Public toilets in France are called “sanisettes,” and are a level in between a small building and a porta-potty. They seem slightly permanent, but are still mostly plastic, and are small enough that they seem to house only one stall. They have huge, sliding, electronic doors and are free to use. As someone with a small bladder, I considered myself a sort of connoisseur of public toilets, but this breed was a new one for me. Less than a month into living in France, I went to a wine festival in the city center of Montpellier. After a few days of intensive French classes, I was still at a caveman-level…
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Beer, Tip, Water, Bread, Olives, and the Foreigner Tax
In Prague, you can buy a pint of beer for around $2.00. And I’m not talking a Bud or Miller Light kind of beer. I’m talking a top-quality, world-renown pint of happiness. It’s a point of pride for Czech people, and I can see why. After getting off our first, one-way train, exhausted, thirsty, hungry, and schooled, finding that those fabled prices were true helped get us back on the right foot. Prices are low in the Czech Republic in general, and the beer definitely takes the cake. Unfortunately, not all prices in Europe are this low. In Oslo, we wanted to grab a quick bite of lunch our first…
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Learning the Ropes
It was 6:30 in the morning, and we were sprinting across Krakow as fast as our double-backpacks would let us. Despite the panic, we were feeling the thrill of boarding our first one-way train. We made it to the station with about 15 minutes to spare, stopped briefly to grab a quick bite of breakfast (and a shot of caffeine), and then jumped onto our train. Done! Made it! We were officially on our adventure, our nomadic experiment. The plan: in the spirit of a memoir I had read a few months earlier, our plan for the next few weeks, albeit for a couple plane tickets we already needed to…
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Let Me Catch You Up: What’s Happened Since We Left the US
A LOT. Kevin ended up taking the job he was offered in France, and I decided to look for work once we arrived, while developing my own business on the side. We left the US for Europe in September, 2017, hopped around for about 6 weeks until we arrived in Montpellier, France, where we’ve been living and working since. You can read the plans we made before leaving in my official “Announcement” I posted on my teacher-blog in July, 2017 here–> But as for after July 2017, here’s a quick summary: Work Since moving, we’ve continued to work, though we’ve both been trying to move towards 100% remote work. Kevin…
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Pre-Move: T-7 Months
February 15th, 2016 – 7 Months Before What craziness it’s been the past month. If you were wondering, Teaching + 8 hours of grad school is a little nutty. Kevin would tell you that finishing a PhD while also tying up business ventures before going abroad is a little nutty, too. I’ll update you on what’s been going on towards preparing for “The Move.” Since my last post, I took the opportunity of the three-day weekend before grad school started to apply to a teaching assistant position through the Spanish government. The position is officially called a “North American Language and Culture Assistant,” and my impression of the purpose is to bring…
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Pre-Move: So, It’s Official?
December 15th, 2016 – 9 Months Before Even though we’ve been talking about moving abroad for a couple years now, when we tell people these days that those are our plans after our grad degrees, the first question we get is, “So it’s official?” We never really know how to answer that question (what makes something “official?”). It’s as official as it can be. Kevin has applied for a couple jobs, and we both have been researching various ways in which to support ourselves while abroad. We know it’s what we want to do. We know there are various ways to make it happen. It’s just a matter of getting there.…
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Pre-Move: I Feel Like I’m Living a Double-Life
November 18th, 2016 – 10 Months Before “I feel like I’m living a double-life.” This is the statement I’ve started and ended every weekend with this school year. During the week, I’ve been teaching my 6th graders by day, rushing home and completing grad school coursework by night, barely time to breathe. Weekends are my space to catch up, and most importantly, to wake up for 48 hours to the dream that Kevin and I have been kindling for the past 18 months. We are going to live abroad. We are going to live abroad for at least a year. We are letting go of the status quo. At 26, every step of our…
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Vulnerability Grande
I remember wiping the sweat off of my palms and moving seats twice to ensure we had a good view, but not front-row-and-awkward view. It was so weird that he was in London, so weird that I was in London, and weirder still that we were both in London at the same time and in the same room. I was so nervous. There is this very naked feeling when you’re meeting someone you’ve admired for a long time. It’s like the cyber screen or pages that kept you connected yet separate up until now suddenly felt like clothes, and now that they were gone, well, you were naked. Suddenly very…
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Translations Part 5: Washers
We stayed with Mary for a few days, exploring different places near Bialka Tatranska, and eventually trekking to Krakow. This was where we’d say good-bye to Mary and officially start on our own in Eastern Europe, armed with Google Translate and a few survival phrases, along with a couple backpacks each and a loose itinerary for the next 6 weeks. It was exciting and stressful. The trek to Krakow from Bialka Tatranska is lovely (and much lovelier when I’m not jet-lagged and narcoleptic on my way to BT). Poland is really beautiful: rolling hills grazing livestock, and steep-roofed, colorful houses dot the scenery. Mary told us that after Poland was…
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Translations Part 4: Receipts
For our next few restaurant experiences, we discovered the camera button on Google translate. If you haven’t seen this, seriously, go download the app and check it out. While not perfect, it usually can do the job well enough for you to get the gist of what you’re trying to read, along with a healthy dose of presumably mistaken word or phrase translations. The first time we used the app, we used it to help translate our receipt at a Polish restaurant, which seemed like it had a couple extra items. At this moment, we hadn’t realized that you could actually take a picture of what you were looking at;…