print ('hello world')

To be an expat is often to be a divided soul.  On the one hand, I love what I am doing, and plan to continue doing it.  I have been teaching in Quito, Ecuador for the last four years, and I have just signed a new two-year contract that will take me to Barcelona, Spain beginning this August.  To explain the excitement I feel about moving to a new city on the Mediterranean or the staggering impact of the people I have met along the way thus far would be way beyond the parameters of this particular blog post.  On the other hand, I also have strong ties to family and friends in Maryland.   I miss them.  I am compiling nieces and nephews that know me mostly as a floating head on a laptop.  The lives of my childhood friends go on, and I become the oddball they think of less and less as these years go by and they see me only a few times each summer.  And because I identify so strongly with both of these aspects, I can be defined by neither.  That truly becomes the lot of the expat: one who does not fit into either of their worlds very neatly anymore.  I suspect that many of us felt like misfits from the start, which is why this strangely appealing lifestyle suits us so well, and why we don't readily leave it.

This blog may be a way to bridge the gap; we will see.  At the very least it will provide a way to better share my experiences with those back home, to dislodge festering thoughts from my mind, and to hopefully give helpful information to any fellow travelers or expats who may want to poke around South America (and soon, Europe).  See you around.