Expat days

Before moving here, I'd never considered myself an "Expat" or really sure what criteria one had to fulfill in order to be classed as such.
My dictionary says that an "Expat" is "a person living outside their native country", but I think there's a bit more to it than that.

I've lived in a few different countries and have just been a foreigner living in another place. I could integrate to some extent and even speak the language in one case. Essentially, I lived like the locals did.

Here, it's different. Yes, I've tried to speak the language and still do use as little I can get away with it on a daily basis* to ease life without getting too frustrated at not being understood when I'm trying really really hard; I've moved out of the more western-populated area to a little community area where I can say hello to the local shop-owners and xe om drivers in a friendly way**, buy my fruit off a woman who sells it out of polystyrene boxes and moves from one side of the road to the other for reasons beknownst only to her, and peer over at the post-lunchtime draughts game without raising any eyebrows.
But I cannot integrate. I'm a Westerner. I live very differently to the locals. And as such I feel it is more suitable to accept Expat as a label.

Expats behave in a particular way. It is feasible to do certain activities that are either entirely normal in London and not in Thiscity-life; or activities that are completely normal and unthinkably expensive in one's homeland.

My day went like this:
Yoga
Shiatsu massage
Hair wash and dry. That's right - hair wash and dry. I didn't have it cut, just washed for me by somebody else and blow dried. Blow dried by two people at the same time, I might add. I gasp at my own extravagance. (It gets better)
Goats cheese salad lunch (not typical Thiscity fare) in a French café
Visit friend (that's fairly normal anywhere I think...)
Bimble a little in second-hand bookshop and purchase a book
Home, change.
xe om to Old Quarter, marvelling at the tourists en route (That is definitely Expat Behaviour)
Waxing (to cries of "trắng,trắng,trắng!"***) pedicure & manicure. The last two at the same time.
xe om home.
Order food online.
Write blog entry.

Two of these things I had never done before, and I suspect proper "Expats" have their own motorbikes or drivers (economic level depending). But I think I did pretty well in fulfilling my role today, whilst thoroughly enjoying myself in the name of research, of course.

And all for about a tenth of what it would cost elsewhere in the world.
Now for that food that's just arrived....



*which is more than a lot of people 
**and they won't try to sell me anything or insist on driving me anywhere. Usually.
*** "white white white!" which is a prized skin-colour here, so it's ok.