British expatriates living in countries as diverse as Hong Kong, Canada and Qatarwere asked what they have learned during the time spent abroad.

Newspapers are known to do this sort of thing from time to time to gauge what the readers are doing with their lives and whether they are happy with what they are doing.

Expatriates, as you know, are those highly motivated people who wish to make something out of their lives and those crazy people who leave the comfort of their homes to travel and work in foreign countries.

Even if they did know where they are headed, the information about their destination would not be wholly accurate and is usually garnered from that odd chap down the lane who visits his mother once a year and talks of the wonderful time he is having working daily for 12 hours at a stretch.

Some get their passports out of the socks drawer, pack their bags, leave the cat and the grandmother behind ... for money. Others pack their socks and leave their homes for adventure, because they are bored living in their small towns and want someone else to talk with other than the mailman.

That got me thinking. What have I learned living in the Arabian Gulf for nearly a lifetime?

It was hard to zero in on one thing, so I took a second opinion.

Has it been a good experience? I asked my wife and she laughed loudly: “What, spending a lifetime with you?” and went back to reading up for next day’s class.

“No. Living abroad, away from home? I said. “What have you learned?”

‘Living abroad’

“It is good to sleep early. The classes start here before sunrise. The days when it is foggy and when you can’t see anything on the road, the taxi drivers drive like mad,” she said.

That did not seem very illuminating, so I asked my son. Maybe it was the wrong person to ask, because he does not know what living in India or Canada is like since he has been with us during our sojourn in Saudi Arabia and Dubai, and the only time he is back home, so to speak, is briefly for less than a month.

“What have you learned living abroad?” I asked him. “Dad, can you ask me later? I am playing an online game with my friend in Toronto,” he said.

Later he told me he learned that without air-conditioning he would have died. “Sometimes the teacher turns the thermostat down for no reason and I shiver,” he said, sniffling.

There must be something that I have learned, I told myself and wondered whether if I am one of those people who say they are always learning.

“You can never stop learning. I never say I know everything,” a person expounded in a webinar that I had once attended. “The moment you stop learning, is the moment you stop living,” one management guru said as I nodded my head wisely and took down notes.

One British journalist told the newspaper she had become cynical living in London for 12 years. Then she made a switch to Denmark and found them to be fun-loving people who were very open and who cared about things and did them with a zestfulness that was contagious.

She said this was a quality of life she had never experienced before and it taught her to appreciate the little things in life and be content.

Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ mahmood_saberi