Spin-off thread from this one.
I’ve never actually been out of the country, so I’m like the worst person here to be starting this thread, but I just felt like this spin-off thread had taken too long to be made. 
Go!
Well, when I moved to Spain, I was bummed because I was going to miss all my favorite T.V. shows, but once I got there I discovered I didn’t really care. There were plenty of older American movies and shows on Spanish T.V., just dubbed.
And this is going to sound pretty terrible but…
I didn’t really miss my family and friends. I made new friends in Spain (and one old friend was studying in a nearby city). My family I talked to every week on the phone, and I had a really good relationship with my Spanish roommates who became like my second family. On holidays and in the summer I was invited to stay with their families and we just generally ate all our meals together and hung out together a lot.
Some other students couldn’t handle the homesickness (one girl didn’t even stay a week before returning home) but I spent a year completely apart with no visits and I was fine.
When I moved to Switzerland, I thought I’d miss many Spanish foods. Since I was going to the “three borders” area (Basel), I figured I’d poke around German and French supermarkets as well as Swiss ones. Not only did French supermarkets carry lots of foods which I would find in Spain but not in Switzerland or Germany, they happened to be the cheapest ones: saucisson for the win!
Scotland was also a nice surprise that way. I already knew it was a good place for fish, but things like “lemon flavored ice-cream / ice lollies / yoghurt” which I’d missed in other countries also exist here. Gotta love a country where men have legs and yoghurt has lemon.
Pyper, I talk as much with my family being abroad as being [in Spain but not in the same town]. It’s only that, pre-skype, doing it from abroad was much more expensive.