Tag: Expats
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Time Travelling Postcards: Anatolian Road Trip, 2003
I didn’t always live in Shanghai. Or Hanoi. Although this blog places my online identity firmly in heart of east Asia, I have actually spent more time living in Turkey, both in European Istanbul and Asian Anatolia- 6 years in total. Sometimes even I forget what a huge chunk of my formative adult years that…
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Time Travelling Postcards From: Christmas in New York, 2002
It’s damp season here in Hanoi. The moldy months are in full swing and I’m feeling super protective of my electronics and my reams of ephemeral life data. Hanoi, like Shanghai before it, kills electronics. I’m quietly doing multiple back ups, fully aware of the three external hard drives and two laptops that Shanghai’s humidity…
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Notes From Hanoi: Post-Tet Bling, Wise Men and Orion Pies For the Gods
I’m surprisingly comfortable with having no clue what’s going on around me. I’ve spent most of my adult life in countries where I’m not only far from fluent in the language but am also illiterate and still learning the cultural ropes. Vietnam- and specifically here in Hanoi because I can’t really speak for the rest…
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Sometimes You Just Need to Get the Hell Outta Dodge
The French had a word for those long grim grey drizzly damp Hanoi winters. Le crachin, they called it, which also applied to similarly grim, grey, drizzly damp French places like Bretagne. They probably attached a grumbled maudit to it, shrugged their shoulders, lit up an unfiltered cigarette, slugged back a swig of tannic Dalat…
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Let’s Hear it For the Boy: Notes on Thwack’s First Birthday
Have you seen this baby? A year ago today, he made a mad dash for the outside world, narrowly averting a first appearance in the hospital elevator, born in a hastily cleared labour room to the sounds of John Coltrane on the iPhone. Everything went so quickly not according to plan that the home birth with the pool…
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Do Shared Memories Still Exist if One Party is Trying Really Hard to Forget?: Notes on Losing 5 Years of Travel
This one has been worming its way through my head for about a week or two now. It’s a tricky one, one I can’t quite articulate without giving too much away. I write publicly, but I have boundaries. I need to tread carefully sometimes. I’m going to make this one about a specific…
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10 Practical Reasons Why You Probably Shouldn’t Move to Hanoi With Your Baby
Last week, I adamantly insisted that Vietnam- or, more specifically, Hanoi- was the place to be if you have a small urchin to care for. Because reasons. Lots of very good reasons. However, I was totally lying. Kind of. In a hyperbolic, contrarian fashion, I now intend to tell you exactly why moving to Hanoi would…
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Tiny Notes From Hanoi: It’s Like Downton Abbey, Except Different
We have a house, people. A whole house to ourselves, partway down a narrow scooter-wide lane, off a side street, a block from the lake. After two months of living out of suitcases, over a month living with family (both sides, on both sides of the Atlantic), and over three weeks camping out in hotel…
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How to Pack for the Person You’d Like to Become
We moved out of our little terrace house last weekend. Our dining room full of boxes is now stacked neatly in the third floor spare room of a sprawling Victorian house in the groovier bit of Leicester. We have a surprising amount of stuff for having just moved here last November with a 30kg…
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What I’m Talking About When I Talk About China
A few weeks ago, I was randomly contacted by someone working for an expat relocation company. He wanted me to write a guide for Suzhou, a city I spent a total of one afternoon in several years ago, interviewing for a temporary job doing localization editing work for a Chinese video game company producing martial…
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I’m Learning Vietnamese, Y’all: What You Really Need To Know When Learning a New Language
I’m Learning Vietnamese. I Think I’m Learning Vietnamese. I really think so. So I’m learning another language. I’m adding Vietnamese, slowly and poorly intoned, to my slapdash mental collection of half remembered words and phrases from a dozen countries. I may have mentioned this once or twice already. After a decade of trying to cram Turkish…
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Stock Taking (Again): Notes on Preparing to Leave (Again)
How many Ikea POÄNG chairs have I bought (and then sold or left behind) in my decades of careless geographic instability? How many sets of kitchen odds and ends, how many cups and bowls and sets of cutlery? How many bookshelves (and their contents), kitchen tables, armoires (and their sartorial contents) and beds? All of them,…