The following will get you started on the quest for your ideal teaching job abroad.

Sometimes the sheer number of teaching jobs abroad is overwhelming. Korea? Kyrzgystan? Mexico? Lithuania?

A google search for ESL jobs will pull up a cluster of potential resources which takes time, patience and a discerning, critical eye to wade through. Some, of course, are much more trustworthy and useful than others.

In my four years of experience teaching overseas, here are the ones I’ve found most helpful.

1. Dave’s ESL Cafe.

Simply classic. Yes, you’ll find the old salts in the forums whining about anything and everything – the food, the bureaucracy, the students, the pay, the visas – so think twice before you turn down or accept a job based on what you find there. At the same time, those forums can be an excellent way to gauge the legitimacy of certain language schools and to get a sense of the average pay and visa regulations in a region.

Before I took a short-term teaching position in Japan, I consulted the forums at Dave’s and got several private messages from previous instructors telling me what to expect, which was enormously helpful in preparing materials and adjusting my expectations.

Plus, the International Job Board is much more reliable than many other online job feeds and contains a wide range of jobs all over the world. I’ve found two out of four teaching positions via the International Job Board.

2. Tefl.com

Another extremely reliable site for jobs which tend to be more professional, for teachers with a TESOL, Delta or Celta certificate and experience. There are some jobs for novices on here, including plenty in China, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia, but many of the jobs are in Europe and require certain credentials.

Photo: J.C Rojas

The site also tends to favor teachers from the UK – be careful when reading the job ads to check if the little blue “EU National Preferred” box appears at the bottom. If so, Americans, you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle for that position, and you’ll probably be in charge of dealing with visa issues.

One major perk of Tefl.com is that they allow you to apply for jobs directly through their website by uploading your information into a portfolio. They also give you the option of applying for a daily feed of jobs – which I ultimately had to unsubscribe to, because I couldn’t deal with the constant temptation to move to, say, Kazakhstan.

3. Transitions Abroad’s Teaching English Abroad Portal

This is much more than a simple job site. If you’ve ever wondered about TEFL courses in Vietnam, short-term teaching positions in Italy or the ins and outs of getting a university job in Chile, this should be your first stop. The site has an unbelievable amount of useful, detailed information about teaching abroad.

I could spend hours simply wandering dazed through the possibilities, and you probably should if you’re new to teaching and thinking about taking a job in a place you’ve never visited.

4. Esl Job Feed.

Jobs. Lots of ‘em. Straight up.

5. The University of Michigan’s sites for Teaching Abroad Without Certification and Teaching Abroad for Qualified Teachers

These sites offer an extremely well organized compilation of information not only about teaching jobs, but also about programs like Fulbright teaching assistanceships for recent graduates or graduate students. They contain extensive guides to teaching in countries on six continents (Antarctica is woefully underrepresented) as well as articles about cross-cultural exchange in the English language classroom, teaching jobs with government organizations and NGO’s, and teaching at every level from elementary to post-graduate.

There’s no reason not to do research before you take off on a teaching adventure, especially if you’re thinking of accepting a position with a gigantic language school with branches all over Asia or Latin America. If you’ve got a set idea of what you want to do and where you want to go, all it takes is persistence and research to get you there.

Community Connection

Matador offers its own set of ESL resources, including The Insider’s Guide to Teaching English In Asia, The Eight Hidden Benefits of Teaching English Abroad, Top Ten Places for Teaching English Abroad, and the classic Meet Your ESL Coworkers.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/5-essential-online-resources-for-finding-esl-jobs/feed/ 5 http://matadorabroad.com/does-travel-abroad-less-conspicuous-consumption-at-home/ http://matadorabroad.com/does-travel-abroad-less-conspicuous-consumption-at-home/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:15:33 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=2521

Feature photo: Phillie Casablanca Photo: permanently scatterbrained

I often hear talk about how travelers made a bold and courageous move to “leave behind the American dream” or “escape from the rat race” to travel abroad. Well, great, I think, but what happens when you go back?

Perhaps in contrast to many travelers and travel bloggers, I’m not sure I see the act of getting temporarily out of the 9-5 grind as inherently courageous or life-changing. Sure, in some contexts it is – but in others, it seems like a vain and pompous way of, well, to put it bluntly, slumming it, playing at poverty and adventure for a certain period of time before settling snugly back into a world of Western plumbing and three dollar lattes.

Photo: colros

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with taking a break from work to travel (nor, I should add, is there anything wrong with Western plumbing), and I think escaping daily life for awhile can lead to some perspective-altering experiences, but I just don’t buy that it’s always an act of nobility to leave a cushy job with a pile of savings and hit the road for a bit; I don’t buy the frequent argument that this automatically creates a life or society changing perspective.

But this piece about how adventure travel kills conspicuous consumption changed my mind for a bit. I cringed at the opening line about ditching the American dream, thinking isn’t it the “American dream” that’s allowed you to save up for this whole adventure and to appreciate it from the distinct perspective of someone from the land of plenty?

But the article humbled my cynicism. The author talked about coming home to an overflowing storage unit of stuff she realized she didn’t need. She discusses the changes in her lifestyle in San Fransisco after more than a year traveling around the world, and how she doesn’t feel the need to fix things that aren’t broken. More interestingly, she notes how before resistance to materialism felt contrived, whereas post-trip, it feels natural.

Photo: chopr

Thinking about this, I experienced a full-on surge of travel optimism.

I have my personal opinions about how traveler quests for “authenticity” or “simplicity” often enough end up reinforcing the same dichotomy between noble poor paradise and wicked material wealth, but this article offered an alternative: taking an awareness of the enormous gap between wealthy developed nations and poor developing ones -between the excessive haves of the former and the often desperate lack of the latter – back home and crafting a different lifestyle out of it. Yes. That’s good.

And you, reader? What do you think? Do you think travel abroad -adventure or otherwise- curbs consumption? Share your thoughts below.

Feature Photo: Andrew Currie Photo: akechi

I still remember the sinking feeling I had getting off the train in Guangzhou, China, at 1 a.m. You think that perhaps arriving in the middle of the night in the middle of winter might spare you from the onslaught of shouting pushy people waving laminated fliers, but no.

“Hotel hotel HOTEL HOTEL hotel hotel CHEAP CHEAP good price!!”

The refrain like a cacophony of badly tuned horns, reinforced by jostling elbows and hands grabbing at our coats. These situations require a big deep breath of centered calm. Otherwise, if you’re anything like me, you’re likely to freak out and start running as fast as you can in the opposite direction.

Guangzhou isn’t the only place this happens in the world, of course. At those charged Destinations with a capital D where travelers arrive in swarms with obvious needs to be met (spiritual, commercial, basic, or otherwise) there is inevitably a waiting mass of locals looking to fill those needs, or create them. The Age recently ran a piece about the top cities where you get hassled as a traveler and I can think of many that aren’t on that list.

For me, this is a nasty feeling. I dislike fighting through the crowds, dislike the pulling at my clothes and the shouting, dislike the feeling of being in a full-on, unmasked consumer interaction with a place and it’s people. It’s like pulling that pretty little shear veil of “authenticity” or awe off of a travel experience and a place to reveal the simple, ugly framework of money beneath.

But then again, is it really my place to whine about this? After all, in China or Peru I am taking advantage of the low cost of living and searching out my own version of the authentic (Chinese living in traditional hutongs? Peruvians walking llamas through the Andes?) and there’s no reason the local people need to comply with my vision of an idyllic authentic getaway, right? To many of them, I am a way to make money – perhaps a nice and friendly way to make money or a slightly hostile one, but in any case, a path to the cash. Does this make them bad, cynical, sinister people? Perhaps some, but not all.

From yet another angle, however, one wonders if this sort of unregulated full-on assault throwing all sorts of random goods and services at tourists really benefits the “sellers” or “touts” or “locals” or however you’d classify them in the end – it often creates a popping resentment and hostility between them and visitors, it can end up damaging tourism to the area, and it frequently leads to rampant development in the form of hostels and backpacker joints and, to use a controversial term here, “cultural pollution.”

Yet how do we and they prevent it from happening?

What do you think, readers? Where are the places you’ve been hassled most? How do you deal with it? What do you think could be done about it? Let’s get the discussion going.

Perhaps, being a traveler (or someone at least vaguely interested in travel), you are as obsessed with maps as I am.

I find old maps nostalgic and achingly beautiful. They seem to bring up a swirl of memories, subterranean memories about exploration, fear, fascination, curiosity. The delicate borders of continents like the veins of leaves, and place names in fine print emanating the smells and sensations and mysteries held within their borders. Brazil, China.

It is hard to find the vinyl-ish film and gaudy greens and yellows of modern maps as romantic, but I still love a good map, before, during, and after a trip. A map, arguably, brings a trip into tangibility – you start with the anticipation and the plans, tracing lines on the map, pointing at dots, and then, at some point, the lines become rivers you’ve walked and the dots a city you’ve wandered and slept in. Maps are the most concrete and primitive artifacts of a journey – I was here.

Maps are also, of course, somewhat relative. Early cartographers drew their dragons and monsters on distant seas and used images to suggest the native flora and fauna that might be found in a place. Colonial maps tend to reflect the interests of the colonizer, electing colonial place names and highlighting material resources of importance.

Aerial photography greatly altered map-making to suit the interests of colonial powers at the turn of the century – once resources could be mapped from above, maps could be constructed solely for the purpose of showing where the loot was. A cynical perspective, but one that certainly aided in the colonial mission.

So maps are powerful, subjective tools, which got me thinking that as travelers, how would we construct maps of the places we’ve visited or would like to visit? What would our maps reveal about what interests us in a trip?

There is this beautiful gastro map of India, for example, for the traveler who discovers place through food. Then there’s the brilliant Worldmapper, creating cartograms of the world and individual countries according to criteria ranging from female literacy to radio usage. A really useful way of understanding a country through terms other than physical boundaries and topography.

Maybe you’d map the world by mountain ranges, maybe by deserts – the idea is, all maps are, to a certain degree, subjective in travel, and the way we interpret and use maps depends on the places and ideas that interest us.

To start us off, I think my maps would include a gastro map of Mexico, with a detailed guide to street-side taco stands. And then, perhaps, a careful map of Andean villages tucked between peaks, and a map of small, out of the way passenger train routes in Japan.

So tell us, travelers, what maps would you draw?

Feature Photo: Paul Stevenson Photo: gabyu

There’s plenty of reasoning about why Americans don’t travel abroad. Travel bloggers speculate on whether it’s fear of a big, scary world, or ignorance of other cultures, or short vacation time, or the simple fact that there’s a helluva lot of stuff to do in the U.S alone. It may be all of those factors combined, but that’s not what interests me. What interests me is the assumption behind all this speculation – the assumption that Americans should travel abroad.

At first I wanted to question that assumption, since I’ve met plenty of Americans who could (and happily would) tick off all of the countries they’ve visited, list all of the trials and tribulations and predictable breakthroughs they’ve had, rave about all the artwork and trinkets and objects they’ve bought and swoon over the precious simple authenticity of “the locals,” and I find nothing particularly revolutionary or educational about this at all.

In fact, I think it’s pretty much the same old dynamic between the U.S and the world multiplied once more – simple consumable experiences, the commodification of culture, the seeing-what-we’ve-been-primed-by-the-media-to-see vs. researching-what-is.

But I hope I’m not so cynical or so pompous as to completely disregard the potential of travel abroad – while I don’t see it as the panacea for twisted U.S foreign policy or the distorted views many Americans have of the world, I also think it holds enormous potential to create positive, constructive change. By “change” I mean change in the way Americans think about, say, where their coffee comes from, or change in the way they think about an American food culture that relies on an unhealthy dependence on processed corn and the microwave.

Photo: tiltti

I’ve met plenty of people who have gone through transformations abroad and started, little by little, to see their world and the world overall from different angles. They’ve perhaps started to follow the news about China or Mexico much more carefully and to search out different perspectives. They’ve become aware of the affect of U.S corn subsidies on the people they met and talked to in Southern Mexican villages. They see that wow, I have a lot of stuff in my house and these people, they seem to be doing just fine without having to go to Target every other day for a new something.

This is not, of course, a given. I don’t think anyone has the right to declare what a traveler should or should not learn, should or should not see. But I have met plenty of Americans who have been prying into their own assumptions and accepted ways of understanding the world, taking apart their own cultural perspectives, and coming away with a much more complicated, empathetic understanding of the connections between themselves and the places they’ve visited.

And I think that process, of empathizing with people from vastly different cultural, social and economic perspectives, is at the heart of traveling abroad. That is what often distinguishes travel abroad from domestic travel – travel abroad requires so many more leaps into the unknown.

There are the major unknowns, the unknown languages and cultures and histories, but there are also the smaller unknowns; how rice or sugar cane is made, the herbs people use for medicines, the deserted villages where people have been forced to migrate to other countries. And traveling abroad is the process of excavating these unknowns, of bringing them up to the surface of one’s mind, in the hope of creating some new bridge of empathy and compassion.

So I’m not sure it’s the percentages and the statistics that matter, I’m not sure it’s the act of getting one’s passport stamped – I think it’s the way of seeing and questioning that makes travel abroad different, and that has so many people vehemently defending the act of crossing borders. It’s the push into the unknown, and the coming back humbled, contemplative, vulnerable, and yes, in ways both conscious and vaguely felt, changed.

Community Connection

What do you think, readers? Do you think travel abroad is inherently educational? What have been your experiences overseas? Do you think Americans are afraid of overseas travel?

Feature Photo: Robert S. Donovan Photo: The Alieness GiselaGiardino

Taxis: the cause of so much hand-wringing, street side bartering, frantic planning, late night shouting, anxious nail-biting, dread, fear, mystery and intruigue. Yes, taxis. As a traveler you may loathe, love, or fear them, but you probably won’t be able to avoid them.

Experiences with taxis and taxi drivers are some of the most common travel survival stories told – the taxi that took you in circles for hours around Beijing, the taxi that charged you 200 times the price, the taxi driver that told you about the past thirty years of history in Brunei, the taxi driver that took you home to dinner with his family. I’ve heard all of these stories, and more.

So with taxis being such a central travel experience, it’s understandable there’s such a wealth of travel lit surrounding them. First off, there’s taxi gourment, a definitively pro-taxi blog that simultaneously explores the lives of taxi drivers and the food and drink scape of Buenos Aires. Relying on the local knowledge and catering to the distinct personalities of taxi drivers, Layne Mosler travels round the city, using taxis and their drivers as a prism through which to understand the local culture.

On the other hand, there’s I hate taxis, a site that channels traveler’s resentment of taxis into a search for other forms of local transport. I hate taxis is inspired, allowing travelers to choose their destination and then investigate a number of transportation options from the airport to the city center (how many of us have gotten into the airport, thrilled to finally be there, only to be overwhelmed by taxi dread?). It’s not as anti-taxi as the name sounds, and is in fact a great source of info for navigating local taxi prices and policies.

These represent twin poles on the taxi spectrum – one appealing to the stress and fear surrounding taxis, the other to people’s fascination with and weakness for that gamble of personality and adventure inherent in a taxi ride.

So, readers, to kick off this weekend, I ask you to share a taxi story below. You can love ‘em, hate ‘em, or be all tied up in ambiguity about them – but I’ll bet no matter how you feel about taxis, you can trace some of your most memorable travel experiences back to them.

Community Connection

Give your opinion on Mexico’s new girly pink taxis. If you’re constantly paranoid about being ripped off, you might want to have a look at how not to get ripped off by a cabbie. On the other hand, if you’re worried about haggling to the point of exploitation, read When Does Budget Travel Become Exploitation?

Feature Photo: Marc Oh! Photo: didbygraham

The central Mexican city of Puebla has recently introduced a new fleet of thirty-five taxis for women only. The taxis are driven by women and are open only to female passengers; they’re also painted a Pepto Bismol pink and contain GPS systems and special makeup mirrors in the backseats because you know, women like to spend most of their time en route meticulously applying lipstick.

The taxis have received an enthusiastic and positive ground level response from women, but Mexican women’s rights organizations find the idea appalling. Vianeth Rojas, a member of the Network For Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Puebla, told the Associated Press “[The taxis] are absolutely not helping eradicate violence against women.”

The new cars are meant to protect women from harassment (or worse) from male taxi drivers, and come in response to frequent complaints from Mexican women of being accosted by male drivers. Yet one has to wonder, is creating a fleet of candy-pink cars with makeup mirrors really a step forward for women’s rights, or is it simply reinforcing the same macho attitudes that lead to these harassment problems in the first place?

Female-only taxis exist in many parts of the world, including Moscow, Lebanon, Colombia, and Dubai, in response to security issues and cultural attitudes about how women can travel and who can accompany them. In cultures in which contact between women and men is strictly regulated, such as that of Dubai, women-only taxis may be unpalatable to foreigners but at least seem fit the cultural context.

But in a country like Mexico, in which there are no taboos against women traveling with men who aren’t their husbands or brothers, the taxis seem to me a band-aid solution to a social problem, not an expression of an inherent cultural belief. The taxis announce, in pink, that women are girly, delicate creatures who need to be protected from the leering tendencies of men, who need a chance to pretty themselves up for their men in the safe company of other women.

The cars also imply that the men who accost women simply can’t help themselves, and should be separated from women instead of asked to change their behavior.

What do you think? Would you ride in a pink taxi? Do you think this is an effective solution to the problem of harassment? Most readers here thought it was a great idea. What do you think, Matadorians?

Kick off the debate below.

Photos: author

When we first go abroad, it’s often for the sheer plunge; the fear and thrill of falling. But when we stay, I think it’s for the little things.

Musculation.

A sense of smell.

The game of language.

Small, brilliant absurdities.

Walks (even better with dogs).

A refined ear for accents.

Getting to know the neighborhood.

There are so many others. For me:

Popsicles. Real popsicles with real coconut.

Light. The way the light changes from late afternoon to evening. I’ve never found a light like that anywhere but Oaxaca.

Graffiti. Bizarre, fantastic, local. Pedro Infante with an enormous sombrero. Dancing grinning orange skeletons.

The memela lady. The way the tortillas puff up on the comal.

The young dudes singing unabashedly to their iPods, walking down the street with a full-on groove going on.

The 5 o’clock coffee.

And you? Keep adding your own, below.

Photos: author

7:30 a.m. :

Wake up. Take the dog out, stroll down our cobblestone street that rises up slightly from the city, allowing a view of early morning clouds rising over churches. It’s chilly. The light is subdued shades of whale white and blue, sometimes a faint orange edging its way in at the horizon.

Come back inside, make coffee. Write. Try to ignore my email as long as possible.

9 a.m. :

Take the dog running. Up the brutal arching back of the Cerro Fortin to the dirt road that winds around the mountainside and up and up with a view of the pine-coated Sierra Norte to the north and the expansive yellow-green valley to the south.

There’s nobody up here at this hour. Let the dog off of the leash, think about how crucial running is to writing, how it’s this necessary physical and mental release.

10 a.m. :

Go to the market for juice. “Amigocha!” shouts the juice guy, “how’s the Stella?” Stella is panting on the market floor. He blends fresh orange and mandarin juice, sometimes with strawberries. People shuffle in and out of the market, in and out of the rising sun and the shade filled with smells and heaps of food; huitlacoche, chicozapotes, epazote, yierbasanta, things you can’t find in the U.S.

I buy avocados from the same woman everyday. She’s curt but sometimes she gives me a fourth for the price of three.

11 a.m :

Huevos con chipotle, our current brunch of choice. Brunch is the best meal of the day and I try to make it extravagant. Oftentimes it’s a big scramble of squash flowers, chile poblano, chipotle, huevos, red onion, tomatoes and avocado, complimented by red pepper bread from the German bakery.

We eat and watch the hummingbird, Fred, who we dubbed Fred at a party a long time ago and somehow can’t un-dub Fred despite the fact that she now has three babies, feed her children. We peek out the windowsill very carefully after she takes off to watch the blind babies maw at the air. We look for Fred up in the bougainvillas.

12 – 5 p.m. :

Write, read, research, catch up on emails and blogs and Matador, swap ideas back and forth over my shoulder with Jorge, look out in procrastination at the blue amphitheater of sky which shows no trace of the morning’s softness, coolness, ambiguity.

3 -4 p.m.

Popsicle man comes. One coconut, one walnut, with real coconut and walnut chunks packed in. We chat for a bit about the heat and he always says, “que te vaya bien, guera,” a Mexican goodbye I love, meaning, “may you go well,” with the implication that you’re always going somewhere.

5 p.m. :

Take the dog out for a walk. The city is relaxing now, easing into evening, and I get a coffee and stroll up the andador. Tourists, usually big groups of pastel-and-visor-wearing Europeans, are taking photos of Santo Domingo, and sometimes their guide ventures forth to pet the Stella.

The Germans love Stella. They come up and speak to her in what I can only guess is German baby talk. I never really associated German Shepherds with Germany, always figured it was one of those things like French fries that had roots in a place but had long since lost them, but it seems Germans and the Stella have a thing for each other.

We keep up the andador and pass the pirate CD stands where Lila Downs or Vicente Fernandez is playing, or sometimes a bizarre Mexican Bob Dylan cover, and hippie viajeros sell their leather bracelets and beaded jewelry. They have drums and dreads.

We pass the fruit man selling mangos, oranges, cucumbers, jicamas in chile. He looks embarrassed every time I say hello even though I do it every day.

We do a tour around the Conzatti park and the Llano park where kids stop riding their bikes and stare at the dog in awe, and where one day, only one day in all of our walks, a little girl came running up and said,

“Yo soy Angela Gloria Martinez Gonazales y amo los perros” and proceeded to grab the dog’s head and hug her. Stella is a sweetheart and loves affection but parents used to seeing dogs foaming at the mouth and hurling themselves against fences don’t assume this, and I thought her father was going to faint on the spot. But Stella and Angela Gloria Martinez Gonazales bonded, and the dad stepped back for a bit, cautious and curious.

6 p.m. :

Go the Miscelanea for beers. Carry a big green woven bag like the señoras carry to the market full of envases, the empty bottles you have to bring back to the store to exchange. If you don’t bring the envases you’ve gotta pay 5 or 10 pesos more per bottle. This is a lot for a young writer scraping bits and pieces together to get by.

I hand over the envases and the man brings a couple of Bohemias out of the big freezer and puts them in the bag. Sometimes I cave and buy garlic peanuts and jalapeño kettle chips.

7 p.m.:

Jorge and I have beers. Talk. Plan. Dream up road trips around the Oaxacan Coast and houses we’d build deep in the Sierra. Start cooking a big mix of local veggies and heating tortillas, or:

8 p.m. :

Go for tlayudas. The place is an old house with a big square courtyard bordered by the rooms and the kitchen where the family lives.

Grandma shuffles in and out of the kitchen in a woven dress, socks, and an apron while the middle-aged couple who run the tlayuda business spread the big tortillas with bean paste, cheese, sliced onions, and lettuce, and stick our chorizo wrapped in aluminum foil underneath the charcoal.

The kids meander in and out of their rooms and the kitchen, sometimes coming over to put salsa or napkins on our table. The tlayudas come twenty or so minutes later, the giant grilled tortilla crispy, the chorizo sizzling hot, the beans and cheese and onions with a poignancy you just don’t find outside of Mexico.

9 p.m. :

Walk back home. The lights on the hillsides glimmer against an enveloping midnight blue and always remind me of the first overnight bus I took to get here when I had no idea where or how anything was. I can still feel that initial surge of mystery and adrenaline walking home, even when I walk the same streets everyday.

10 p.m:

Firecrackers pop, the sound of horns from distant fiestas drifts over the house, and we fade off into sleep.

And you? I’m putting out a call for submissions for “A Day in the Life of an Expat in…” Where are you living? What’s a typical day there like for you? I’d like to explore the kinds of routines we develop living abroad; the ways in which the exotic becomes routine but also maintains a vividness, a foreignness, perhaps a trace of mystery.

Do not send thrilling tales of adventure on the high seas. Plunk us down into an average day in your life – sights, smells, sounds, experiences, popsicle men, bus drivers, neighbors, students. Send submissions, under 1000 words, to Sarah(at)Matadornetwork.com with “A Day in the Life of an Expat in ….” In the subject line.

Feature Photo: worak Photo: Just Taken Pic’s

Things are a little different in Mexico than in, say, the U.S or Europe. Here, the gas truck blares its jingle out of a gigantic static-y loudspeaker every morning; here, the term “ahorita” (right now) refers to an occasion 3-6 hours down the road (or maybe mañana).

It may seem pathetically obvious that yes, when one lives in Mexico, things—like time and noise and customer service—are a little different. But believe me, the longer the expat is away from home, the more shocking and abrasive this concept is. It’s a travel paradox.

You see, a pattern I’ve noticed with expats – and I’m referring here to expats who’ve chosen to settle in developing countries – is that the longer they actually live overseas, the more the differences get to them, until expats start referring to the locals with a condescending “they” as if they were an alien race that had somehow invaded the streets of the quaint, pretty little Mexican town or the upscale Beijing neighborhood where these expats had previously lived in much deserved tranquility.

I am terrified of becoming one of these they-sayers. It is a very easy trap to fall into. I think the longer expats stick around a place like Mexico, the more a sense of entitlement starts to creep over them (ok, fine, I’m including myself in the “them”) and the more they start to feel indignant if they’re not greeted with a smile and served their coffee within the allotted corporate three minute time slot.

This is scary for the following reasons:

A) because it reeks of imperialism

B) because it makes expats into hypocritical assholes

Why do many expats move to developing countries? I think for many, the answer is one of the following:

a) I’m tired of capitalist-consumer U.S workaholic culture

b) I want something more “real”: all sorts of problematic ideologies behind this but hey, I can identify with it. Some sort of relationship with people that feels more natural than, “And would you like a blueberry nut bar with that, sir?”

c) I like colorful walls/coffee/the laid-back pace of life/the challenge of another culture/the insanity of a big foreign city/the freedom to enjoy things like blue sky and learning another language and a sense of community

d) I want to be more aware of everything around me and want that jolt of travel and excitement that comes from sipping a 10 peso beer in a darkened Mexican cantina on Friday afternoon

e) Life where I’m from is boring, is a given, is simply too routine, and/or I don’t fit in

Great. So a second home abroad gives one or all of these experiences to expats, and also – many times – gives them an incredibly reduced cost of living and the freedom, in my case, to live as a starving artist without quite starving and with the ability to even afford a whole liter (!) jug of Corona from time to time. Cool.

So why all the bitching? And why does it increase the longer one is away from home, when one should supposedly, be increasingly tolerant of cultural differences?

I remember a fellow teacher at the language school where I taught in Oaxaca going on a rampage about a BranFruit bar. BranFruit bars, for your information, are nasty, mangy little turds of granola bars cemented together with neon-colored “jam.” They are mass-produced by Bimbo, your friendly neighborhood junk food corporation. Why in the world it occurred to this girl that BranFruits would be a healthy local breakfast, I don’t know. Is Mexico known for specializing in fibrous granola bars? No.

But these are the kinds of things that, after awhile, get to expats. She was ranting and raving about how unhealthy the food was here and how they couldn’t even make a frickin’ granola bar right. And the thing was, I sympathized with her. I was irritated because people walk veerrrrrrryyyy slowly and I walk with the rapid, every-second-of-my-day-is-filled-with-purpose stride of the Busy American. I’d zoomed around who knows how many meandering grandmas and school kids on my way to work (after leaving home, as usual, with exactly 16 minutes for a 30 minute walk.)

So I could identify with the BranFruit rage. But at the same time identify it as disturbing. This is my Number One Fear as an expat: the creeping sense of entitlement, the outrage, the sense of being offended by the very same things—cultural differences—that caused me to come here in the first place.

Of course, I should insert a disclaimer here saying that some things, of course, merit complaining—serious racial or sexual discrimination, being harmed or mugged, being manipulated or taken advantage of… But I think the average expat has the intellectual capacity to distinguish between basic cultural differences and these other, more individual or wider societal issues.

So what is an expat like myself, worried about falling prey to the expat conundrum, to do? Remember why I came in the first place—because I can spend Saturday afternoons playing Scrabble in old railway stations surrounded by palm trees, because I like the way “ay, cabron!!” can have ten different meanings, because people are honest and funny and straightforward and because really, there is nothing better than a sizzling clay pot of chilaquiles after a long night on the town.

Community Connection

Is travel really just consumption, anyway? Add your thoughts at Travel Torture: Personal Implications of Cultural Consumption. Are you an expat with animosity towards tourists? Take a look at Tourists, Expats, and That Fragile Sense of Belonging. Seasoned expat? Do you know the six characters you’ll meet at every expat bar?

Photos: Jorge Santiago

Mexicans have a way with expressions. They use Spanish the way a bullfighter uses a flag – to grab your attention, to add a little romance and drama and flair, to turn a dull conversation into artful swoops of language.

1. caerle gordo a alguien

Used to refer to someone who rubs you the wrong way. For example, that friend of ours who never returned the book I lent her, and who’s always gossiping about everyone else, ella me cae gorda. You can use “caerme …” to describe how you get along with someone in general – “me cae bien, me cae mal” – with the literal, direct translation being how well someone falls on you. In this particular version, my favorite, someone falls fat on you.

2. pintarse de colores

Get the hell out of there. As in, what my Mexican friends do when I try to convince them to go trail running, what kids do the second the last bell rings at the end of the school day.

3. echarle ganas

Throw some life into it. “Echale ganas!” you might say to someone who looks like they’d rather be doing anything other than what they’re doing at that moment.

4. tener ganas de

Crave, have a desire to, have the urge to. Applies to cravings big and small, culinary and otherwise. In my case, tengo ganas de viajar por Belice, tengo ganas de comer chilaquiles verdes, tengo ganas de arriesgarme.

5. creerse mucho

Brag, think too much of oneself. Se cree mucho is said with a derogative tone, as in, he thinks he knows Spanish fluently but really he’s all arrogance.

6. echar la hueva

The opposite of “echarle ganas.” Instead of giving it your all, you give it an egg, the ultimate Mexican symbol of laziness. What am I doing on any given Sunday afternoon? Echando la hueva.

7. comiendo moscas

Literally eating flies, figuratively dazing out. So when someone’s staring off into space while you’re explaining the basis of your thesis project you can call them out with, “Estás comiendo moscas!”

8. Irse el avion

Lose your train of thought. You’re talking about one thing, and suddenly you say, “se me fue el avion:” my plane just took off.

Y ahora, me pinto de colores, damas y caballeros.

Community Connection

If you’re studying Spanish, or just curious about what “que cabrón” means, take a look at our quick and dirty phrasebook of Mexican slang. If, for some reason, this post made you crave tacos, you might want to check out the foodie primer for Mexico.

Photo: Sarah

Paletas Popeye

Everyday sometime between three and four (imprecision being an ongoing theme of life in Mexico) the Popeye’s Popsicle man comes up our street. We listen to his cry get closer and closer. The same stress is always on the same syllables – pal-let-ahhhs pop-ay-eeeeee, pa-let-ahhhhs pop-ay-eeee, like a birdsong.

We wait, shifting eagerly in our chairs, wondering how this brown, brown old man can sound this cry for hours every afternoon. Once you actually talk to him, his voice is surprisingly normal, no sign that he’s been digging into the depths of his vocal chords for so many afternoons over the years.

“Guera!” he says, “cómo está la guerita?”

“Bien!” I reply, and we talk about the dog, how big she is, about the heat, how strong it is, about whether I want una de coco and una de nuez, which I always do.

He opens the door on the small metal cart, reaches in, and produces two paletas and a few wisps of cool fog from inside the popsicle den. I hand him my peso coins and he nods, slips them in his pocket.

“Que te vaya bien,” says the popsicle man.

“Igualmente,” I respond.

Riding in the Back of Trucks

Last weekend we went to a lake outside of Oaxaca City. Jorge and I rode with Stella the dog in the back of a friend’s truck. Stella was in olfactory paradise and Jorge and I were just plain happy.

Riding in the back of a truck in Latin America is, for me, travel. That is it. Punto y ya. There is no similar traveling sensation. I get this rush and this nostalgia and this sense of contentment and I think, let’s go, I don’t care, just keep going to Ushuaia and don’t stop.

But, we stopped, and we picnicked and swam and then it started pouring rain. So we headed into a little restaurant on the side of the lake with big windows, ordered beers and peanuts, and watched the rain pour down over the pines on the mountains and into the lake.

I thought about how many layers there are to traveling. I live in Oaxaca, but it is so familiar now that it’s hard to feel the same jolt of awareness and vivid sense of place one does in traveling. Yet it still feels like travel, in subtler ways.

The Paletas Popeye man, for example, is a layer of traveling, a traveling-in-the-everyday. The walk I take with the dog every evening is a layer of traveling, perhaps the most satisfying part, where the familiar meets the foreign, allowing for two simultaneous types of appreciation – that of the outsider, and that of someone who belongs.

The lakeside beer in the rain is yet another layer, the thrill of traveling and of being outside of something. Obligation? Routine? Daily life? Givens? As much as I dread the connotations of the word, this layer of travel has overtones of escape. Escape in the best sense – escape from monotony or drudgery or accepted notions or fixed ways of seeing and being.

So many layers. Maybe this happens once travel becomes, inadvertently or purposefully, the paradigm by which you live your life.

And then we came back to the city, the air chilly and the sky already clearing for one of those twilights so blue it hurts. Back to another layer of travel.

This is what I’ve been up to in Oaxaca as of late.

And you, readers?

I’d love to know what content you have enjoyed recently here at Abroad, and what you’d rather see less of. What do you want to get out of this site? What sorts of information would you like to see here? What discussions would you like to be having here? Please share your ideas and opinions in the comments below. I want this site to be a reflection of the thoughts, needs, and questions of the Matador community.

Photos: author

Normally “routine” – at least in my world – has negative connotations. It invokes a dread of dull, grinding monotony. There is no more depressing expression than “day in, day out:” as if life was just going through the turnstiles, again and again.

But routine has entirely different meanings traveling. It’s a new learning curve, it’s paradoxically novel. I think sometimes you can learn more from establishing a routine than from jumping from here to there on a frenetic traveling binge. And the process of settling into a routine is one of the most gratifying and revealing processes that unfolds after moving to a new place.

In Japan I loved the morning subway ride to work. There were the blank-faced salarymen hanging onto the loops dangling from the ceiling. The perfectly made up girls in sheer pantyhose and heels, fast asleep, lolling ever so slightly side to side in some restless underground dream. The school kids in uniforms staring into space, staring down at their feet.

I never thought I’d work 9-6, and three months was probably the threshold for how long I could stand it without becoming one of those blank-faced types walking in circles in the subway station whispering to herself. But while they lasted, those three months were brilliant – I loved the feeling of being done at six and coming out of the Sakae station into a bustling evening, feeling exhausted and relieved and still somewhat alert since everything, even after months there, was still so new.

Eventually that newness was paired with familiarity – a paradoxical combo that creates, for me, the greatest traveling feeling.

Weekends captured this like nothing else in Japan. After so many strange teaching schedules and a year of freelancing, weekends were unexpected gifts this new routine had coughed up.

Saturdays were precious. In the summer in Japan it gets light around 5, and I always seemed to get up around this time, despite the debauchery of the night before. I suppose this has always been a Sarah curse/blessing. Mornings are my time of day.

The city felt so quiet. I’d to the Circle K to get milk, or roam a bit in the Osu Kannon area, waiting for the supermarket to open. An occasional bike would breeze by, the sun would do its morning thing, coming out and disappearing behind clouds, and I’d get this detached, luxurious feeling of freedom.

There are lots of ways to define the passing of time, and weekdays vs. weekends has never been my preferred method. But I must say that in this routine, weekends were sweeter than a fat persimmon. Than a beer after six straight hours of classes. Than finding black sesame at the 100 yen shop. They were the crème de la crème of luxury.

But now, back in Mexico, weekends have faded into a wider swath of time. It’s not necessarily a bad thing – just another routine that’s petered out and become part of the nostalgia for a particular place from the past.

Transitory routine. A travel paradox. At some point I’ll have to reconcile the love of getting settled with the love of leaving, the love of routine with the love of novelty, the desire for newness with the desire for familiarity. Or not.

Feature Photo: siddharta Photo : ivanx

It’s the eve of Mexican independence day.

Almost exactly 200 years ago on the 16th of September 1810, priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla gave the famous “grito de dolores” or, as it’s commonly referred to “el grito.” Priest Hidalgo gathered his congregation at his church in Dolores, a small pueblo in Guanajuato, and proceeded to give the sermon credited with kicking off Mexico’s 10-year war for independence.

The sermon culminated with cries of “Death to the illegitimate government! Long live the the glorious pueblo Méxicano!” followed by the emphatic ringing of the church bell.

This grito is replicated each year on the evening of September 15th, in the Zócalo of Mexico City and in plazas, cities, and pueblos around the country. The president and other public figures initiate it with three or more shouts of “Viva México!” followed by a “Viva!” for every Mexican state and for Mexican revolutionary figures. Massive fireworks are set off and the pueblo Méxicano goes nuts in shades of red, white, and green.

In honor of el grito, I give you “Mexico Lindo y Querido,” sung by Mexican singer and actor Javier Solis (1933-1966).

Any mariachi in Mexico will be able to sing this for you. I most recently heard it on a road trip in Ohio, when Jorge gained control of the Ipod and used it to shout, weepy and unabashed, “México lindo y querrrrrido!” out onto the open road.

If you want to follow along, find the lyrics below:

Voz de la guitarra mía,
al despertar la mañana
quiere cantar la alegría
de mi tierra mexicana

Que digan que estoy dormido
y que me traigan aquí
México Lindo y Querido
si muero lejos de ti

Viva México!

Feature Photo: Jen SFO BCN Photo: sethw

Living abroad is the act of cultivating a sense of superiority to “the tourists.”

Travelers (who often consider themselves the cultured half of the supposed traveler/tourist dichotomy) try to pull off this superiority to tourists as well, but at the end of the day they have to admit that they have no idea what the price of tomatoes per kilo is or how to pronounce zempoalxochitl.

It’s those who are quasi-local, who have plants, cook and have managed the general grid layout of the town, who really perfect their scorn for tourists.

Expat treatment of tourists ranges from gentle condescension, as if the tourists were dense, pitiful, overweight children, to outright contempt, as if the tourists were an invasion of parasites sucking all the authenticity out of local culture. But in very rare cases does the expat actually see a reflection of him/herself in a tourist.

Photo: Ed Yourdon

Ah, but the reality is, folks, that at some point in time even the most seasoned expat was standing on some street corner looking dumbly in each direction and being silently condemned by Those Who Got There Earlier. Yet expats seem particularly quick to throw together a hierarchy, and they defend it like dogs defending the pack order.

The eager study abroad student is at the bottom of the ladder. Then come the English teachers, then the newer retired people, then the older retired people, then the newer retired artists, then the older retired artists. You can jump a few rungs in the hierarchy by virtue of participation in revolutionary politics or marriage to a local.

So what’s the purpose of all this if, at the end of the day, the study abroad student, the artist with his eco-hacienda, and the group of straw-hatted retired folks who’ve been here for twenty years are all foreigners?

I think it has something to do with a sense of vulnerability inherent to the experience of living in another country, in another culture. For as much as you may dress in huipiles and explain the subtle differences between mezcales, you’re still an outsider. Even the huarache-wearing down-with-the-people revolutionary living in the barrios outside of town is, at the end of the day, foreign.

Photo: another sergio

And while, in my experience, Mexico’s got nothing on Asia as far as making foreigners feel foreign is concerned, there are still walls—economic, social, cultural. And occasionally, foreigners bristle at the presence of those walls.

Hence, the vulnerability—who knows when that occasion will come, just when you feel that you’re in the intimate little cave of culture, huddled round the campfire with everybody else, when suddenly BOOM a wall goes up and you realize that nope, you’re actually outside looking in.

I don’t want to give the impression here that expats can never truly belong to or be part of a local culture. No, not at all. But belonging is a precarious and fluctuating state of being, not a constant.

And perhaps feeling that, consciously or unconsciously, expats throw up an extra wall between themselves and tourists. So that at least if the wall gets thrown up between them and Mexicans, well, they’re still not outside the moat yet. There’s a big ol’ wall between them and the tourists in white tube socks and sandals.

And an even bigger wall, expats are quick to point out, between them and the big dude in the San Diego T-shirt drinking Negra Modelo out of a can in front of Santo Domingo at 3 p.m. and shouting “Honey! Take me a picture!”

Photo: Garry Knight

All those tourists are reminders, sometimes subtle, sometimes painful, of the essential expat vulnerability.

I’m waxing on about this because yesterday was one of those days when that vulnerability came on sudden and unexpected.

I went roaming around Oaxaca’ s various libraries, searching for inspiration in old atlases and yellowing history books. Didn’t find inspiration, but definitely confronted my outsiderness.

I can’t describe exactly where the feeling comes from, but suddenly it’s there—standing in the weighted silence of a library room with a bunch of school girls giggling and whispering behind their hands, the librarian staring out of the corner of her eye, people shuffling past and casting a sideways glance…and the vulnerability becomes palpable, like a shift in the air.

It’s hard to shake once it’s there, and it throws off one’s sense of balance. The urge is to mentally shout, but no, I live here! Really! I speak Spanish! I’m not….dum da dum dum…a tourist!

But really, isn’t this vulnerability and this outsiderness part of what makes us go abroad in the first place? To see everything, the most minute details, with freshness, with exhilaration?

I ran into a group of tourists later that day on the andador in the center of town, and stood behind them as they took photos of Santo Domingo. For the first time in awhile, I stepped back and craned my neck to admire the cathedral. It was huge and imposing, glowing with late afternoon light, set against one of those impeccably blue Oaxacan skies. How could it have been so long since I’d looked at it?

Feature Photo: db*photography Photo: jakeliefer

The other morning I went to the market with the dog to buy some avocados.

There was a foreign woman buying veggies from the same stall. She cast a few glances at the dog, a big female German Shepherd, and asked,

“Amable?”

“Yes, she’s very nice, you can say hello to her,” I replied in Spanish.

The woman bent over and greeted my Stella, who responded with kisses and happy grunts and a near belly-flop. When she stood back up, I said to her in English,

“Have you tried huitlacoche?”

Then I got the look.

It’s the “why are you speaking to me in English” glare of wounded pride and condescension. The woman responded with something along the lines of “what how is?”

Photo: dionhinchcliffe

I tried to explain in Spanish about the concept of mushroom corn fungus and how to cook it, but that wasn’t going so well, so I took a risky political line and jumped back to English. The explanation got through then, but the woman was obviously insulted and we parted ways without either of us sharing any goodbyes or further info.

This got me to thinking about the politics of English overseas. Why, I wonder, are foreigners so often insulted when other foreigners speak to them in English? I’ve never understood the purpose of having a tedious conversation that one or both parties only half-understand when they both speak English and could glide on by just fine in that language.

I took a controversial stance on this in France, when I was studying abroad and it was all the rage to speak nothing but French all the time, even with a fellow group of Americans whose French sounded, at best, like a heavily accented Wisconsinte reading sentences by rote out of a grammar book and, at worst, like garbled, frustrated baby talk.

What are you learning in that encounter? I argued. How to mimic each others’ painfully flat American accents?

We’re practicing our French, they’d reply, with the same haughty and irritated look the market woman shot me.

And I’d contest, Do you really think it’s helping your French to talk about how many brothers and sisters you have with other American French students?

But still, I’d often find myself in situations in which I overheard several Americans having a brutally basic and torturous conversation like the following:

“What’s your favorite color?”

“I like blue. And you?”

“I like yellow. Yes, yellow. Yellow is be nice.”

I thought this was just the bane of overly eager study abroad students. But I’ve discovered that it’s a widespread traveler phenomena. Especially in Mexico, American tourists will get irritated if I speak to them in English, even if it’s to clarify something they don’t understand.

Once, I went to go grab a beer with a traveler who spoke basic to intermediate Spanish. There were plenty of things I wanted to talk about–Mexican politics, her perceptions and experiences, who she’d met…but she insisted from the beginning on talking solely in Spanish, and half the conversation was spent on waiting until three word sentences about what she liked and didn’t like came together.

There’s nothing wrong with speaking in Spanish or French or the local language, and certainly nothing wrong with squeezing in as much practice as possible when studying a language. And with native speakers, for sure, give all your energy to muscling up those language skills.

But what I find bizarre is the insistence of certain travelers on speaking a second language with a fellow native English speaker when the said travelers obviously don’t speak that second language well enough to hold a decent conversation or to understand their partner.

If you speak fluently or well enough to move beyond describing when you brush your teeth and what you’re doing tomorrow, great. But if you don’t, then in my opinion it’s waste of time.

Photo: William A. Franklin

Particularly if you’re passing up the opportunity to learn something or to get a useful explanation — like, for example, the other day in the coffee shop when a woman became increasingly irritated that they didn’t have eggs, and I tried to explain in English that they did have eggs but they were on another menu, and she insisted on switching back to Spanish only to get more frustrated. Why?

So I’ll draw up my Rules for the Use of English Vs. the Local Language When Speaking with Native English Speakers (RUEVLLWSNES-catchy, right?)

1. If you do not speak at the same level as your conversational partner, be aware of this when insisting on speaking in the local language.

2. If you do not understand what your partner is saying, it might be time to throw in the towel.

3. At parties or meetings or other social events where native speakers of the local language are present, by all means speak only the local language, even with other English speakers. But if it’s just you and someone who shares your native tongue, and your level is not high enough to have a worthwhile conversation, then scrap language practice time.

4. Keep in mind that for expats, speaking the local language isn’t exactly the most stimulating experience ever.

And that’s all for today, folks, from the land of rant. I’d be interested to hear your experiences on this front–are you one of these English-leery people? Why? Are you a practice-my-French-with-American-friends kind of gal/guy or does this make your skin crawl? Why? Does it drive you nuts when you try and explain something in Chinese or Italian to a tourist who obviously does not understand?

Fly on the wings of rant, travelers. Sound off below.

Photo: Jorge Santiago

The first dilemma hit when I tried to choose a chair.

Faculty members did an awkward shuffle, turning this way and that like confused middle-aged couples in salsa classes. I loitered over a seat and pulled back, loitered and pulled back…

Then the deans strolled in with grace and unconcern and seated themselves in the two seats closest to the door of the banquet room. Somehow, everyone unraveled neatly into seats around them without further ado.

I later learned that the seats closest to the most important guests are occupied by the second most important guests, and then the ensuing chairs are filled in the same way, with the least important people being furthest from the guests of honor.

The university staff must’ve known this and waited for the cue from the deans, and the other professors swiftly slid into their places accordingly. I, being the youngest and newest professor, sat squarely across the table from the deans.

It was our first university banquet. I was new to everything in China and I took in the scene with an air of intrigued bewilderment that didn’t leave me the whole time I lived and worked in Beijing.

The younger dean was in charge of the menu. This is a great honor and an even greater responsibility. Unlike in American restaurants, in which each person studies a menu and chooses a dish, in China one person orders a variety of plates for everyone to share. This ordering must be done according to several cultural givens:

There must be way, way too much food for anyone to eat.

There must be a mix of hot and cold dishes, sweet and spicy dishes, meat and vegetable dishes, and dishes cooked according to the different styles of Chinese cooking.

There must be rice and/or noodles. The rice should follow the meal.

There must be soup.

The dean ordered a cold wood ear mushroom salad, a cold Spinach salad, a plate of crunchy chrysanthemum greens, a plate of cold, firm tofu, and the ubiquitous cold cucumber salad with grated garlic.

The dishes kept appearing after that. Again, unlike in an American restaurant in which the entree dutifully follows the appetizer, in China all the dishes come out as they’re prepared. Just as the gong bao chicken is put on the table the sizzling platter of fish with Sichuan peppercorns comes out. Then, three waitresses in qipiaos bring in over-the-rainbow ribs and the Peking duck.

All of these dishes are placed on the revolving banquet table. Guests push the table gently so that each person has access to the array of dishes.

This is when mad chopstick skills come in handy. I had been mastering mine, eating peanuts in the house with a precise pinch of the chopsticks, picking up slippery cashew nuts between sticks of stir-fried celery. I could sneak in and snatch a piece of passing broccoli before it was lost to my neighbor.

The visiting English department head was not so lucky. She knew, however, how to handle the situation with grace. She asked a Chinese staff member to serve her, and the Chinese woman placed small portions of each dish on her plate. She did a fine job of not making the two major cultural mistakes I’d been warned about: stabbing portions of food with a chopstick, and sticking chopsticks straight up in a bowl of rice or a dish of food.

The soup and rice presented she and I with less possibility for peril. I swooped in with my spoon and served myself each after the main courses had been sufficiently depleted. A small bowl is reserved for rice and another for soup, and I learned by example that it’s important to serve each in its proper place. It’s also critical to hold off until the meal is wrapping up; soup and rice are generally reserved for after a meal, as they’re considered to aid in digestion.

Luckily, this banquet was not one of the alcohol-drenched affairs which end with someone stooped over a bowl of fish soup and others gesturing in flagrant, drunken revelry at the waitresses. But I’d heard stories from enough people about this to know that my situation was the exception to the rule. In the case of drunken abandonment, my friends had advised sipping…sipping…slowly…and if necessary, pretending to pass out at the table so as to avoid further damage.

The banquet ended tranquilly, with the dean paying the bill and all of us pleasantly stuffed, sipping green tea. I was, above all, relieved. I’d survived the first major social experience in China, and I hadn’t dropped anything in my lap or lost face or greatly offended anyone’s honor or the group harmony.

I learned something tonight, I thought. I can do this again.

Each Friday, Matador Abroad features a new learning experience. Want to share yours? Check out how at call for submissions: learning experiences around the world.

Community Connection

Interested in China? Check out Christoph Rehage’s time lapse video about a walk across China. Or read our tales from the road from China and Tibet. And if you’re thinking of moving there, you might want to look into how and why to move to China during the recession.

Feature Photo: drunkprincessPhoto: dhilung

Ta da! Tim and I are psyched to announce the arrival of a regular Friday column called….

“Do It Yourself Study Abroad: Learning Experiences Around the World.”

The column will feature a new learning experience each week from a different part of the globe.

We want to highlight unique, local skills. We’re not so interested in how to study Spanish in Mexico, but we’d love to know how you learned to crush, roll, and fold the maize to make tortillas. And we don’t really need to know which university you chose for a study abroad semester in France, but we’d be into hearing about how you learned to play boules in Marseilles.

We’re interested in the skills that form the backbone of cultures, the learning experiences that’ve been passed down from generation to generation and are perhaps at risk of being lost as societies undergo rapid changes.

Tell us about the flower-arranging class you took in Japan or how you learned to conduct an Ethiopian coffee ceremony in Addis Ababa. Your experience doesn’t have to be a formal course attached to an institution, but it should be something other travelers can search out and replicate.

Remember to focus your story on the learning experience and not on explaining how to do something. Don’t tell us where to put our fingers in order to play the Chinese harp. Instead, tell us where and why you learned how to play it, and explain why other travelers should learn it, too.

Please send 300-800 word submissions in the body of an email with “Learning Experiences” in the subject line to Sarah(at)matadornetwork.com or Tim(at)matadornetwork.com. Don’t forget to include your full name, your Matador profile URL, and any photos and links related to your experience.

Show us what you’ve learned, readers! We can’t wait to kick off this new venture at Abroad.

Your editors,

Tim and Sarah

Feature photo: clinkerPhoto: Felixe

Mexico has its own language untaught by Spanish schools and phrase books. It’s a language whose meanings shift in a heartbeat from insults to compliments, a language Mexican people manipulate deftly and instinctively in all sorts of contexts.

It’s, in a word, cabrón.

Here’s a primer of your essential Mexican slang:

Cabrón.

Photo: Jorge Santiago

This sounds like a cliché. Sure, a cabrón is a guy who’s a sort of badass, right?

Sure, that’s one interpretation. But this guy can be a real jerk, someone you talk about with disgust or fear, or this guy could be, say, an internationally renowned artist who’s just completed a photo exhibition about indigenous cultures.

Either one is a cabrón. And don’t forget about the feminine version, cabróna. Same standards apply: there are the bitchy, detested cabrónas and the revered, awe-inducing ones.

Then there’s que cabrón, which is used to describe a thing or situation as opposed to a person. This, too, can be positive or negative, but it’s gotta have a particular edge to it. Real life examples:

a) Narcos entered a popular restaurant and collected the cell phones of all the customers, warning them not to make any phone calls or act out of the ordinary. The narcos ate peacefully, returned the cell phones, paid everyone’s bills, and continued on their way. Que cabron.

b) You ran out of water, and the government isn’t sending more water to the Centro Historico for three days. You just had a party and now have a sink full of beer glasses, skillets full of chipotle sausage residue, and greasy plates. Que cabrón.

Insider tip: For added flair, add an “ay” before cabrón when used for people, and mix it up with an “esta cabrón” instead of “que cabrón” in the case of situations.

Destinations

Community Connection to Mexico

Madre

In the quintessential Mexican read, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz has a great passage about the significance of la madre (the mother) in Mexican slang and culture.

The madre is identified with all things negative, the padre with all things positive. This, argues Paz, is a reflection of two historical and cultural factors in Mexico.

The first is the idea of the “long-suffering mother,” the passive recipient of pain and burden who is, to use another classic Mexican slang term, chingada (screwed, for a polite interpretation).

Photo: descamarado

The second is the historical resentment and resignation towards the woman whom Paz claims is the mother of modern Mexico—La Malinche. La Malinche was a Nahuatl woman who aided Cortéz in the colonization of Mexico, translating for him, offering insider information, and…giving him a son, one of Mexico’s first mestizos.

So la madre is not treated kindly by Mexican slang. Whether you feel squeamish about it or not, be prepared to hear at least one of these expressions on a daily basis:

Que madres: what the hell? As in, the sudden explosion of firecrackers on any random street corner, the drunken antics of your friend after so much mezcal, the thing floating in your soup.

Que poca madre: literally, how little mother, as if mother was a quantity added with an eye dropper to a particular experience. The less mother, the better. So if Mexico kills in soccer with a 5-0 victory, it’s definitely poca madre.

Or, on the flip side, it’s padre—meaning cool, awesome, interesting.

Hasta la madre: utterly sick of something. Your boyfriend’s behavior could drive you to feeling hasta la madre, and so could consistent rain every afternoon or the incessant barking of the dog next door. You’re at the end of your rope, the breaking point—you’re literally, to translate the phrase directly, almost to the point of motherhood.

Huevos.

Photo: procsilas

There’s a whole linguistic universe surrounding huevos here, so I’ll just stick to my personal favorites.

Que huevon/huevona: What a lazy egg. This expression is one of the principal reasons for my deep affection for Mexico. The mental image rocks, and the insult rocks. It is soft and prodding and so accurate in so many situations (particularly for describing the morning after 10 peso beers and a night of salsa).

Similarly, there’s the expression que hueva, which translates literally as “what egginess.” Eggs here have the same association with laziness with an additional component of boredom. For example, you could toss out a que hueva at the suggestion of starting up a soccer game, and you could toss out a que hueva at the suggestion of watching one on T.V.

Que huevos! A brilliant expression that translates most accurately as “what balls” but really, contextually, means so much more. In the most literal “what balls” sense que huevos can be used to express admiration for some great courageous act; for example, throwing your half-eaten mango at that guy who whistled at you in the street.

It can also be used, however, to express repulsion for rude behavior, such as tearing around a corner in your SUV and nearly killing a couple of pedestrians.

And finally, it can be used without the “que” to lament a minor tragedy—spilling beer all over yourself, tripping over the sidewalk, forgetting to buy the one thing you went to the supermarket to buy.

You can’t really go wrong with these three overarching expressions—cabron, madre, huevos—used in one variation or another. (Obviously, when you’re having a chat with the polite grandmotherly señora on the corner you don’t want to bust out with “ay, cabrón!”….common slang sense applies in Mexico as in most places).

So the next time you find yourself grappling with the differences between ser and estar, why not sprinkle some huevos into the conversation and save yourself the effort?

Community Connection

Planning a trip to Mexico? Check out the three part series on Mexican cantinas: Wrestling, Pig Skin, and Beer, Life is Worth Nothing, and Tequila and a Song. Also, take Matador editor and Mex-pat Teresa Ponikvar’s advice about spending summer in Baja California Sur. And if urban life is your thing, read up on the top 10 nightlife spots in Mexico City.

Feature Photo: Verity Cridland Photo: Hamed Masoumi

The three, identified as Sarah Shourd, Joshua Fattal, and Shane Bauer, have not been heard from since.

In the latest update, Iranian officials have announced that the government is interrogating the three and deciding whether to try them as spies. American officials are attempting to work through Swiss ties (the Swiss have represented the U.S in Iran since the 1979 hostage crisis) to obtain further information and negotiate the release of the travelers.

The incident has inspired a vitriolic and disturbing backlash against the three Americans, and revealed a common way of thinking in the U.S about travel and travelers.

Take these comments on the website of ABC News, for example:

“Let them stew over there for a bit. For to be so educated (as it appears) these children certainly are naïve and STUPID!”

“Dude, the GPS say’s were in Iran.
Hey, lets go ‘break bread’ with the Iranians, we’ll show’em, Americans are goooood, it’s just our government that’s baaaaad…C’mon let’s do it ….we’ll be hero’s for world peace.”

“I hope they spend a couple of years in an Iranian prison thinking about their self-centered stupidity. And, when they get out, I hope the U.S government jails them for another couple of years. Idiots!”

“Ere is a real example of people acting stupidly, and now they ask us for help because of their stupid actions. I say if you want to vacation in the mountains of Iraq, summer in Afghanistan, or frolic in the waters off Somalia north coast then you should do it knowing (because the state department tells us so) that if your picked up on your own—stupid.”

“…they walk around with this dewey-eyed dream of the world…”

“…stupid aspiring writers…”

There are two themes here. One is that travel (outside of the U.S and perhaps Western Europe) is dangerous, reckless, and stupid. The other is that only starry-eyed, pot-smoking hippie backpackers are dumb enough to try it, and they get what they deserve.

One of the striking things I’ve noticed in comments on articles about the hikers is the way people are seething with contempt about the nerve of these “backpackers” to go “on vacation” in Iraq. The mainstream news media runs with this image and perpetuates it, etching out an image of the three as clueless, trust fund hippies singing camp songs round the fire on the Iraq-Iran border.

In actuality, the three were established journalists and experienced travelers, with bylines in the San Francisco Chronicle, the L.A Times, New American Media, The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, Transitions Abroad and Brave New Traveler. Shane Bauer’s story on Iraqi Special Forces took him to Baghdad, where he did extensive research on the political infrastructure behind the special forces and interviewed Iraqi civilians, Iraqi military officers, and American military officers. He speaks fluent Arabic and has lived for years in the Middle East.

Sarah Shourd’s stories on Yemen and Israel also show an insight and skill as a journalist and a shrewdness for travel which betray the convenient idea that she’s a study abroad ingenue with a misguided sense of adventure. She also has lived and traveled for years in the Middle East and was studying Arabic in Damascus.

Yet most Americans would prefer to view them in line with a rhetoric that says, “Don’t go overseas. The world wants to kill America and America is damn smart to just stay at home and let the State Department deal with it.” Thinking this way maintains the neat dichotomy between hippie liberal backpackers who sympathize with those hostile foreign nations and clued-in Americans who understand that in the “real world” these nations all detest us.

The coverage of this story is a direct reflection of the way the U.S news media portrays travel to anywhere that isn’t Tuscany or Disney World: dangerous and inherently stupid, seeing as the rest of the world hates Americans and wants to attack them out of envy and hatred.

Perhaps this is why so few Americans travel and why so many Americans returning home from a trip to Latin America or Africa or the Middle East will be confronted with gasps and wonderment over how they survived.

Because the media doesn’t like to tell the stories of travelers who’ve come back not only in one piece but actually inspired and optimistic, the disaster stories will always reaffirm the same point about travel being for the green young idealist who has yet to get slapped by the “real world.”

And sure, there will always be a certain degree of naïvete and ignorance involved in travel: that’s part of what makes it so difficult and so rewarding. How can a person not be naïve in some respect visiting a different culture and trying to figure it out from square one?

But as most readers of this website could tell you, traveling is something you learn in the same way you learn to teach or to cook. It’s complicated and physically and emotionally trying, and this is part of what makes it addictive, particularly for challenge-oriented people. And oftentimes, the more people travel, the more willing they are to take on bigger and bigger challenges, and the less willing they are to think of travel the way the mainstream media and the State Department paint it.

Therefore, they take risks. And these risks are the basis of some of the most successful reporting and travel writing, the kinds of stories that crack open our awareness of and compassion for life in a particular place.

Photo: Desmond Kavanagh

This is what Sarah Shourd did with her articles on Yemen and Israel; she took risks and put herself in uncomfortable, unfamiliar situations and came out with stories that stick with the reader long after he/she has finished the last sentence. I can still imagine what it must’ve felt like to sit in prayer with so many covered women in Yemen, and I can feel her experience gnawing at my own given ideas about that country.

Yet if Sarah Shourd had been kidnapped in Yemen, I wonder how many people who read her story and enjoyed it would instead be saying, “How stupid!”

It is not only Americans glued to Fox News and spiteful of travel who scorn these travelers. There is also a vibe within the travel community that says, “well, you should’ve known better, too bad.” Whether that is true or not, where is the empathy for travelers when they need it?

Are we willing to marvel over travelers’ experiences when they get home, and dream about how we would’ve liked to have gone and done what they did, and look through the windows they open for us, but not to rally around them when they get into trouble?

This is not to say that travelers never make mistakes or get careless or cocky. This could have been what happened to these three hiking around the border; we still don’t know. There is plenty of potential back and forth about the logistics of their plan: North Kurdistan is a resort area and a relatively safe area for travelers, not the “war zone” people think it is. Other tourists have gone there in the past several years with no problem. The three spoke the local language and had traveled extensively in the region, which would have prepared them for travel in such a volatile area. Then again, one could argue that their experience should have taught them not to get so close to the border.

We don’t know. Traveling is always a series of decisions and oftentimes the travel that teaches the most, and leads to the best and most piercing writing, is a series of calculated risks.

So instead of degrading and condescending to these travelers, maybe we should show some compassion. After all, how many times have you been in a dicey spot on the road, how many times could someone have said to you days or weeks after a disaster, “what were you thinking?”

This is not to diminish the gravity of this situation, or to glorify their travels, or to say, “no big deal, so they made a mistake.” Rather, it’s to counter this widespread way of thinking that sees travelers as clueless, innocent idealists, and travel as an inherently reckless and futile behavior.

This story is more complicated than such straightforward conclusions, and merely writing it off as an example of naivete meets danger not only hypocritically insults these travelers when they most need support, but also degrades the act of travel overall and reduces it to simple formulas of safe vs. dangerous, smart vs. stupid, naive vs. experienced.

Community Connection

To read travelogues from Iraq and Iran, check out this post by Matador editor Tim Patterson.

Photo: wili

1. The further “off the beaten track” you go, the more authentic a place becomes.

Japan isn’t Tokyo, Thailand isn’t Bangkok, New York isn’t the U.S…to this refrain I say: what? Sure, U.S culture can’t be summed up by New York nor can Japanese culture be summed up entirely by Tokyo; but these places are as integral to their country’s culture as any tiny town in the backwoods.

And while it can be much harder to navigate cities and find local haunts amidst all the big, glittering tourist destinations, cities are by no means cultural voids.

Even Starbucks, the easiest global corporation to hate for sucking all the local rootedness out of coffee culture, is inevitably local. Japanese Starbucks serve Coffee Jelly Frappucinos, and have four different trashcans for sorting garbage.

This is obviously not a grand cultural revelation every traveler to Japan should experience—but it does go to show that local culture creeps up in a variety of places, from the apartment blocks taking over downtown Beijing to the ramshackle villages in the far reaches of Hebei province.

2. It’s always better to go independent.

This is a given truth for many travelers. However, there are times when a tour will give you access you couldn’t have as a solo traveler.

Photo: philliecasablanca

Be it a bike ride around Paris with a well-informed guide, a trek through the Ecuadorian Amazon to a village swallowed up by jungle, or a neighborhood tour of a Brazilian favela, it could offer views and insights which are difficult to come by independently.

This is particularly true when time is an issue. Sometimes, it’s simply not possible to spend the weeks or even months that might be necessary to get to know people and get a feel for the realities of life in a certain place.

Strong-willed travelers raised on the Lonely Planet’s how-to-go-it-alone philosophy often have an instantaneous, negative gut reaction to tours. I know I do. But sometimes it’s pretentious and blinding to think that it’s possible to really learn about a place on one’s own.

Well-designed, respectful tours run with the participation of and for the benefit of local people can be worth it.

3. Everyone who travels shares a certain sense of enlightenment.

There is undeniably a lot to be learned from travel, and in my opinion most of it is learned unconsciously and drifts to the surface only after the traveling is done.

However, travel does not inherently bring on some new way of seeing, and can in fact do just the opposite. Anthropologists have long noted how traveling frequently reinforces the same prejudices, fears, and biases travelers had before leaving home.

It all depends on the person traveling, his/her attitude, and the degree to which he/her is willing to alter assumptions and beliefs.

4. Travelers stay in hostels, tourists stay in hotels.

Putting aside the bundle of issues behind the supposed tourist/traveler dichotomy, this is just plain B.S. If getting wasted at the hostel bar with a couple cute British girls and an Australian surfer is your idea of a quality traveler experience, good on ya (as the Australians would say) but don’t lord it above hotel dwellers.

I’d rather stay in a crappy budget hotel in a second than come back to a dorm room full of backpacks and lonely planets and horny, hungover twenty-somethings.

Photo: idalodiskho

Full disclosure: haven’t stayed in a hostel since I studied abroad seven years ago, and believe me, I haven’t been earning any more money than I was then. I’ve just gotten smarter about choosing budget accommodation.

5. There is some sort of almighty List Of Things To Do (as in, “have you done the rainforest walk yet?”) that all travelers must uncover and dutifully check off.

The best part of Kota Kinabalu, in the Sabah region of Malaysian Borneo, was sitting on the corner of the same beaten down coffee shop every morning. Kota Kinabalu is the essence of unspectacular—boring architecture, tame seafront, tired-looking markets, laid-back restaurants that all serve the same things.

We went to the tourist office. We found out what there was to do. Giant flower here, mountain there, orangutans there. It sounded interesting.

But we went back to the same coffee shop every morning. Met a Filipino fisherman who took us to the water village where the Filipino immigrants lived, where kids jumped off wooden planks into the water and women cooked in tiny barren rooms suspended above the ocean.

Photo: Jorge Santiago

I went running on the hillside behind the city until its geography became so familiar that I felt the rush of having a pseudo-home on the road.

We ate durian at a night market underneath a pedestrian bridge.

We went back to the same Filipino fish market every night, to the same woman’s picnic tables, and ate cuttlefish with fern salad.

That was one of the first times I’ve traveled list-free, and Kota Kinabalu remains one of the favorite places I’ve been.

Surely these preconceptions are the tip of the iceberg—travel has become so widespread, and so picked apart and analyzed, that travelers hit the road now with a whole bundle of beliefs packed up in their head.

What are yours? How have your preconceptions changed the more you travel? Please share below!

Community Connection

Interested in the way people think about travel? Explore inner travel, read up on persistent travel myths and debate the nature of “real travel.”

Our good friend Benny, aka Benny the Irish Polyglot, is traveling the world to learn new languages to fluency. And making awesome video along the way.

His latest vid, published on his awesome new site, gives travelers some pointers on starting off learning Italian.

Have travel footage of your own? Dust it off and upload your own clips to our YouTube group today.

Feature photo Tim van Kempen

Community Connection:

Also be sure to check out Benny’s guide to efficient luggage packing

Photo by Damon Garrett

It’s July 4th.

I’ve got a red hot cup a coffee in my hand, and I’m stuffing socks in a backpack, getting ready to race out the door for a 7 a.m. slow train to Kyoto.

July 4th has been a bizarre holiday for me in the past five years—celebrated anywhere but “home,” if we define home in terms of birthplace.

It has reinforced that strange connection to Americans I feel when abroad, and the distance I sometimes feel from them when I’m at home. One of those traveling paradoxes I just can’t put my finger on?

In any case, today, I’ll celebrate it at a friend’s house in Kobe, with one fellow American, a Canadian, an Australian, several bottles of wine, and the dangerous, looming potential for karaoke.

And you?

Thanks for keeping up with us here at Abroad; we love your comments and your insight. Happy July 4th!

Feature photo: striatic Photo by Neil’s Photography

When you’re in that maddening spot where you can’t seem to put a comprehensible sentence together, look to these metaphors for inspiration.

1. A Desk Covered in Scraps

Language learning is like a desk covered in bits of fabric, old ceramics, shiny plastic buttons, rough pieces of recycled paper. You sit down before the desk and sigh. But then, inspiration strikes, and you start sorting through the bits and pieces and putting together a mosaic. And before you know it, all the disparate scraps come together, and you have….a conversation.

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

The point: let go of your obsession with logic and order, and get scrappy. Figure out how to piece together what you know and make it work.

2. A Game-Playing Date

Language learning is like dating a coy, flirtatious dude (or gal) who strings you along a bit, making you feel so smart, so sexy, so cool, and then suddenly stands you up.

You find yourself completely lost in some restaurant, unable to put together a sentence, realizing how little you know. You go through a bitter phase in which you swear off men/women.

Then, you meet some cute, sweet thing on the street one day, and your faith is instantly restored.

The point: there will always be moments, no matter how confident you feel or how much progress you’ve made, in which you feel like the rug has been pulled out from you.

It’ll always be harder and more intimidating to speak with certain people, and there will inevitably be times when all the language you’ve been practicing goes flying from your head at the crucial moment.

3. A Department Store

Language learning is like shopping in a massive department store with countless floors and boutiques.

You try on suits, miniskirts, overalls, knee socks, baggy sweaters, heels, boots.

Some make you feel uncomfortable and constricted. Some feel so good it’s almost like an addition to, or slight alteration of, your identity.

The point: Not every language will fit perfectly.

Photo: erredoppia

I feel much more natural, much more like myself, speaking in Spanish than in French.

I’m still happy that I speak French and I love speaking it, but I can recognize that sometimes it just doesn’t fit with my personality.

Understanding that some languages fit you better than others can help you get beyond some of your frustration with language learning.

4. An Archeological Dig

Language learning is a process of cultural excavation. At first, you’re simply pondering over shards and fragments, holding them up to the light, trying to put them in context.

Little by little, the culture behind the medley of artifacts starts to come through.

The ways people think and behave – and have thought and behaved over time – reveal themselves through the bits and pieces you’ve uncovered.

The point: Language is culture. Culture is language.

This basic lesson takes some time to figure out.

The longer you speak a language and the more time you spend in areas where it’s the native tongue, the better chance you stand of getting access to a new way of thinking and a new way of seeing the world.

Little by little, you come to realize that phrases and expressions you use for the sheer practical purpose of communication are deeply cultural, and reveal cultural values and beliefs.

5. Driving through a fog

Language learning is like driving up a long winding road through a thick fog. You arc around curve after curve, hypnotized by the monotony and the concentration of driving, by the feeling of being totally lost and insulated in your little car world.

Photo: blyzz

Then you break through the fog. You’re at the flat peak of the mountain and a whole valley of undulating green, edged by a distant bay, spreads before you.

“Holy shit!” you think. This is what I’ve been approaching!?”

The point: Immersion is a fog.

If you’re really, truly immersed in a language and unable to escape it, you’re probably going to spend quite a bit of time feeling completely isolated and unsure of yourself.

You’re going to muddle through things and feel a bit lost in every conversation, just trying to inch up the road.

And then suddenly, there will be a moment, or moments, when you can sense how far you’ve come.

Community Connection

Getting started on that maddening, thrilling journey that is learning a language?

Get motivated, and learn to follow your intuition..

And if you’re not sure where to begin, why not learn the importance of eating a new language?

Burmese Curry / photo by jackol

Photo: David Hagerman

Does eating a searing red curry with a piece of buttery naan make you feel like a different person from one who normally eats, say, a baguette of Serrano ham and heirloom tomatoes?

Does eating pickled vegetables on a daily basis start to get to you, make you feel a little differently about life after awhile?

Does standing in the narrow corridor of a Japanese yakitori bar, smelling grilled chicken and onion, watching smoke billow around a bandannaed man flipping the skewers, temporarily give you a new identity?

Like traveling, food can pull the rug – subtly or blatantly – out from under a given identity.

The transformative effects of food might not be as immediately obvious as those of a new cultural environment, but they’re just as significant.

Which is why I bring you my top five Asian food blogs.

Why Asia? Because the continent is fortunate to have some extremely talented and experienced cooks and writers dedicating their lives to exploring its cuisine.

These bloggers will help you navigate the overwhelming realm of Asian food. They’ll flesh out the context for you and guide you through the culinary metamorphasis that takes place in travel.

And they’ll make you so. freaking. hungry.

1. Yasuko San’s Home Cooking

Photo: I Love Egg

Poco is a Japanese woman blogging about her mother’s cooking. The aim of her site is to preserve knowledge of and respect for traditional Japanese cooking. She quotes her grandfather :

“You eat local cuisine and you’ll not get sick.”

The site is a food diary of what her mother cooks every day—literally, almost every day—as well as an extensive catalogue of Japanese ingredients and recipes. This is one of the best resources I’ve found on Japanese food and cooking.

I think Poco sums it up simply and sweetly in an essay entitled The Natural Style:

I never forget that our body is made up of foods.

2. Appetite For China

I cannot tell you how many times in Beijing I’d spend the morning devouring Appetite For China and the afternoon scouring the city for roujiamo (a kebab-like sandwich of pulled pork) or the perfect dan dan mian(spicy Sichuan noodles).

Diana Kuan grew up partly in Puerto Rico, where her family operated a Latin-Chinese “fusion” restaurant (before fusion became the most overhyped food concept of the century) and partly in suburban Boston, where the family ran a “Polynesian-style take-out and Cantonese bakery.”

Combine that family background with French culinary training, a stint as a pastry chef, years spent as a food writer covering everything from chocolate to Ethiopian food, and a move to Beijing, and you have one helluva perspective on food.

Appetite For China runs the spectrum from the traditional (mapo tofu) to the innovative (absinthe cranberry frappe).

And you can’t beat Diana’s 100 Chinese Foods To Try Before You Die if you’re moving or traveling to China.

3. Eating Asia

Photo: David Hagerman

Writer Robyn Eckhardt and photographer David Hagerman have been living in Asia for over thirteen years, and are currently based in Kuala Lumpur.

Their blog is equal parts travel, people, and food, and can’t be missed if you’re traveling to Malaysia.

The photos and the stories behind them invoke fields, valleys, smoky alleyways and street-side noodle stands where you’ve never been but can somehow feel and taste.

The writing is suburb and direct – as much about recipes as it is about local ingredients, people, and stories.

Even though I’ll be leaving Japan soon and don’t have another Asia trip planned, I visit this blog because I want to be there in the dumpling steam, sitting at a tiny plastic table beside a ramshackle stand, with the taste of scallions and meat and sharp vinegar in my mouth at 7 a.m.

4. Rambling Spoon

Karen Coates is the Asia correspondent for “Gourmet” and author of “Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War,” among other books. She and her husband have spent more than a decade living in, traveling through, and writing about Asia.

Rambling Spoon is as much about Asian politics, history, nature, and social life as it is about food. Coates writes:

Food is life (and death). It is history and politics and science and nature. It is everything, and it is not a subject to be taken lightly. After all, food is everything we are.

Photo: Jerry Redfern

I would argue, food is also essential to traveling, and it is part of the transformation that takes place in traveling.

What we put in our bodies links us to people and landscape.

And those links are evident in the stories, recipes and photos that come together on Rambling Spoon.

5. Sticky Rice

The bio on this site leaves an air of mystery about the authors:

“Eating, drinking, sitting, watching -these are the things we love about Hanoi. On this site we will attempt to eat our way through Vietnam’s northern capital and pass on the results.”

Despite the dearth of personal info, the writing has a distinct voice. It manages to be snarky, insightful, slightly pretentious and down home all at once.

It makes for great reading and stokes a desire to go to Vietnam that I didn’t know I had.

Photo: avlxyz

For anyone traveling to Hanoi, and Vietnam in general, this is the one blog that should not be missed, and for those of you for whom food blogs are porn, Sticky Rice is particularly drool-worthy.

Sticky Rice teleports you to the green banana stand, to the cluttered café, to the pho joint that haunts your dreams.

Again, these five blogs are the ones I find exceptional in the way they capture places through food. There are, of course, many more great Asian food blogs.

Consider food blogs as travel guides that give you another angle through which to experience culture. With these blogs as your guide, you can learn how to literally swallow up and digest a place.

Community Connection

For more about the connection between food and place, check out this author’s article about Tasting Place, or peruse Essential Cookbooks for the Culinary Traveler. You also might want to know how to eat a new language before you embark on your culinary adventure.

For up-to-date Southeast Asian restaurant reviews and trip planning information, check out TravelFish.

Student by foundphotoslj. Feature photo by Okko Pokko

There’s the guy who’s really interested in grammar and can’t stop asking you why the present perfect form of run is irregular.

He pores over his book every night and could present a thesis on the use of adverbs of frequency, but if he actually needs to bust out a comprehensible sentence in casual conversation, he’s floored.

There are the two or three middle-aged workers who’ve randomly decided they should learn English, gotten really pumped about it during the first week, and then promptly grown bored.

Now they recite new vocabulary words as if they were heavy rocks dropping with a thud.

There are the keen university students who want it, need it, soak it up with the desperation of a man trying every trick he knows to get the woman he wants.

They grapple with the language, play with it, try to please it and alter it a bit to suit their needs. They could use more practice, but they’ve got skillz in place for the moment when they actually meet a foreigner.

And then there are the rare students who soak up language like the proverbial sponge, who will always have a four-year old’s capacity for absorbing new vocabulary and grammatical structures.

There are, of course, many more types of language learners.

Which one are you?

Photo: Bredgar. Feature photo: foundphotoslj

“And so you need to put your three daily activities in order, and then tell your partner about them, and then cover them up, and have your partner remember what you said. OK?”

Three or four students — the ones who’ll fight their way through conversations in English until they get to the point of fluency — will nod.

Some students will tentatively look at their friends for encouragement.

A handful of others will stare up at me with traumatized expressions as if I’ve just sung an obscure Italian opera.

Florence by Deva.

This is when I can identify the natural language learners in my class.

They’re the ones who aren’t obsessed with hearing every word I say, with breaking down the grammar and analyzing it, or with trying to have a crystal clear native speaker’s appreciation for the exact meaning of a sentence.

They’re listening for gist—they want to get to the baseline meaning of what I say and follow it intuitively.

They know they’re blindfolded and feeling around in the dark, so they use their intuition and all the bits of language and memory they have to make their best guess.

The single most important skill any language learner can have is the ability to induce and intuit meaning, especially when one doesn’t understand every word—or even most words—a native speaker is saying.

Can you get far enough outside of your own cultural and linguistic box to divine what someone is trying to say?

Perhaps this is the most full-on plunge you can make into a foreign culture: giving yourself up to the language and letting yourself be carried along by it, even when you’re not sure, even when you don’t fully understand, even when you’re totally out of your element.

You’ve got to be confident enough to make a solid attempt at understanding and acting on that understanding, and yet you’ve got to be humble and perceptive enough to pick up on the speaker’s intentions.

Photo: Ed Yourdon

And most of all, you have to give up the need to make sense of every element of language.

You have to get to some deeper level of connection and communication, based on intuition, based on those skills you have when you’re an infant and you’ve got to figure out how to get milk and love.

Use whatever you’ve got – random vocab, frantic miming, raised eyebrows – to make communication happen. And be willing to accept the fact that you won’t know everything, and that you may be partially clueless for awhile.

After all, the struggle to grasp bits and pieces here and there until you can begin to make sense of the foreign world around you, is at the core of every travel experience.

Embrace the confusion!

Like so many things in travel, it makes the most banal moments — sending a postcard, ordering a beer — into grand tales of success and failure.

Please share your language learning tips and stories below!

Photo: peiqianlong Feature photo: Pratham Books

I’ve seen a lot of learners and a lot of strategies pass through my classroom in the past four years of teaching English abroad. In those four years, I’ve also managed to learn two languages and am working on a third.

How people successfully learn a new language is an elusive topic – one that academics have had cat-fights about for years.

What exactly are the factors that determine a language student’s success?

Yesterday at the Nagoya International Center I came across the single most important language-learning factor:

Motivation.

I’d been taught about the importance of motivation in my SIT TESOL course (one of the single greatest learning experiences of my life) but, as usual, learning the concept in the classroom and experiencing it in real life are entirely different stories.

The Nagoya International Center was offering eleven 90-minute Japanese classes for 2500 yen (25 bucks). The application and interview period was from 11:30-12 on Sunday.

We got to the NIC at 11:10, twenty minutes early for the interview period, figuring hey, nobody’s going to be that eager and we’ll probably be among a small group of language nerds.

Ha.

We took the elevator to the fifth floor. The entire place was jam-packed with people.

Photo: author Jam-packed NIC!

People squatting and filling out forms on the inches of available floor space. People milling around and chatting nervously. People bunching up around the desks where application forms were being handed out.

There was only one form left in English, so I let my friend have it and I filled out the Spanish one.

As we sat there, going through the requisite names-numbers-checking-boxes form, I soaked up the energy of the room.

It was a veritable U.N meeting of nationalities—there were Filipinos, Brazilians, Brazilian Japanese, Chinese, Southeast Asians, Americans, Brits, Africans, Mexicans, Spanish…

(I know because I kept peaking at the “native language” box on people’s application forms as we stood waiting in line).

All of us had the same eager, slightly nervous, first-day-at-school posture, and I realized that all of these people needed to learn Japanese. They were there because in their immediate, everyday lives, they had to use Japanese in some form or another and they’d jumped at the chance to do so for a bargain.

I’m sure if I’d asked them there, on the spot, “Why are you taking these classes?”

They could’ve clearly and specifically defined their goals:

“I want to work in an office and I need to learn polite Japanese conversation and basic vocabulary.”

“I want to open a shop and I need to interact with customers and officials.”

“I want to have conversations with people about Japan and Japanese culture.”

“I want to be able to read the newspaper and the subway signs.”

Clearly Defined Goals

And so, waiting in line at the Nagoya International Center with representatives of a dozen different countries, I saw again what I’ve seen throughout the years in my classes: having clearly defined goals and the motivation to charge at them makes all the difference in learning a language.

I’ve heard a lot of people say “I’d love to learn Spanish” or “it’d be great to speak Chinese” but their aims don’t go much further than that—which isn’t to say they aren’t motivated, but their motivation doesn’t have specific goals attached to it.

If you want to learn a language, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Why do you want to learn a language?

3. Why do you need it?

The more clearly and specifically you can answer these questions the more success you’ll have in learning a language.

Make a list of your goals and make sure you avoid general, vague statements like “I’d like to talk to people.” Be as specific as possible.

Once you’ve drawn up your list, start looking for programs or classes that fit the goals you’ve defined.

And stay tuned to Matador Abroad for where to go from there.

Feature Photo: L’osservatore Photo: Sir Sabbhat

“We’re more isolated from the world than ever,” wrote my Mexican partner in an email this morning. “Over 300 people were shut off inside a hotel in Hong Kong just for being in contact with a Mexican, and Japan has suspended the visa exemption for Mexicans. This is going to make travel even harder for us.”

My first response was a feeling of total deflation. As if it weren’t hard enough to coordinate visas and bureaucracy and paperwork for him whenever we travel somewhere, now there’s the added discrimination of swine flu paranoia.

I went on my morning mission of finding swine flu updates, article after article presenting what seemed to be hopeful news – “epidemic in decline”, “the critical moment has passed” – only to immediately clarify that that the danger is more imminent than ever and one should stay tuned to all future updates in a state of panic and high alert.

Then the feeling of deflation turned to anger and defiance. I’ve been in contact with my Mexican friends ever since the swine flu news broke, and none of them have ever said anything along the lines of:

“You don’t know who could be carrying this plague so it is best to just keep behind closed doors as much as possible.”

Or “It’s like we’re in a strange zombie movie or something” (conveniently said while “hurriedly stocking up on groceries.”)

My friends’ comments have been more fearful of the economic, political, and personal impacts that the swine flu panic will have on their lives and the lives of the people they love. Are they staying inside? Wearing masks? Yes. Are they paranoid and panicked and talking about plague and zombies? No. And neither is anyone they know.

To top it all off, a good friend of mine here in Japan works for the WHO and could not express enough scorn for the way the epidemic is being addressed.

“A pandemic simply means that the flu spreads to other places,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that it’s some sort of plague that will wipe out the planet.”

Sensationalism is nothing new, and is in fact pretty much the standard, in the global media. But I’ve been particularly irritated by it this time since it hits so close to home.

And yet towards the end of the day, after a long back-and-forth with friends in Mexico, my frustration calmed and I came to thinking that travel abroad is more important than ever in moments like this. I’d felt a rising panic, reading reports from Britain to Japan about swine flu, and then I remembered that wait, I’ve lived in Mexico, many people I love are in Mexico, and most of what they’re saying doesn’t collate with any of these frenzied stories.

And I thought about how much of the time that happens to travelers. How often do we read a story written in the New York Times or the Telegraph or any newspaper anywhere and think, “Hey, that has nothing to do with what I’ve seen and felt and experienced in a place?”

Which is why, instead of getting swept up in paranoia and letting the media enjoy a global fear spree, maybe travelers can step back and use this moment to appreciate the fact that they have the most important kind of information: local, place-based, human information. And if people continue to travel, and continue to rely on what they see and hear and understand through traveling, than perhaps we won’t be so dependent on the alarmist discourses telling us to panic and close our doors.

Ok. That’s all for today. I’m signing off now to go fight the zombies for more canned goods.

UPDATE: Swine flu might be overblown, but there are other health issues that don’t get enough attention in the mass media. Read “What Should Worry You More Than Swine Flu” at Matador Change to get informed.

Photo: mbell1975

Business Week features photos of ordered, neat, European urban-scapes: stoic cathedrals coupled with familiar brand names, skyscrapers, all the tidiness of money and “civilization.” Buildings are clean and quaintly historic, skies are blue, rivers are strategically running past postcard-friendly architecture.

Bravo. And?

The Mercer reports essentially calculate the “quality of life” in cities where companies are thinking of sending their workers. New York is the base city for all the reports–it’s given an index score of 100 and all other cities are judged around that.

The factors considered in Mercer rankings include:

Infrastructure: electricity, water, postal services, transportation, etc…

Cost/Quality of Living: how extravagant of a lifestyle can you get on a decent budget?

Accessibility: How close is the nearest international airport? How frequent/reasonably priced are flights?

Crime rates and economic and political stability: Are you going to have to worry about getting kicked out by a coup? Pick-pocketed on the subway?

There’s nothing wrong with these calculations, and they certainly do pick out safe, highly organized and developed cities.

…but….and in this but lies, in my opinion, everything fantastic about travel…

These are places where you can get all the luxuries of the modern corporate lifestyle for relatively cheap, where it pays the most to have bought into this whole vision of globalization that judges quality of life based more on Starbucks and tidiness than on…human connections? Bustling communities? Diversity?

Call me highly impractical and romantic, but I think quality of life should be a helluva lot more than this. For as great as these cities may be–and some of them are amazing and surely wonderful places to live–I think these criteria mostly reflect an expat culture that demands imported French wines and fully furnished apartments at a steal in whatever outpost the company has most recently invaded.

And I find that, besides being somewhat sad, incredibly boring.

My criteria for the best places to live in 2009 would be:

1) A thriving coffee culture.

2) People who still love and care about and grow their own food.

3) Public places that are alive and teeming with activity. People who meet in these places.

4) A certain degree of unpredictability– non-conformity and non-uniformity. Can you find noodle shops or clandestine Nigerian record stores somewhere? Might you stumble across something unplanned, unprecedented, spontaneous, unruly?

I could go on and on…but I’m more interested in seeing what you all would use to judge “quality of life” in a place. If you had to rate the best/worst places to live in 2009, what would your criteria be?

It was a rainy day in Japan.

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

I work a mad Monday-Friday 7-7 schedule, between the commute and a lunch “hour” that inevitably turns into a photocopying extravaganza with bites of supermarket sushi thrown in. Don’t get me wrong—I’m enjoying the job, my colleagues are great, and I seem to constantly be throwing myself into situations in which I’m over-stimulated, over-caffinated, and operating on a massive adrenaline rush.

But that said, work only leaves me Saturday and Sunday to explore Japan, and those two days seem like a giant candy store of possibilities. Orchid garden? Comic book café? Train to the countryside?

Yesterday, the candy store was closed. It rained. Poured. A friend and I tried to go out exploring, but peering at driving rain through an umbrella with wet shoes and wetter pants didn’t turn out to be an illuminating experience. So I sat in my apartment virtually all afternoon, feeling guilty for being closed off in my little bubble on my one free day, while Japan went on being Japan outside.

And then I took a bath with a cherry blossom bath bomb. Sakura is the Japanese term for cherry blossoms. The water turned a satiny pink. I sunk into the deep bathtub, the sides going up past my chin, and thought about Japan, travel guilt, and details.

It’s obvious that the best way to get to know a place is to roam around, see things, talk to people, eat things, be out and about and, in a word—immersed. And it’s natural for travelers to feel a sort of guilt for not doing so, or for not doing enough or doing it in the right way.

Yet at the same time, so much of a place seeps into a traveler through osmosis, through the slightest details that jar one’s memory years down the line.

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

I thought about this in the bath. The shower in my Japanese apartment is softly lit and perfectly designed, closed off from the rest of the apartment by folding glass doors. The bathtub is deep, like traditional Japanese baths. The room fills up with steam as the bath is filling. That day, the steam mixed with the fragile scent of sakura petals.

Japan’s in my bathtub, I thought. Yes, I’d love to be able to walk around and roam into temples and yakitori bars, but Japan is here, too. In the details. In smells and bath bombs and the depth of the tub. In the view from my balcony and the smell that hits me when I open the door and step outside—the smell of trees, with industrial overtones and hints of Asian spices.

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

All of this is part of what attaches me to this place and teaches me about it. And it’s not so much about doing what I think I should be doing—chasing the shoulds and the pressure and the guilt—as it is about creating the mental space to see.

How do you do it, travelers? What are the details, unexpected or sought out, that have etched out places for you?

This happened to me this week. My parents came down to Oaxaca for a visit and I was smacked into seeing the city anew again. I saw bromeliads in the Sierra Norte and broken turquoise balconies on the second floor of crumbling buildings.

Photo: Sarah

The flavors of tortillas jumped out at me again and I remembered just how good the cappuccinos at café Nuevo Mundo are, and how good it feels to sit for hours there under a sky bluer than blue. I also remembered, seeing my family see, feel, and process the city, just how overwhelming and transformative travel can be.

Photo: Sarah

And then I found out that I’m going to Japan. I’ve been offered a three-month position training teachers in Nagoya. So right on the tail of a big family visit, still swept up in all the renewed enthusiasm for Mexico, I got bit again—hard—by the travel bug.

I can’t wait to get back to Asia and to see Japan. I’d be forever grateful if you, readers, would offer your experiences with Japan and Japanese culture. Anyone taught there? Lived there? Traveled there? Advice? Insight? Sound off below!

Your editor leaping into a new era at Matador (Photo: Jorge Santiago)

I spent the past weekend in the back of a truck, under a pile of sleeping bags pinned down with coconuts, traveling across Mexico’s Sierra Sur to get to the beach. It was a fitting intro to my new position here at the Matador Network.

Matador is taking a new direction, with a different layout and site design. Each site will have a unique voice and emphasis within the wider Matador vision. I’m thrilled to be bringing this new voice to Abroad along with the intrepid Tim Patterson (trekker of Cambodian jungles, fisher of Patagonian trout, leader of youth into the vast unknown, explorer of the wild rural dreams of countries round the world).

Tim is ready for anything

We’ll be mixing up our longer pieces with short, juicy posts for you to devour wherever you are in the world.

We want to get your feedback, readers, and to develop a thriving community here on Abroad. Roam around and let us know what you think of the new site.

Regale us with your experiences on the contributers page, and if you’re psyched about where Abroad is going, sign up for a subscription to Matador.

Welcome to the new version of Abroad!

Photo: Hyperscholar

I won’t deny that learning Spanish is both necessary and fun—I studied for a month in Quito before traveling around South America. However, as anyone who has trekked across Bolivia or Guatemala or Mexico can tell you, Spanish is not the native language of the region.

And while most countries have done a remarkable job of wiping out native languages through a mixture of brutality, exclusionary educational policy, discrimination and intimidation, some of these languages have managed to hang on, and some have even seen a revival in recent years.

Travelers now have a chance to get a more intimate look at Latin America and its diverse cultural groups, and to aid in the preservation of distinct cultures and languages in danger of being usurped by mainstream Hispanic culture.

The following is your guide to Latin America’s indigenous languages and where to study them. The languages mentioned below are only a sampling—there are literally hundreds more, but I’ve tried to select the ones that are still spoken by a large number of people and that are offered at fairly accessible language schools.

1. Zapotec

Zapotec is spoken by around half a million people in the southern Mexican states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Guerrero. There are more than 50 versions of the language, but the largest three are mountain Zapotec (spoken in the Sierra Norte and Sur), valley Zapotec (spoken in the central valley of Oaxaca), and Zapotec from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Of these three, the latter two are the most accessible.

Valley Zapotec can be studied in Téotitlan del Valle (a village a stone’s throw from the city of Oaxaca), and in the city of Oaxaca. In Téotitlan, you’ll need to ask around for private tutors and negotiate prices.

In Oaxaca, the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca (UABJO) offers semester-long courses in Zapotec, with four evening classes a week, for 500 pesos (around $50 USD). These courses usually go from September-December and February-May.

Zapotec from the isthmus can be studied in Juchitán, Oaxaca, where the Casa de la Cultura offers courses. The University of California at San Diego offers a summer Zapotec immersion program in Juchitán which sounds wonderful, but costs $4,000.

But for those interested in anthropology or in working with indigenous groups, the price may be worth it.

2. Quechua

Photo: Quinet

The official language of the Incas, Quechua is spoken today by more than 10 million people from southern Colombia to northern Chile, with the largest concentration of speakers in Peru and Bolivia. In the latter two countries, Quechua is recognized as an official language.

The best place to study Quechua is Bolivia, where Quechua and Aymara (another official language recognized by both Peru and Bolivia) are as widely used as Spanish. Aymara and Quechua share similar structures and over one-third of their vocabularies, so learning Quechua is practically a two-for-one deal.

Sustainable Bolivia, an NGO based in Cochabamba, offers full time Quechua language study, as well as a host of volunteer opportunities in Cochabamba and the surrounding communities. For total immersion, this is your best option.

For more information about where to learn Quechua, this page offers plenty of information.

3. Mayan

Photo: spankmeeehard

Sometimes it is difficult to believe that those elusive, mystical places and peoples featured on National Geographic specials (the ones where the narrator speaks in booming tones and the dramatic musical score plays in the background) actually exist.

The Maya are one such example; much has been written about ancient Mayan culture, but few people actually get involved with the present-day Mayan community, which, like most other indigenous communities in Latin America, is largely marginalized and poor.

There are more than six million Mayan speakers in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras. By far, the biggest number live in Guatemala, which remains the best destination for full immersion Mayan study.

The Celas Maya language school in
Quetzaltenango, Gautemala, offers full immersion Mayan classes as well as local volunteer opportunities.

4. Guaraní

Photo: Nagillum

Guaraní is the language of the indigenous group of the same name. One of the two official languages in Paraguay, Guaraní is widely spoken throughout that country, as well as throughout parts of Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay.

Paraguay is an exceptional example of a country that has embraced an indigenous language and enforced a policy of bilingualism in education. All Paraguayan children are required to speak, read, and write Guaraní as well as Spanish.

Asunción is the best place to get started on Guaraní study. The National Registration Center for Study Abroad offers study abroad programs in Guaraní in Asunción (for a bit of a steep price!) and South America Inside offers slightly cheaper courses.

Both websites mention private language schools that I couldn’t dig up online, but I’d imagine that roaming around Asunción (or taking a glance at the Lonely Planet) you could find the addresses of these schools and save money by approaching them directly.

5. Nahuatl

The language of the Aztecs, Nahuatl dominated Mesoamerica for over a millennium, first as the lingua franca for merchants and politicians under Aztec rule, and then as the language favored by Spanish conquistadors for communication with local subjects.

In a policy that seems an anomaly within the larger history of colonization, Spain’s King Phillip II decreed in 1570 that Nahuatl would be the official language of New Spain.

During a period lasting over two centuries, Nahuatl spread from modern-day New Mexico to El Salvador. In the 16th and 17th centuries it became a literary language in which poetry, theatrical works, histories, chronicles, and administrative documents were written.

In 1770, a Spanish decree calling for the elimination of indigenous languages in Spanish colonies did away with Nahuatl as a literary language, but didn’t entirely eliminate it.

Today, it is spoken by more than 1.5 million people, mostly in Mexico. You can study it in Cuernavaca at the International Center for Cultural and Language Studies (CICEL), which also offers seminars on traditional medicine and “reality tours” focusing on Mexican traditions and foods.

So instead of signing up for a Spanish course, go further back into Latin America’s history and get a little closer to its roots by studying Quechua, Guarani, Zapotec, Nahuatl, or Mayan, and in the meantime contribute to greater cultural diversity in this globalized world.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Matador offers resources for students of all languages! Check out 5 Questions to Ask When Picking a Language School, 5 Tips for a More Productive Language Exchange, or 10 Steps to Recovering a Language You’ve Forgotten, for a start.

Feature photo by scui3asteveo. Photo above by John Althouse Cohen.

Sometimes I wonder if my undergraduate degree, which gave me a solid foundation in the History of Science and has led to a lucrative career in international vagabonding, is worth the $10,000 of student loans I am evading by living in Oaxaca, Mexico.

I ponder this, sometimes wallowing in bitterness, as I pore over the websites of American universities in search of graduate programs that won’t leave me forever indebted and doomed to the life of a backpacker on the run.

There are very few such programs—American education is undoubtedly very good, but it is also very expensive.

So, for those of us who love the experience of delving into and becoming part of different places, doesn’t it make sense to look abroad? The world offers some excellent opportunities for graduate school that might actually leave you spare change to, say, eat, and travel.

Thus, what follows: a brief overview of seven countries where you can get a graduate degree at a fraction of the price you’d pay in the U.S.

Photo by Martin Dougiamas.

Spain

At around $2,000 a year, graduate programs in Spain are an incredible deal. The University of Barcelona ranks as one of the three best universities in Ibero-America (the other two being the UNAM of Mexico City and the University of Sao Paolo), and the University of Madrid is not far behind.

Masters degrees are diverse, going way beyond the simple categories of anthropology or sociology—how about an analysis of the history and culture of food? Or the management of cultural heritage? Why not get a degree in women, gender, and citizenship studies? And of course, there are plenty of offerings in the sciences, from an interdisciplinary analysis of water to the study of artificial intelligence and mathematics.

France

I apologize for giving way to cliché, but France, whether you love it or hate it, has an age-old association with intellectual life. Intellectuals have long been the Marilyn Monroes and Tom Cruises of France, and the quality and seriousness of French higher education reflects this cultural preference.

The Ecole Normale Superior de Paris ranks at number 28 in the list of the world’s top universities, and tuition for international graduate students is a whopping 190 Euros a year.

Photo by Riviera Kid.

Sweden

Graduate school is free. The website for Uppsala university announces this nonchalantly, as if the whole world lived in the calm socialist paradise that is Sweden.

Now, keep in mind that you’ll probably be paying about five Euros for a beer and who knows how much for any sort of classy lifestyle, but with free tuition, you can take down two Euro espressos right and left while you hit the books.

Plus, Uppsala offers a whole catalogue of Master’s programs in English, unlike other Swedish universities that require a good working knowledge of Swedish.

Germany

Yet another case in which very solid, well-ranked universities come in at around 100-500 Euros a year for tuition. You’ll have to contend with somewhat exorbitant living costs, particularly in the country’s financial centers, but by living like a good ol’ suffering grad student (think of a steady diet of comforting, hearty pasta) you should come out with a pretty good deal in the end.

German language skills are required for some schools; others, such as the University of Berlin, offer a selection of degrees in English.

Photo by mjmyap.

Singapore

Asian students flock to Singapore by the thousands to take advantage of the (relatively) cheap and high quality education. Singapore National University is ranked at number 30 in the world, and tuition stands at around $4,000 a year for international graduate students.

Potential students with interests in Asian studies can explore a range of Masters degrees, from broader studies of Asian civilization to critical analyzes of Southeast Asia or the Malay Peninsula.

For those deeply embedded in love affairs with Asia and wanting to further them in an academic setting, Singapore offers a melting pot of Asian cultures, a high quality graduate education, and ah, yes, the affordability that allows you to take a much-needed chill weekend from time to time on a Thai beach.

Mexico

With tuition around $1,000 USD a year, the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico offers a tempting alternative to rival schools just North of the border.

And with UNAM ranking as one of Latin America’s most prestigious universities (along with Argentina’s University of Buenos Aires) you are really, let’s say, getting what you do not have to pay for: a top-quality graduate degree.

For those interested in Latin American studies and history, the program recently initiated here is one of the best in the world. And if Mexico City seems to you like an experience in pure chaos, try Puebla, Monterrey, or one of the CIESAS research institutes located throughout the country, all of which offer quality graduate degrees at prices comparable to that of UNAM.

Photo by DanieVDM.

South Africa

The country in and of itself is an education, and provides a seething, transforming, highly charged backdrop to academic study.

Universities have taken advantage of the country’s post-apartheid opening up to promote academic and personal freedom, as well as the study of many disciplines banned or marginalized in the past. Cape Town and Johannesburg contain the most well recognized universities, each of which charges around $4,000 a year in tuition for international graduate students.

Add to this the fact that the cost of living in South Africa affords grad students a much greater degree of luxury than they would experience in Europe or the U.S., and voila, you have the tantalizing prospect of plowing away at a doctorate without having to survive on heaping bowls of spaghetti.

Keep in mind this list is only the beginning. Start doing research online: the aptly named International Graduate Schools website has plenty of listings of specific schools and programs, but in my opinion the Top Grad School site is even better, with rankings, statistics, and programs listed for most major schools in dozens of countries.

Good luck, and may you save as much as you learn!

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Still aren’t convinced that study abroad is right for you? Read Tanya Brothen’s article, Study Abroad: What Are You Waiting For?”.

Have you done grad work abroad? Share your experiences and insights below!