NB: The advice on this blog comes from my, currently unfolding, experience as an expat, ICT wife and so some things may not be relevant to, nor match the experience of self-funded expats (though it won’t hurt to read!) If you’ve just begun the relocation process and are filling out the survey from your relocation…
One expects to have the odd translation issue when you can’t speak the language of the country in which you are living, usually those instances can be instructive, when the source of the mistranslation has been analysed. In Thailand, though, we’ve found that the mistranslation issues haven’t been that instructive, partly because we are yet…
I’ve been getting a little ratty because I haven’t had a chance to write since preparation for the move pushed its way into the obsessive part of my brain, where my writing usually resides, around 5 weeks ago. Since arriving in Bangkok, the aforementioned part of my brain has, gradually, been vacated but the writing…
WARNING: This post is highly specific to those moving to Thailand/Bangkok and potentially goes into far more detail about power sockets and power boards than many could understand anyone wanting – until they are faced with the pre-pack-preparation helplessness of the expat-wife before “the locusts” come which can only be assuaged by copious browsing of…
So, we arrived safe and tired in the wee hours of Friday morning and checked into the hotel room which will magically become our leased apartment early next week. On Friday night, our brains were still pretty much fried and we had missed Captain America in cinemas in Sydney, so we decided to take advantage…
It is the evening of Tuesday August 23rd, the house we’ve lived in for the past 17 months is empty and we are installed in the preferred hotel of Anonymous Car Concern – the same one we spent a month in as we hunted for the above mentioned house, 17 months ago. Just how transient…
When we were first in Japan and met other expats I took to asking them what they had brought in their air shipment, at first as a conversation starter but I soon realised that the answers could be quite revealing. Whether an expat was an ICT (Inter-Company Transfer) with an air shipment (which is usually…
When we first moved to Japan, I reunited with a high school flame: photography, albeit digital. I was brought up with a Pentax SLR, and was lucky enough to have both a teacher at Primary School and an Aunt who showed me the magic of images appearing on wet, blank paper, at an early age…
It’s 5pm on Saturday, in Bangkok and we are in the hotel recovering from our morning at the amazing Chatuchak Talaat (Weekend Market,) before we are picked up to go for dinner on the River tonight. Superman has declared that now that the home-hunt is over, we are tourists and we should act like it,…
Can’t really think at the moment – too exhausted but I can say that after three days, 16 properties (in which we saw between 2 and 5 suites each,) and revisiting 4 properties, some of them twice and with multiple suites, we have finally decided on one. In the end we were vacillating between two…
