Another blog, another introduction. To be fair, a lot has happened since the last time I started a blog, and I’ve learned a lot more about the international life, so this is long overdue.
If you’re new to the various forms of How To Go Abroad, let’s keep it simple: Hi, I’m Caleb. When I was 21 I moved from a small city in California to Prague, Czech Republic, to teach English for a year. A year turned into four years; those four years revealed a personal passion for culture, travel, and the human experience; that passion led to a world-discovery project that brought me to rural Japan for a year, backpacking and volunteering in India for six months, and surveying the “Heroes, Hopes, and Fears” of school children in Tanzania for another six months. Along the way I realized that I was in love with a French girl I’d met in Prague years before, so it was back to Europe for me! But not before a small detour to South Korea for a summer job, obviously!
That brings us up to 2011, when I last maintained a blog. If you want to see what the whirlwind of my life looked like as I contemplated “settling down” you can peek into the archives here. Spoiler alert, life didn’t “settle down” all that much. I spent the next three years studying Global History in Germany and International Management in France (during which I moved six times), while spending every extra moment with my girlfriend who was living in another city (more lessons on international and long-distance relationships). In 2014 we got married and accepted an opportunity to work together at an international school in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. The following year we moved to Washington D.C. where I learned about the difficulties of returning “home” after ten years away. During that time I was offered a job at a university in Prague, back where it all began! Of course it took 20 months of twists and turns to make that dream a reality, and we were “forced” to spend six of those months in Thailand as digital nomads (in case you were wondering, that was THE life!). We finally made it to Prague, and we’ve been here for six months, me in the international student office of a large university and my wife teaching at an international high school. We’re a little older, a little wiser, and a lot more tired, but no less excited about all the possibilities of The International Life!
So I’d like to share some of my experience to help you find your international adventure, hopefully after learning from my mistakes so you can make it even better! My posts here will take the form of stories from the road, general observations about culture and society, tips to help you travel better and cheaper, and highlighting specific opportunities or common ways of going abroad. This information will usually be aimed at Americans who want to live abroad, since that is my own background, but most of the posts should be interesting for a much wider audience of people who want to live in a foreign country.
Please follow me your social platform of choice (links above) and feel free to ask any questions on any of those platforms. If I can provide a helpful answer, I will! Happy adventuring!
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