Cassandra Neace is a writer, artist, and teacher from Tennessee, though she called Houston home for more than a decade. She just returned to the United States after teaching in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for the 2019-2020 school year. She called the capital city home while working for the American School of Ulaanbaatar. This was her first experience living abroad, and those 10 months mark the longest stretch of time that she had ever been out of the country. She was motivated to finally make the move because she didn’t want to turn 40 without experiencing life in a completely different part of the world. While her time there was cut short by the pandemic, she is forever grateful that she didn’t put off having her grand adventure. It was so worth it.