Tag: Foreign

When I first started travelling the world at 20 years old, I found comfort in meeting people that spoke English. Although everything else was foreign, there was a familiarity in being able to connect in a common language. However, the more I travelled the more I longed for the unknown. So, I&r...

We human beings have a special ability that no other species have : to look ourselves from the higher perspective and figure out our way in life — what is going on? what is the problem I am facing ? and what I need to do right now to make things better? This higher order thinking helps us t...

When I first started travelling the world at 20 years old, I found comfort in meeting people that spoke English. Although everything else was foreign, there was a familiarity in being able to connect in a common language. However, the more I travelled the more I longed for the unknown. So, I&r...

I travel a lot, lived in many places in the US, Middle East & Asia. People always like to ask me what my favorite city is. I wish I had a simple answer since each city has its own charm and appeal. Recently I lived in Bangkok for an extended period of time again before coming back to Taipei w...

Today marks one week since we landed on foreign soil. I wish I could say this first week has been a crazy adventure (and, of course, in some ways it has been) but actually this week has felt *almost relaxing. The weight of hoping and praying that we’ll get through every obstacle to get through...

The topic of working in Taiwan as a foreigner is something I’ve spoken about on multiple occasions. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at events discussing this issue hosted by All Hands Taiwan, The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, TAITRA and at a couple of job fairs. Within the foreigner co...

It is a common lament, both within the United States and abroad, that Americans lag far behind Europeans in foreign language skills. As far as stereotypes go, it is a pretty well-founded one. Most Americans do not even study a foreign language in school, and I know many who took French or Spanish fo...

First, it was the Malagasy immigrants who had settled here long before my arrival — mostly second-generation immigrants. To them, they were the true immigrants because they had been here long enough, having endured the trials and tribulations of immigration, and having a deep un...

Soon after I moved to Prague, the Czech Republic, in 2015, I went to a used book store and bought a book of children’s fairy tales in Czech. I love reading fairy tales, so I wanted to use this love to motivate me to read in Czech. I had to translate nearly every word. As it was a second-han...

Over the past year I’ve been working towards fluency in another language: French, my family’s long forgotten mother tongue. It hasn’t been easy, not by any stretch of the imagination — their love of grouping things in threes took my American mind a long time to wrap around. ...