Tag: Expats

Time Travelling Postcards: Anatolian Road Trip, 2003
March 12, 2015

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 …

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Time Travelling Postcards From: Christmas in New York, 2002
March 6, 2015

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 …

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Notes From Hanoi: Post-Tet Bling, Wise Men and Orion Pies For the Gods
March 2, 2015

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 …

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Sometimes You Just Need to Get the Hell Outta Dodge
March 1, 2015

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 …

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Let’s Hear it For the Boy: Notes on Thwack’s First Birthday
February 26, 2015

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 …

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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
January 24, 2015

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 …

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10 Practical Reasons Why You Probably Shouldn’t Move to Hanoi With Your Baby
December 23, 2014

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 …

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Tiny Notes From Hanoi: It’s Like Downton Abbey, Except Different
November 11, 2014

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 …

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How to Pack for the Person You’d Like to Become
September 5, 2014

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 …

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What I’m Talking About When I Talk About China
August 21, 2014

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 …

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I’m Learning Vietnamese, Y’all: What You Really Need To Know When Learning a New Language
June 18, 2014

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 …

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Stock Taking (Again): Notes on Preparing to Leave (Again)
June 7, 2014

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, …

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