Tag: ex-pat

Discovering Europe…with a little help from my friends

Yes, I’ve cried on friends’ shoulders, shared laughs, graduated, shopped, worked, participated in weddings…the normal life stuff.  But ten years ago I never would have anticipated that I would be crossing Europe with my friends, and it would be thanks to them that I can experience Europe in a way that far and away surpasses your average tourist experience.


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I’ve lived in Bologna, Italy, for three years, which is a big university town.  Here I have been lucky to meet people from all over the world.  Among my best friends are a Russian and a Serbian, and between the two of them we have heard a lot of Cold War and Bill Clinton jokes, which I am more than willing to suffer in exchange for the unique opportunity to see the world through their eyes once in a while.  And even the Italians that I am drawn to seem to have the traveling spirit and have spread all over Europe.


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So, luckily, I seem to have a friend wherever I want to go.  And my mission is to take advantage of this as much as possible.  In the last month I have been to Austria, Germany, and within Italy I have visited Venice, Treviso, Cassano D’Adda, Dozza, and Rome.  Exhausting, but awesome.


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My friends have brought me to these cities in different capacities – as tourists themselves, companions, hosts…and each trip was a pleasure.  I have the karma gods to thank for this, because, well, let’s face it.  Traveling with friends can be overwhelmingly awful as often as it can be wonderful.  I’ve had my share of the awful – from my friend loosing his pre-paid credit card on the way to our vacation in Stockholm, leaving me to underwrite his trip.  Or the evening a friend and I chose different adventures for the night, and thinking he would get home before me, he took the keys to our shared apartment from my purse without telling me, and never arrived at home, leaving me to search for an available hotel room in the wee hours of the night on foot in Hamburg, Germany.


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But, despite my past challenges, I can still whole-heartedly recommend traveling with friends.  The lighthearted, more outward focused energy between friends usually leaves us more emotionally open to meeting people during our adventures, which I believe is the true spirit of traveling.  Traveling with friends can be a nice break from traveling with your family or significant other in that it allows you to escape the normal role you play within your family unit.  And when you visit friends in their cities, you couldn’t ask for a better way to experience a new city.


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I only hope you can learn from my utter failures and keep in mind a few of my tips:  Try to travel with friends that have at least an equal amount of travel experience as you, and friends that you have traveled with before (at least a little bit) – i.e. don’t go to East Africa with someone you’ve never even left your own city with.  The more they love to travel, the better.  And if you aren’t completely flexible in every way along with your friend(s), the more you have in common economically, habitually, and with your goals/interests, the less conflicts you will have.  Which, in the end, I guess is just basic logic.


Logic??  What’s that???


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Stay tuned for my series of posts about my trips this month with my fabu friends.  And the pics!!  Oh, the pics.  Several thousand of them.  But don’t worry, they’ll be edited. 🙂
A presto!

Art Basel: A visual delight in my own backyard.

I live in Bologna, Italy, a mere five and a half-hour drive from Basel, Switzerland, which hosts one of the most important annual modern and contemporary art shows in the world, Art Basel.  In my two years of living in Bologna, did it ever occur to me to make a trip to Basel?  No.  Why not?  Good question.  Laziness…money…ignorance perhaps…I guess it gets the best of us sometimes.  Our own backyards are sometimes the last place we explore.  In this case, I was lucky enough that my friend Zong rescued me from my remiss by inviting me to meet him at his gallery’s exhibition this year at Art Basel.

Having virtually no visual arts education and not being a fan of fairs and trade shows in general, my decision to go was in the spirit of adventure, friendship, and trust in Art Basel’s excellent reputation.  And, well, why not?  The exhibition spanned a full week in Basel, with about 300 galleries exhibiting, strictly chosen from a group of 2,000 applicants.  It sounded promising.

Simply put, Art Basel wholly lived up to its reputation and in scale, was truly the most impressive collection of modern and contemporary art I have seen in my life.  And I really can’t stress this enough – you don’t need to know anything about art to enjoy an exhibition like this.  From all-star artists like Picasso and Warhol, furniture and design displays, photography, and installation art, there is something for everyone.  And don’t even try looking at everything – there’s no time.  Just stop and look at what really gets you.

Statistically speaking, there is something for everyone, and because this is not your average art show, that something is likely to be, well, amazing.  I will never forget the moment I walked into one of the exhibit halls at Art Basel, roughly the size of a football field, and realized the entire hall was dedicated to installation art.  This is not the sort of thing you find every day.  I suddenly felt like an eight-year-old that just walked into Disneyland.  I spent the afternoon weaving my way between larger than life paintings with their own soundtracks (think Moby Dick dressed in costume complete with whale sounds and a recorded reading), huge sculptures, through installed walls of fictional deserted businesses on an urban street, and into countless dark rooms with video projects, each one like a treasure waiting to be pulled out of a grab bag.  By the end of the day, my mind was soaring from all the stimulation from so many visual delights.  I was thrilled.  I even managed to convince my athletic and left-brained travel companion, David, to come.  He found solace in the visual mind tricks from architecturally inspired installations.

And the cherry on top of the fabulousness that was Art Basel was the beautiful, accessible, and relaxed city of Basel.  While the city was packed with people attending the exhibition, there was plenty of room for everyone (aside from the steep hotel prices – book in advance).  I spent a relaxing evening enjoying a stroll along the River Rhine, soaking in the beautiful architecture and the wonderfully relaxed vibe.  My friend David spent the day hiking along the river, which he filled me in on with his iPhone photos when we met later for dinner at a local favorite for beer,  The Fischerstube.

Reuniting with Zong in what really did turn out to be a mecca of modern and contemporary art, I really started kicking myself for not being more proactive with my travel adventure research and coming to Art Basel sooner.  How many other amazing places are there to explore and things to do in the world am I missing because, well, no one has invited me?  I’ve really got to get on this…Next year, Venice Biennale, here I come!

Here’s a slide show of my favorite photos from Basel:

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Art Basel 2013, a set on Flickr.

Teaching English Abroad: A means to an end, or home away from home?

Does your burning desire to travel keep you up at night?

Do you speak any other languages?

If no, are you an expert in skiing/snowboarding/sailing/scuba diving?

No? Well, worry no more. If you are reading this blog and understand all of my slang, phrasal verbs, use of the verb “to get” and collocations, your English is your golden ticket to a life abroad.

So, how do you feel about teaching English?

While this is indeed a fictional conversation, I’m certain that it has taken place many thousands of times, over the years, all over the world. If you are wondering how I became such an expert on the topic, the answer is possibly one of the most surprising things that has ever happened to me. I’m a Californian, and I have been living in Bologna, Italy, for two years. My career path twisted and turned enough to dump me out in Italy for what was supposed to be a period of one year. And at the conclusion of that year, I realized I wasn’t nearly ready to return to normal life in the U.S. So, what could I possibly do to sustain myself here? Why, teach English of course.


I wish I had a time machine and could have read my own blog before I moved to Italy. Instead, I spoke less than ten words in Italian when I touched down here two years ago, and had no idea how I would possibly make money. Crazy you say? I think yes. Believe me, getting settled hasn’t been a cakewalk. But every little setback and frustration has been completely and utterly worth it. My time living in Europe is pretty much the most important period of my life to date. I thank my lucky stars that this opportunity fell in my lap.


And now, at the age of 32, with two masters degrees and fifteen years of work experience, I find myself living like a college student in Bologna and spending most of my days hissing like a snake in a hopeless effort to remind my students not to forget the “s” when speaking in the third person.

My English teaching colleagues span the career spectrum from college student to lawyer to security guard, and come from the United States, Australia, and Ireland. You can find us with the heaviest backpacks, standing at bus stops with our lunch in our hands. I can safely say that none of us imagined ourselves as being experts at explaining the usage of the present perfect verb tense, but I guess weirder things have happened. No matter what the economy is like, people will always spend money to learn English, and therefore, there is always a demand for mother tongue English teachers. And that is great news for you, because no matter what your skills are in teaching English – from none to expert – it means you can live wherever you want in the world, and pay your way through this profession. But while becoming an English teacher is quite easy, being a good English teacher is not so easy.

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My students watching Obama’s acceptance speech.

A deceptively simple occupation from an outsider’s perspective, the reality is teaching English is a constant juggling act of the infinite needs of a student body that includes every imaginable age, learning type, background, and English level. Being a good English teacher mandates a drive and a determination to rise above the mediocrity of the industry in an effort to not only share the gift of our native language, but to fill the many challenging roles that go along with teaching including diplomacy, psychology, and friendship. This isn’t an easy task. But the payback is exponential (notice the use of “payback” and not “paycheck).

There are circuits of international schools around the world that allow their teachers to spend their lives moving from city to city, teaching at different international schools within the circuit, and exploring different countries. Coincidentally, a close friend of mine from my hometown is doing just that. We ran into each other by chance in Bologna, and after living here for a year and a half, making a living by teaching English at a wealthy private English school, he has now moved on to China, where he is teaching for a private English school owned by Disney. He loves it.

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My students at the Mediateca library in San Lazzaro always remind me to wear my jacket.

Not only does teaching allow you to earn the money you need to live in the country of your dreams, but the students you teach help you build the support network you need to acclimate to and live happily in the country of your dreams, which is the least talked about and most important aspect of this job. Every Friday at the local library my longtime students make me feel a little less homesick for my Aunt Suzanne, as they know the ins and outs of my love life and even remind me to wear my jacket. When I miss my nephew, every Monday and Friday I enjoy my youngest student just a little more, especially when I get to help him decorate the Christmas tree, which was especially important this year since I didn’t get to go home for Christmas. When my Saturday afternoon student cried on my shoulder after her boyfriend broke up with her, I felt like the big sister I always wished I was (I’m an only child). And I was overwhelmed when one of my students called me from the hospital just before Christmas to apologize for missing our last class, and to give me the information for a theatre group he was encouraging me to join. Through my students I know the ins and outs of Bologna in a way that some of my Bolognese friends can’t even understand.

I feel utterly blessed, and I wonder how I could have possibly been so remiss as to never have considered moving abroad earlier in my life. But then I remember that after discovering my love of theatre at the age of 11, I’ve spent the better part of my life completely absorbed in my career oriented-ness. Unfortunately, I spent little time pondering what I wanted from life aside from my career goals. How American of me.

I hope that my unexpected adventures as an English teacher will inspire you to think about what you want from life, and not what you want from your job. And if what you want from life somehow includes traveling, all the better. Now you know how to finance it.

And the next time you are in Italy and happen to see someone on the bus reviewing an English grammar book, do say hello.


Bon voyage.