What I Stopped Googling After My Second Year Abroad

The History That Tells on You

If you want to know what version of yourself you were a year ago, do not read your journal. Read your search history. The journal is curated, even when you are honest with it. The search bar is not. It catches you in the small panics and the petty curiosities, the moments you would never describe out loud because they feel too unfinished to count as thought.

When I scrolled back through mine recently — not deliberately, I was looking for a recipe — I found a stranger. Someone who had spent the better part of two years asking the same kinds of questions in slightly different shapes. How much should a one-bedroom in this neighbourhood cost. What does this word on a utility bill mean. Whether the bakery on the corner was actually good or whether I had only convinced myself it was because it was close.

The questions themselves were not embarrassing. What was strange was how completely they had disappeared. I had not decided to stop asking them. I had simply stopped needing to.

The First-Year Questions

Almost everyone who moves abroad goes through a phase where Google becomes a kind of prosthetic. You use it the way you used to use a friend who had already done the thing you are trying to do. You ask it whether the produce at the market is meaningfully better than the supermarket. You ask it how to address an email to someone whose title you cannot place. You ask it whether the rash on your forearm is the kind of rash you should worry about or the kind that comes with a different climate and resolves itself in a week.

In Portugal, my first year of searches was almost entirely logistical. The word for inheritance tax. Whether the building manager was supposed to be the one calling the plumber. How long the residency renewal actually took versus how long the forum threads claimed it took. Each search was a small confession that I did not yet belong to the place I was living in.

In Georgia, the searches were different but the shape was the same. Bank transfer limits. The difference between two visa categories that seemed identical on the surface. Whether the marshrutka driver was supposed to give change or whether the change was, by some unwritten convention, his tip. I was searching, constantly, for a manual that did not exist — a document that would translate the lived rhythm of a place into something I could understand from the outside.

What Replaced Them

The shift happened gradually enough that I would have missed it entirely if not for the accident of scrolling. By the middle of the second year, the practical questions had thinned almost to nothing. What replaced them was harder to categorize.

Some of it was deeper. Searches about how the local pension system actually treated foreign contributions. Whether a long-term lease in a specific neighbourhood was a defensible decision or just an emotional one. Whether the school I was considering for a friend's daughter had the kind of reputation that survived the parent-forum noise.

Some of it was, frankly, more personal. Whether the low-grade tiredness I had been carrying for months was the climate, the diet, the altitude, or just the slow accumulation of being slightly outside everything. Whether the writers I had started reading in translation had been translated well or whether I was missing the better versions of them. Whether the feeling I had — not bad, not good, just persistently in between — had a name.

The Questions That No Longer Have Answers

There is a category of search that simply stops working after a while, and this is the one I find most interesting in retrospect. It is the search for reassurance disguised as research.

In the first months abroad, I would google things like whether expats in Colombia regret moving. Whether Tbilisi was getting more expensive. Whether the digital nomad scene in Lisbon was sustainable or about to collapse under its own weight. The questions sound practical, but they were not. They were attempts to outsource a decision I had already made, to find a stranger on the internet who would tell me I had chosen correctly.

After a while you realize the strangers cannot help you. Not because they are wrong, but because the question is not really answerable from the outside. Whether a place is right for you is not a search result. It is a slow accumulation of small verdicts that you make almost without noticing — the morning you stop translating in your head, the afternoon you give directions to a tourist without thinking about it, the evening you turn down an invitation from another expat because you would rather have dinner alone at the place around the corner.

The searches did not stop because I found the answers. They stopped because the questions dissolved.

What This Actually Measures

I am wary of turning this into a tidy framework, because it is not one. Not every expat goes through this. Some people stay in the practical-search phase indefinitely, and there is nothing wrong with that — it just means they are using a different part of the move to do the same work. Some people skip it entirely because they arrived with more language or more local context than I did. The timeline is not the point.

But for me, the disappearance of certain searches was the clearest signal I had that something had genuinely shifted. Not that I had become local. I will never be local in the places I have lived, and I have made my peace with that. What had shifted was the relationship between my curiosity and the place. I was no longer interrogating it. I was inhabiting it.

The thing I would offer anyone in their first year somewhere new is not advice. It is a small suggestion, almost a piece of housekeeping: occasionally, look at what you are asking the search bar. Not to judge it. Just to notice. Because the shape of those questions is a more honest portrait of where you actually are in the move than anything you would write down on purpose.