Moving Together: A Guide on How to Navigate Moving With Your Partner into Your New Home While Keeping Your Sanity Intact

Daydreaming about moving into a beautiful, spacious new home is whimsical and fun. Actually packing up your whole house on the morning of your move, hours before the movers are supposed to arrive, is a bit of a different experience – especially if you and your partner aren’t on the same page. Recently, I moved […]

5 Tips On How You Can Cope With Your Mental Health During The Covid-19 Pandemic

These last few months have been like walking through a fog. The world has shut down. Blurry memories now haunt the streets while basked in a tainted, hazy daylight. After Covid-19 happened, it’s like we’ve all gotten swept up in a whirlwind of jigsaw emotions. Our brains have been rattled and our sanity has been […]

An Expat’s Experience After Returning Home During the Covid-19 Pandemic: When Does Home Start to Feel Like Home?

It’s a peculiar feeling when you leave your home, set out to explore the great global expanse of unknown before you. It’s even more peculiar to return to your home after being gone a while, only to return to a semblance of home which has been morphed and twisted into a fog-mirrored, shadow-reflection of its […]

An Expat’s Experience: Returning Home During the Covid-19 Pandemic

On March 19th, 2020 I received a text from my sister. She informed me that the U.S. government issued a statement asking all U.S. citizens living abroad to return home to the states immediately, or to anticipate remaining abroad indefinitely. A panic surged through me. My racing thoughts came to a halt and everything around […]

An Expat’s Response: Deciding to Return Home During The Covid-19 Virus Pandemic

I’m going home. As we all know, there is a horrendous virus plaguing the globe that is disrupting the global economy, stealing thousands of lives, and quite frankly, it’s petrifying me. Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam is where I am currently based. It has been such a pleasure and an immeasurable gift to have […]

A Guide to a Better You: How to be a Good Expat

I was not a very good expat when I first arrived in Vietnam. There were instances when I resisted and fought against opportunities to better myself and act with compassion. I ignored my privilege and viewed differences as things that were wrong instead of just different. I compared the culture which I grew up in […]

Hobbies: The Best Ways to Fill Your Time While Living Abroad

As an expat living abroad, have you ever found yourself with a lot of additional free time and no idea what to do to fill your day? Perhaps there’s an international virus pandemic which closed down the business where you work and now you have extra hours each day aching to be filled by something […]

Looking Past the Mundane Filter

It’s a shame how often the “mundane” is so disregarded from how extraordinary it really is. I keep finding myself lost in thought, sitting at the umpteenth coffee shop tucked away in the millionth alley of Ho Chi Minh City. After having lived here for seven months, it’s all too easy to forget exactly where […]

The Thing About Cultures is…

The thing about cultures is that they are glorious. They are beautiful. They are unique. I’ve come to the realization that there are some aspects of cultures that one simply can’t comprehend without having been born and raised within them. There are subtle norms etched into the very souls of those who grew and developed […]

The Power of Saying YES!

At the start of 2019 I made myself a vow. It would be the year of “saying yes”, of challenging myself and the fears that had dictated my years prior. I recognized that I had let so many amazing opportunities slither away from between my fingers. Blown as sand amongst the winds of change. Fear […]