What is the craziest, most complicated, and best thing I’ve gained from a life of travel? A new family.

Several years ago, my future husband and I met while we were both living abroad in Ecuador as expats, working and studying – I am from the United States and he is from Cuba. Having both already moved away from home and embraced new cultures, we found it exciting to learn about each other’s cultures as we got to know each other better. As we grew together as a couple and each joined the other’s family, we quickly learned that building a cross-cultural family brought an entirely new level of rewards – and challenges.

I haven’t gotten it all right as I’ve learned to navigate living with a new family who speak a language and come from a different culture – like with travel itself, it is a journey. But, I have learned a lot along the way.

1. Open Your Mind

Travelers know they’re bound to encounter things that will shock, surprise, amaze, and confound them. It’s part of the journey, and it’s why we love to travel. Who can’t look back on a trip and point to how it’s changed them, awakened a new realization, or impact them profoundly?

Gaining a family from another country or another culture is very similar – it’s a nonstop journey through those same moments of shock and surprise, and so much more. Even after years of knowing my husband’s family, there are still moments I’m awakened to new perspectives and experiences I could have never imagined, both good and bad moments that arise and remind me how engrained culture is in all of us. 

Make every effort to understand that there will be so much that you won’t understand right away – and make a conscious effort to ask your new family to help teach you and show you their cultures and traditions.  It will take you out of your comfort zone, but that is the only way you’ll grow, and it’s the only way through it. Acknowledging you have a lot to learn and inviting your family to help be a part of that is humbling and honoring, and one of the best things I’ve done to grow and learn.

2. Learn the Language

This goes for those that speak the same language and those that don’t – there is tremendous learning in communication that must happen regardless of your language skills when becoming part of a family from a different culture. Learning to communicate is of course only made more complex for those that don’t have a good grasp over their new family’s language.

Thankfully I knew Spanish before meeting my husband, and our relationship developed in Spanish, so I didn’t have to start learning from scratch. I’ve now been in the process of learning Spanish for longer in my life than I haven’t. But still, there are times when I look at my mother-in-law and have no clue what she just yelled from across the kitchen. And don’t even get me started on my father-in-law’s “guajiro” country accent specific to a remote part of Cuba, with its slang and phrases I had never learned or heard before.

Unless you don’t have to learn a new language to communicate with your new family, accept you may never be perfect, but you’re doing your best. And if you don’t know – learn! Learn learn learn. Even if your partner can translate for you, even if you can already eke out a basic conversation, keep learning. It’s an investment of time in something that will reap rewards in understanding and love with your new family.

3. Understand Expectations

The area of family life is where cultures dig in deep, traditions get strong and rigid and are often inflexible. Society places so many expectations on family – this is true on every corner of the planet. Sure, there may be cultural expectations for how you behave in public spaces that you encounter as a traveler, but expectations get much, much stronger once you’re inside the home.

Even if it’s hard to understand or not communicated directly, people have expectations for their family members – parents have dreams for their children, aunts and uncles and cousins are used to interacting in a certain way. Think about how your own culture has traditions for dating, marriage, childrearing … each culture has their own, and those will fall on you if you’re stepping in to a family of another culture.  Navigating those expectations can be a lot to handle if you’re not expecting them or not aware of them.

Make sure you know and understand these family expectations, and even if you choose not to necessarily accept them but adapt them to your own life, be ready to face push back. The expectations of others won’t necessarily be applied differently to you because your own culture doesn’t have similar traditions. Prepare and plan to inevitably navigate this, and accommodate the wishes and desires of others when you can.

4. Embrace differences

Even years later, when I mostly feel so well adapted and integrated as a part of my husband’s family, I still have my moments of feeling totally different and foreign. I often am confronted with reminders that I am not Cuban, and I will never be Cuban, as much as I belong to a Cuban family now just as any other member of the family does. In a family that has totally embraced and loved me, that I can still feel foreign at times has been a strange and challenging thing for me.

I want to feel accomplished in my integration into a new culture or new place – it’s something that I think most expats feel and strive for. So having these moments that remind me that I can never be perfectly integrated or perfectly adapted is so hard. I’ve had to do more than just accept it – I’ve had to uncomfortably embrace it. I don’t have to stop being myself to be well-adapted or accepted – I bring something to the table, and I bring something to my new family by my experiences and history and traditions.

When you do the work, you’ll see the results. One of the best parts of gaining a family abroad is feeling at home in a place that would have under any other circumstances been foreign to you. I was lucky enough to take a trip to Cuba during college, before meeting my husband – reflecting on how strange and new everything felt there as a tourist, while feeling so at home there now, is the best feeling! It gives you a feeling that you’re an insider, and that someone has your back, and that you can feel at home there.

It might sound hard or challenging, but it’s not all bad. As you make the effort, you will see that the reward can actually be one hundred times greater. It’s not easy, but like travel, you will learn and grow and gain so much more than you would have sticking with what you’ve always known.

Carley Rojas Avila is the founder of Home to Havana, a travel blog dedicated to inspiring transformational travel in Cuba and beyond. She and her husband, José, launched Home to Havana as a way to share their story of moving from the United States back to Cuba, and inspire travelers to transform their own travel dreams into reality. Carley’s writing has been featured in a variety of travel publications online and in print. When not obsessing over creating inspirational online content she can be found trying to befriend street cats and personally taste-testing every pizza in Havana.