Throw out an EFL teaching acronym or initialism and I've taught it extensively. I hear you about the "angry at life" thing that plagues the ex-pat community there. A friend of mine started going through a nervous breakdown while he was there, which coincided with the birth of his second kid and the loss of his job as AAC at one of the larger English schools in our city. He started self-medicating and seeing a doctor who was able to see that everything he was going through was all in his head. Now, my friend married a really great Viet woman and was living a pretty great life, but when the doctor told him she'd seen what he was going through time and time again in other ex-pats he was shocked to hear that her diagnosis was "loneliness".

Now, they live in England and he at least, is much happier for it. I don't know about you, but I just couldn't stick it out there. I can't make a life for myself in a place that will deny that my building a life there still means that I'm a foreigner. Of course, there is some of that in America too but having grown up in it, I can handle it. So, I absolutely agree that a network of some kind is so essential to making a life in a new place.