The inner side of moving abroad

How to Get to Know a New City After You Move Abroad

By Stephanie Johnson, LICSW, a licensed clinical social worker and expat

For the first few weeks in a new city, your map is mostly made of errands. You learn the route to the grocery store and the way back from the place you had dinner, and a few streets get worn in fast while the rest of the city stays a rumor.

We had been in Phnom Penh a few weeks when we took a boat out on the Mekong, and that one afternoon did more for my sense of the place than all the walking around we had done up to then.

The first weeks are a handful of streets

Settling in takes so much attention that there isn’t much left over for curiosity. You’re sorting out the apartment and the money and the sim card, working out which shop has the thing you need, and the city you can actually describe stays small, because the part you know is the part you’ve had to use.

That’s a reasonable way to start, and it has a side effect. You can live somewhere for weeks, moving through the same few blocks with confidence, and still have almost no idea what you’re looking at.

An afternoon on the river changed the size of the city

Several river cruise ships were docked at the pier that afternoon, and ours was the small boat, six of us aboard counting the captain and our guide, with my husband and me and one other couple from France making up the rest.

The air was so heavy with moisture that rain felt close even though none was falling, and the clouds were dark and dense the whole time, so I kept glancing up and waiting for the sky to open. It was September, the rainy season, and we were fairly sure we were about to get soaked.

Instead we got an afternoon of spring rolls and freshly cut fruit, with enough room in a group that size to listen and ask questions and drift between the conversation and the water. Our guide spoke excellent English and told us about the Mekong and the Tonlé Sap, and about the history the river shares with the city. At one point he described something the water does at another time of year, something we couldn’t see from where we were sitting.

The part I couldn’t see

That was the piece that stayed with me. The more he told us, the more I realized how little I understood about the river my new home sits on, and I liked that more than I expected to.

By the time we got back to the pier the sky still hadn’t opened, and we rode a tuk-tuk home through air that had finally cooled off. That morning Phnom Penh had been the handful of streets we were starting to learn. By the evening it was also a river with a history I had barely begun to hear about, and a whole season I hadn’t seen yet.

The city felt bigger, and I wanted more of it.

Becoming a regular does the other half

One afternoon with a guide gives you the shape of a place. Showing up in the same spots over and over gives you the part where people know your face, and I’ve come to think you need both.

Wherever we land, I look for a little family-owned shop or cafe near wherever we’re staying, and then I go back, often daily. I do it mostly for myself, because having a familiar path to walk and a familiar place to sit is grounding when everything else is new, and the side benefit is that people start to recognize you.

In Thailand that’s exactly how it went. There was a woman at a fruit stand whose expression changed when she saw me coming after I’d been there a few times, and she remembered my face long before either of us could have managed a conversation. On the walk home we passed the same group outside a storefront most evenings, waving, until one night somebody asked where we were from, and after enough evenings of stopping to talk we ended up invited to a family birthday party, and later to karaoke.

Neither of those came from exploring. They came from repetition.

The city gets bigger before it gets familiar

What I didn’t expect is the order it happens in. Learning something real about where you live tends to make the place feel larger rather than smaller, because every piece of history or geography you pick up points at ten more you don’t have yet.

That can feel like falling behind if you’re measuring how settled you are. I’ve started reading it the other way around, as a sign the place is finally more than a set of errands to me.

If you’ve just moved and the city still feels like a map

Things that have worked for us, offered as what we do rather than a plan you should follow.

One guided thing, early. A boat, a walk, a market tour, whatever exists where you are. Having a local person tell you what you’ve been walking past is worth more in two hours than weeks of our own wandering.

One place you return to. The cafe, the shop, the stand. The familiarity is for you, and the recognition that comes later is a bonus.

Let yourself be a beginner out loud. Our guide answered questions I’d have been embarrassed to ask anyone else, and none of them turned out to be embarrassing.

And give it time to stop being an errand map. Mine usually does somewhere around the point where I stop needing directions for the ordinary stuff.

Common questions

How do you get to know a new city after moving abroad?

Two things did it for us. Something guided early on, where a local person explains what you’ve been walking past, and one or two places you go back to so often that you become a face there. The first gives you the city’s story and the second gives you a foothold in it.

Is it worth doing tourist things in the city you actually live in?

In my experience, yes, and sooner than you’d think. We took the Mekong boat trip a few weeks into living in Phnom Penh, and it told me more about where we were than anything else we’d done. Living somewhere doesn’t automatically teach you about it.

How long before a new city feels familiar?

It varies a lot, and the honest answer is that familiar and known aren’t the same thing. The ordinary routes tend to come quickly, within weeks, while actually understanding a place keeps going for as long as you’re interested. If you want the fuller timeline on settling, the honest-timeline article below covers it.

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This article is educational and reflective, not therapy, diagnosis, or a crisis service. If you’re struggling beyond what an article can hold, please reach out to someone you trust, a licensed professional, or your local emergency services. You deserve real support.