Kathy
Tony Kahn is our guest host this week! Hear his story about expatriation in Mexico as a child, and a special friend he met there.
Brit-pats in LA
For Southern California's colony of British subjects, LA is the perfect place to begin the expatriate experience. There are more than half a million of them, but don't expect to find a single one anywhere near The King's Head British-style pub or the local purveyor of fish and chips. Like expatriates anywhere, as writer and ex-pat Frances Anderton told me, their main concern is not standing out, but trying to fit in.
The Grashow Family in India
Mark and Sheri Grashow, my oldest friends, live in Brooklyn, New York. Mark's Dad lived and worked here. Mark himself was born and taught school here for 35 years, and his two kids are Brooklyn born and bred. His roots go so deep, in fact, I sometimes imagine them buckling the ground in Prospect Park, just down the block from their brownstone. So, ten years ago, when Mark, Sheri, 13-year-old Alexander and ten-year-old Rachel decided - on what was basically a whim - to pick up and leave Brooklyn for seven months in Bangalore, India, we thought they'd lost their minds.
Interview: My Ex-pat Cat
For every ex-pat family there's often an "ex-pet," a cat or dog with its paws to the ground and its whiskers in the breeze of a new world. For Christopher Wren, the former New York Times Foreign Correspondent, the creature in question was a small, semi-Siamese called Henrietta. Henrietta traveled with the Wren family across four continents for thirteen years, inspiring enough insights and anecdotes about life abroad to make herself the subject of a book. Not bad for a kitten that Christopher had every intention of foisting on another family, until his kids refused to leave without her.
American Expatriates in Bali
The Indonesian island of Bali draws about 2 million tourists a year...and not all of them leave. Bali has about 6-thousand expatriates, lured by the promises of a so-called paradise or the profits of a corporate job. Most of these ex-pats live along the coast while some 500, roughly half of them American, settle at the southern foot of the central mountain range in Ubud. Since the 1930's, Western artists have felt the pull of Ubud as have a group of Americans looking less to paint a picture of perfection than to live it. Ubud, in many ways, fits the bill, but, that doesn't mean fitting in. The Savvy Traveler's Jeff Tyler spent some time in Ubud, and begins his story where all Westerners are outsiders: at a Balinese Hindu ceremony.
Postcard: An American in Norway
For the last nine years our peripatetic correspondent Doug Lansky and his wife, Signe, have lived in some of Europe's most picturesque towns, at the rate of about one every few months. For the final part of Signe's medical training, they both had to spend six months living in a small town 7 hours Northwest of Oslo. It's given Doug a chance to cool his heels for an unusually long time and address the age-old expatriate question, what makes for home?
Question of the Week
Ugly Americans
Travelers' Aid
How to Become an Expatriate
