Living a Dream

Traveling is good. Traveling does things to you that staying in one place cannot. But traveling poses one of the most difficult questions that a person can be faced with: Where do you want to go? Most people have a list of places that they'd like to go. Depending on your station in life, that list might include Paris, Tokyo, Disney World, Bora Bora, or Branson, Missouri - all of which are fine choices, if given the right set of circumstances. But that list is probably longer than one place, and you're almost certainly not spending an unlimited amount of time in whichever place you choose, so how you do decide where to go and what to do while you're there? The truth is that it's hard. I'm lucky, I know it. I've been a lot of places - more places than were originally on my "I have to go there before I die" list, if I'm being honest. And yet, I still want to go places. Every time one place gets crossed off the list, another place gets added. Wh...

As anyone who has met me knows, in 2014 I quit my job in Chicago, convinced my then-girlfriend (now wife) to do the same, and moved to Italy to teach English. It was a leap of faith, for sure, but it was never as scary as friends and family feared it would be. It was everything I dreamed it would be and then some; the stories of which have been peppered throughout this blog over the past two years. So today, I simply give five reasons to quit your job and teach abroad. It's surprisingly easy to get started . I used a company called International TEFL Academy to get licensed, but there are countless accredited "schools" that do the same thing. Major cities - both in the US and abroad - offer month-long in-person classes to get certified, but I did the online class. It was not difficult. Anyone who has been licensed and taught will immediately forget what they're taught at the exact moment they're thrown into a classroom, so there's only so much need for pr...

When the situation calls for it, I am a mature person. I can talk comfortably about reproductive health, I can watch a movie with a sex scene and not make a joke, and I can look at nude statues and think nothing of it beyond art. Hell, my senior yearbook quote was about how maturity is just knowing when and where to be immature. I won't laugh when you fall down because you might be hurt and I absolutely do not laugh when an animal humps something because it's instinct and the animal can't help it. I believe you shouldn't laugh at something if the thing you're laughing at is helpless in the situation. But sometimes you find your limit. The National Archaeological Museum of Naples (abbreviated MANN in Italian) pushed me near my limit. See, Naples is home to brilliant and interesting historical artwork. With the nearby town of Pompeii buried under the ash of Mt. Vesuvius, tons of pristine artifacts which were rescued from Pompeii ended up in MANN. Some of these p...

If I can pare travel down into one thing and one thing only, it's that traveling successfully is a mindset. While going to cool places helps you enjoy it, you have to be OK with the fact that something will inevitably go wrong. Embrace it, or else you'll be pretty upset. Rain happens. Foggy, smoggy, hazy days happen. Awful tour guides in the group next to you happen. Trains run late, buses don't run at all, flights get cancelled. Open your mind a bit and realize that some of the most fun memories you'll have can happen when things are going completely wrong. Last night I was reading through my own notes from our 9 months abroad and realized just how much I had forgotten from a trip to a place called Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic. If you recognize the name, it's because you've read a lot of "10 European Towns You HAVE to See to Believe!" articles on god-knows-what website. Cesky Krumlov makes those lists because it looks like this . It's ...

Hi. I haven't updated myself in a few weeks and I am choosing to blame it on my return to these United States of America. Things are different, but not that much different. Have you ever moved? More, have you ever moved back to a place you previously lived? It's a weird experience and it's hard to describe, but if you've done it, I'll see if what I'm feeling matches up with what you felt. Somehow, some way, it feels like we were never gone. Over the span of September 3, 2014 until June 3 2015, Jenna and I took about 9,000 photos. We took those photos in 16 countries, although it was primarily in Italy, where we visited 18 out of 20 provinces. We interacted with native speakers of approximately 20 languages and countless dialects. Thanks to the Eurozone we only dealt in four currencies. By plane, train, and 3-times-rented-car (but not counting work-commutes and travel within Milan) we traveled an approximate 32,000 miles. Add in distance walked and you have...

I was informed by my brother that the brief story I will now tell you doesn't sound real. I've mentioned before that if you thought it was too ridiculous to be real, it happens in Italy, and this latest one is no exception. In my opinion, the hardest part to believe is probably the next sentence I'm going to write. About a week ago, Jenna and I were out for a jog. We were on our way back to the apartment on the same route as always and we were just coming up to a crosswalk. It's a weird intersection where it doesn't seem that anyone actually has a stop-sign, but the two intersecting streets are both one-way, so it's not quite as dangerous as it could be in the states. We were coming jogging across the crosswalk and there was a car parked near the curb and kind of hanging-over into the crosswalk (an illegal parking job, if those exist in Italy - this is a country where cars regularly drive down the sidewalk to find the right parking spot). It actually appeare...

Some time around 2010 a friend of mine was explaining his Eurotrip and mentioned going canyoning in Interlaken, Switzerland. I'd never heard of it. You apparently throw on a wetsuit and helmet and throw yourself off of cliffs, under waterfalls, over waterfalls, between rocks, and other things in rivers/streams in mountains. It sounded incredible. I regretted not finding a way to do it when I visited Europe in 2012, but planned to find a way eventually. So for my 28th birthday, Jenna agreed to humor me and give this a try. We contacted my Austrian cousin Norbert (who is a bit of a thrill-seeker) and tried to match our schedules so he could join. Unfortunately, while Interlaken was a few hours from us, it was about a 12 hour drive for him, so we'd have to look somewhere else. Norbert knew Austria well enough to know that we could find a place near Innsbruck, and so we met him there for a 36 hour stay in the home of both the 1964 and 1976 Winter Olympics. For our part, we ...

One non-negotiable fact in my relationship with Jenna has been that some day we would have to go to Ireland. It's her dreamland. The majesty of the patchwork Irish countryside and the rocky coastlines and such - it's just been her dream to go there. I certainly didn't object. So when we realized that we'd be starting classes on Monday, the 22nd of September, we decided to book our last long-trip til Christmas - we'd go Wednesday to Ireland, and we'd come back really early Sunday morning. Flights were cheap, we could day-trip to the Cliffs of Moher, we'd spend a couple of days in Dublin, and then we'd rent a car and drive around on Saturday. Bulletproof. We arrived on Wednesday and began wandering Dublin. It was, shockingly, a pretty overcast day, so nothing looked quite as pretty as we'd hoped. We visited Trinity College and decided not to pay 10 euros to see the Book of Kells, watched a man feeding swans at St. Stephen's Green from his hands...

There's something to be said for a reputation. I know that, and I understand that. Michael Jordan is widely considered to be the best basketball player of all time - a claim which I won't dispute. He is a living god to the city of Chicago, and if you badmouth him in any way, locals will take it worse than if you'd said unkind things about their wives/mothers, etc. In Europe, when someone asks where we're from, Jenna answers Chicago, and if I answer, I say Cleveland via Chicago (or something like that). Invariably, everyone's response will mention one of two names: Barack Obama or Michael Jordan. But Jordan *much* more often than Obama. For the most part, I get it. He was the most dominant player for the better part of a decade. He was the face of the NBA. He starred alongside Bugs Bunny in one of cinema's greatest accomplishments. That's all true and inarguable. But there's a big part that I don't really get. For instance, I have a student of...

So yes, the plan was to just travel as much as we could before we knew our schedules. During the first couple of weeks there was a lot of emailing, interviewing, and finding out what we might be doing for work. It came slowly, and the stress of not knowing where we could work and what exactly we would be doing motivated us to take short breaks in the form of weekend trips. A quick Google-Flight search showed us round-trip airfare to Brussels for about 40 euros per person. Again, that's round-trip. So that's how we settled on Brussels, and we knew next to nothing about the city.. The first course of action was to peruse wikitravel, which told us some things to see and do. Second course was to ask a friend of mine who lived in Brussels for quite some time, and he gave us a suggestion of a place or two to eat. Some time around noon on September 14th, we flew over the Alps and discovered that this was going to be a whole year of unbelievable new things. Our flight lande...

To try justifying that post-title, I want you to consider something with me that I've not really delved into. Most of this blog has been about bits and pieces of the teaching experience and I haven't really done much to tell you about the 20 weekend trips we've taken to the 10 different countries we've now visited. That's partly selfish of me (for not telling you) and partly unselfish of me (for not rubbing it in anyone's face).  I want to make a slight change. I want to tell you about these things, but I want to do it in the right way. A lot of times I make jokes, and a lot of times I downplay important things (hi, I'm a defense mechanism, what are you?), but I want everyone to experience the things that I've been lucky enough to experience. So in order to make that happen, I'm going to make myself vulnerable.  See, the theme of this entire trip/move/experience has been to grab life by its metaphorical horns and really do something when the c...

As I mentioned last time, people have asked me/us a lot of questions about living in Italy. Usually these questions are about the food and about our classes and we occasionally answer them. But living here is making us come up with questions of our own, and I'd like to share with you a few of them. Partly because they're interesting thoughts, partly because they contain a little more information about what it's like to live here in Milano. 1) What's going on with the opening hours of businesses? Several businesses - usually consumer-industry things like restaurants and small grocery stores - are known to close for an hour or two in the afternoon. It makes perfect sense with restaurants, as very few people will come in and do a meal between 3:00 and 5:00, but it seems a little stranger with markets to me. But there's more to this: There is a cafe around the corner from my house that is seemingly open all the time. It has been opened at 6:00 a.m. Saturday when we...

When we first arrived in Italy, lots of people had questions about what was different. How are the people? How is the food? How is the language barrier? How is public transportation? How do you get around? Is it expensive? What's the best part? What's the worst part? And so on and so on (although most of you ask about the food and then everything else). All of those have probably been answered in previous posts, and if they haven't, sorry. Ask me again and maybe I'll answer. I experienced a very different sort of culture shock last week, and I want to talk about it. One of the more upsetting news stories of the new year was the Charlie Hedbo attack, which I won't heavily detail here. In short, they do satire, pissed off some extremists, and those extremists murdered a dozen people in the magazine's office. I believe this happened last Wednesday. The reason it stands out as Wednesday is this. I had a lesson Wednesday night with a couple of kids, aged 7 an...

One thing that seems to be a true worldwide phenomenon is the realization that my last name is used on New Year's Eve signs around the globe. At first I felt slighted, as if someone were cheapening the worth of my last name. In more recent years I've taken is as a weird sort of compliment and even occasionally tried to make it into a pseudo-attention-getting thing if I'm feeling very "look at me" on a particular day. But that's not what I'm supposed to tell you about because that's boring. What's not boring is that most of the big cities around the world do big exciting fireworks displays and celebrations that stretch way beyond a ball dropping down a pole and standing in a crowd of 500,000 people for nine hours. In short, New Year's in the states generally blows. In the northern US you either go overpay by insane amounts to go to a bar and then wait for three hours for a cab back home or you go to a friend's house and it's...fine. ...