International living and working

Bomb goes off, the cancellations roll in. A rare murder makes the news, tourism takes a dive. It happens like clockwork every time a potential travel destination is in the news because something bad happens. People turn on CNN (or worse, Fox News) and get scared by the scenes of mayhem or murder. “Whoa, I’m …

Are you fully backed up if all your electronics get stolen or lost while you’re traveling? Or your hard drive crashes? When I first backpacked around the world in the 1990s, pre-internet, my back-up files were pieces of paper. Bank account numbers, passport copies, and an address book. All our music was on cassettes and …

Often when I visit a country I take a stroll through a typical supermarket looking for the screaming bargains. What’s a deal here? I’m writing this while traveling through Guatemala, which is certainly one of the cheapest places to travel and one of the cheapest places to live. Here’s what I picked up yesterday in …

If you ask people what they think of Panama, the ones who have never been will generally stumble, shrug, or bring up some negative like the rude taxi drivers in the capital or (generally) boring food. It’s not a country the uninitiated generally have on the bucket list unless they’re the type that geeks out …

  “What are you doing down there?” is the first question I get about living in Mexico. (Half the time followed by “Is it safe?”) “Same thing I was doing in the other places I lived,” is my stock answer. I worked for many years to put myself in a position of being location independent, …