I am not a Freudian psychoanalyst.
But one doesn't have to know a lot about Freud to realize how much trust, the first step in Freud's development theory, influences how we meet other people. I have written more about trust under Communication, but it is central enough to have its own blog post.
There are many angles from which you can attack the subject of trust. One approach is the discussion of baseline. Some people are trusting to a fault. They may be seen as gullible at times. You almost have to con them to get in their black book. Others are skeptics by default and you have to earn their trust.
If what it takes to earn your trust is that the other party is predictable and delivering on promises, going abroad may be very challenging. In another culture most people will at least at times be unpredictable and there may be wide differences in what timely delivery on promises consists of. This means that it may take you much longer to build up a trusting relationship with other people than you are used to, if at all.
We can swing the situation around and make you the unpredictable party - surely there are things in your behavior that would not be as expected by the host country inhabitants. Does that make you untrustworthy? Shouldn't they assume your good intent? (I hope you go abroad with good intent.)
I vote for trusting. Yes, some will take advantage of you, but the more suspicious you appear to be, the more likely is it that they will even want to. Why? The principle of self fulfilling prophecies. How do you feel if good intent is not assumed? So do they.
An other approach is to distinguish between universal trust and specific trust.
It may be much easier for you to develop specific trust relationships. You trust you barber with your hair, not your retirement account; the school teacher with your kids' education but not with flying the plane when you travel home.
If we live somewhere for a long time we may have relationships founded on more universal trust. Do you leave a spare key with your neighbor? Whom do you let know when you are on vacation? Do you give house guests access to your wifi password? Ever hired a babysitter? We all enter relationships where, although we don't discuss it specifically, our health, possessions, relatives are at the mercy of other people.
When we think about these relationships, we can acknowledge that we actually do trust quite a few people. It is healthy to have relationships built on trust. We know that our hormonal balance is influenced by stress; it also responds to trust, spewing out oxytocin instead of cortisol; reducing the blood pressure instead of raising it.
So even if we are skeptics by default, focusing on the specific situations where trust is appropriate rather than lamenting that there is no universal trust can improve one's sense of belonging.
Finally we can decide weather our trust should be an all-or-nothing approach. Can't we put people on a "watching line"? If somebody behaves in a way that would have declared that person untrustworthy in our home country, does that necessarily mean that he is untrustworthy here? It may be that he is normal and it is our expectations that need to be adjusted? It may be that there was a misunderstanding? When two parties communicate in a third language, this happens.
The odd thing about trust is that the strongest building block is our vulnerability. Vulnerability is not a weakness. Vulnerability is being human. When we dare show it, people are more willing to trust us.