The tales of an American expat in Malaysia Thailand…
I have been enjoying the expat life since 2000. My first taste of international living was during a semester abroad in Florence, Italy in 1997. From the first breath of air on foreign soil, I knew I was destined to live abroad. After graduating university, I spent one year working as a property manager in Farmington, CT. During that time, I discovered the world of international school teaching and set about finding a way in.
My first stop as international school teacher was Munich, Germany. Munich, being the incredibly easy place to live that it is, managed to keep me in my Nymphenburg neighborhood for five years. During that time I earned an M.Ed., married my college sweetheart, and learned quite a bit of German.
After five years of snow, rain, clouds, and generally soggy weather, we decided it was time for a switch. And what a switch it’s been. Southeast Asia is all sun, blue skies, and palm trees. The fierce tropical storms are daily entertainment for one so used to the cold, dribbly rain of northern Europe.
I enjoy, above all, traveling. Every vacation (of which teachers have plenty, thankfully) we are off to a new destination. There will never be enough time or money to go everywhere. I dream of visiting India, China, Chile, the Galapagos Islands, New Zealand, Tahiti, Tanzania… basically every place I’ve never been (but I have been to quite a few places in my day).
I am pretty much a tech geek, enjoying anything that allows me to play on a computer, (as long as that computer is a lovely Mac). My days of fiddling with a PC ended the first time I realized what computers were designed to do: make 
our lives easier. And so was born my love for all things Apple.
The title of this blog was inspired by an elephant trek we took in Thailand a few years before we moved here. That was one of the things I was most excited about when we moved to Malaysia – more elephants!
After only two years in Malaysia, an exciting opportunity that we just could not resist presented itself, and we are now enjoying Southeast Asia, Thai style. Life in Bangkok is not quite as easy as it was in KL, but it is certainly just as enjoyable and perhaps just a little more interesting.
As always, I am not sure how much longer we will be in Southeast Asia before the call of a new adventure tears us away… For now I am enjoying the endless summer and the fact that I haven’t had to wear socks in three years.
