But one more thing.  Maybe the hardest thing is living with the knowledge that you could go back to your home country.  Sure, you’d have to deal with other problems there, but you wouldn’t have to deal with *this* (substitute for “this” whatever your current gripe happens to be).  Having choices isn’t always good.  It’s far too easy to glamorize what you used to have and think that if you went back to it that all your problems would disappear.  It’s helpful to go back to your home country once in a while to remind yourself that, yeah, somethings things there suck too.

I now talk about “them” and “us” in both English and Spanish in numerous ways depending on context, relating to multiple perspectives.

I am pretty damn “embedded,” living with my Argentine girlfriend, spending much time with her family, doing more social activities with the locals than expats, and spending more time with long-term expats than with short-term tourists.

So sometimes the me/them is the relatively simple perspective of the “guy from US talking about porteños (people of Buenos Aires) with other other expats.” But more often than not, when I find myself talking about “us,” it is when I am referring to porteños among other porteños, although, of course, I still need to use “us” I am talking about my USA perspective.

In a typical conversation, say with a taxi driver, I will use both “them” and “us,” referring to the people of the US and “us” locals, respectively. And in such conversations, the distinction is always natural, just as a French expat in New York city might talk about the “we” of New Yorkers in contrast to people on the West Coast, but would also say “we” when talking about his native people back in France.

What’s interesting is that the porteños were WAY ahead of me on all of this. For the first year of romance, when I could find not a single fault with the place, “they” thought I was pretty dense, promising, “You’ll see!”

What they meant was that I would see all the faults in this very faulty place, and I would feel a bit silly for how rose-tinted my vision had been.

Well, now I do see, more than I’d like quite often. While I once (contrary to guidebook advice) trusted every taxi cab driver I met not to stiff me, I know worry that almost everyone will — even though my familiarity with the city proves that it’s not happening.

To me this to me relates not so much to “human nature” that people are mentioning in these responses, but rather to the nature of living in a place as opposed to passing through, visit briefly or, instead, seeing the place as a part of the local community.

San Francisco was a lot more wonderful to me before I lived there for three years, but then, I never came to love San Francisco as I now love Buenos Aires, even though I now seem to loathe it in many ways as much as the “natives” do.

I think the best comparison is the experience of family: No one we can love and hate so much at the very same time, often for the very same reasons.

I haven’t lived in any other country outside the USA, but porteños are notorious for their high degree of self-loathing and self-infatuation. So if after four years of living here, I wasn’t both loving and loathing the city that I now call home, I wouldn’t be one of “them.”

You honestly can’t think of a single reason why someone would become more irritated the longer they are faced with things that irritate them? Patience wears thin. Sometimes cultural differences involve serious racial or sexual discrimination, being harmed or mugged and being manipulated or taken advantage of. Sometimes cultural differences involve slow service and lack of smiles. Where someone draws the line for their tolerance varies. Personally, I draw a line at female genital mutilation (FGM). However, even some female professors I’ve had don’t judge. Using euphemisms like female genital cutting and female genital modification for the barbarous act was their way to seem objective. Expecting people not to mutilate their daughters is a value judgment and reeks of imperialism, after all.

Why do you think expecting two specific things (to be greeted with a smile and getting coffee in three minutes or less) after moving to someplace with better weather, exchange rates, culture, nightlife, scenery or job prospects makes someone a hypocritical asshole?

Even if expats only moved to developing countries for the five general reasons you listed, only three subcategories of one could be considered mutually exclusive to the expectations; the laid-back pace of life, the challenge of another culture, the insanity of a big foreign city.

PS. Wow, the commenting system is still like this? Tragic. Starting a subreddit http://www.reddit.com/search?q=matador would be easy if programming a competent commenting system is the problem.