Nicola Buck gives her tips on expat life after spending eight years in Frankfurt. In response to Rowena Paul's quest on Telegraph Expat to find what makes the perfect expatriate, I can offer an entirely different flavour to what might be considered a typical expat experience. In fact, it could possibly be considered not an expat lifestyle at all -- more like attempting "how not to be an expat". I moved with my husband and one-year-old daughter from Herne Hill in London to a suburb of Frankfurt (and not a very pretty one). The move was a relocation because of work; my husband is German and works in advertising. I am British. The move was rather traumatic. We left London reluctantly, having hurried our wedding shortly before. The "landing" in this very dull part of a small town in the Taunus region of Germany was a horrendous shock. The contrast between a noisy, buzzing familiar city to a morbid little suburb, which felt like a depressing retirement area, was accentuated by the fact that it was just before Christmas. The weather was dreadful, and I was away from my family. But I wanted to make the most of being in my husband's homeland, to embrace a new culture and my new family roots. I decided to make a go of it. My daughter was going to be bilingual. I would become part of the community. I suppose you could consider my strategy to have been "avoiding becoming an expat". I