why. What stayed with me, though, was simply that I noticed the difference.

Living abroad can make us particularly aware of differences like these because returning to our birth country can give us an unexpected point of comparison. When we first move somewhere, we notice so much precisely because it isn't familiar. Everyday behaviours can stand out because they're different from what we're accustomed to. We notice how people greet each other, how they interact in shops, the small courtesies and habits that seem completely unremarkable to everybody who has always lived there.

Then time passes. What once felt noticeable becomes ordinary. We stop mentally comparing everything with what we're accustomed to because we're simply getting on with living our lives. Meanwhile, without necessarily making any conscious decision about it, some of those little behaviours can begin to find their way into us.

And then we go back. Suddenly we're among people and places that feel deeply familiar, only we're not exactly the same person who left them. That's when something as small as saying hello can show us what's changed.

The Changes We Don't Think to Look For

When we talk about how living abroad changes us, it's easy to think about the obvious things. The bigger experiences are naturally the ones we tend to remember and talk about. And yet I wonder whether some of the most interesting changes happen much more subtly. They're in the everyday things we've repeated often enough that they no longer feel borrowed from somewhere else. For me, “Grüezi” was one of those things. Not the Swiss-German word itself, just the habit beneath it: acknowledging somebody as I passed them, greeting people when I entered somewhere, allowing a tiny moment of connection with somebody I didn't know.

The pharmacy added something else to that experience because being remembered by name mattered to me more than I might have expected. I was living in a country other than the one I'd been born in, yet here was this completely ordinary place where people knew who I was when I walked through the door. That felt warm.

Over time, all those small experiences became part of my understanding of everyday life in the place where I was living. I didn't have to consciously choose to adopt them. There was no moment when I decided Switzerland had taught me something and I was now going to incorporate it into my personality. Life was much less obvious than that. I lived there. I experienced these things repeatedly. Some of them became familiar. And some of that familiarity travelled back to Northern Ireland with me.

That's one of the things I find so fascinating about living abroad. We can spend so much time noticing everything that's different around us that we don't necessarily notice the smaller ways we are becoming different too. Sometimes those changes are so ordinary that we might never think to name them as changes at all. Until we return somewhere familiar, walk into a shop, automatically say hello and realise that somewhere along the way, without ever consciously deciding it would, a little bit of the place we've been living has become part of who we are.