Things I learned as an expat

I was reading this post again and it made me think about my journey as an expat and things I learned rom it, things that I did not mention in my first post. (Just an observation: some posts feed other ones). So here are some things I learned in my years living as an expat:

-You start hanging around with other foreigners before hanging around with locals. This was my experience anyway: the Italians first (and to a lesser extend the Greeks) and then the French people.
-There is no Québec diaspora. Which saddens me a bit. I could hang around various communities, but never my own. I guess it is because we do not have a big enough population to create a diaspora, especially here. We are scattered all around the map when we live abroad.
-Spending time with French people has more to do with language than culture. I never felt French with them, but I tremendously enjoy speaking French with native speakers when I can.
-You are rarely exotic when you live abroad. You are foreign, but rarely exotic.Which is better, in a way, because when they think you are exotic locals treat you like a platypus in a zoo: something weird and funny. Exotism is for tourists. Immigrants are foreign. That said, it might be different for Quebeckers living in France.
-Exotism is not something you will experience for long as an expat either. The country you move in quickly ceases to be exotic, no matter how hard was the cultural shock at first.