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Sarah Durbridge

Sarah Durbridge
Hi, I’m Sarah. A Brit—a proud Londoner to be exact. I have been living in Houston for three years with my husband and two children. We are first time expats and moving countries was a huge step for our family—we were creatures of habit; the kind of family that like to revisit a holiday destination (11 years in a row) and live in the same house for over 10 years! Friends and family thought we were joking when we told them about ‘the big move’ and I didn’t quite believe it myself – not even when the packers arrived. It wasn’t until I boarded that one-way, long-haul flight with my then 6 and 17 year old (the husband had gone on ahead a few months before) that it started to feel real.

Everyone told me we would need a year to settle in. I admit to thinking that sounded way too long to adjust, especially given we were moving to the US—I mean there’s no language barrier (yeah, right) and I’d worked for an American organisation—how hard could it be? Hmmmm, let’s just say I was a little optimistic, or is it naive?

Sarah Durbridge2 - week 3I’m happy to say that I do feel settled here (most days) and I have made some
great friends. My son, especially, loves his life here and we have all really taken to baseball, so much so I was Little League Team Mom (see what I did there?) last season! Baseball has given me exposure to local (non-expat) families and this is a huge plus for me. I love my expat network but sometimes it’s easy to forget we are the anomaly. My biggest challenge is being apart from our daughter who is now back in the UK at university, and aside from the obvious things such as family and friends, I really miss being able to walk to grab a pint of milk (or glass of wine) and yearn for my old job.

I was keen to try this experiment—to embrace something different and to challenge myself. I was an avid tweeter until a few months back. I needed an excuse to get back to into it.
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Alie Caswell

Alie Caswell

Alie Caswell is a Brit who just passed the five-year mark in Southern Germany. Musician, writer, expat supporter, fluent in the language of international hand gestures and with an always unwavering enthusiasm for marzipan and museums. Originally an accompanying partner (not a trailing spouse) with a detailed 12-month plan to travel, learn a language and check out German culture from the inside. Life decided to extend those plans and she ended up with a Dirndl, a love of beer festivals and living in a wonky half­timbered house in deepest Baden­-Württemberg. She blogs about Germany, the expat life and the good, bad and ugly of living somewhere which both exasperates and delights her on a daily basis.

You can find her on social media any time she isn’t working, reading, swearing at her sewing machine or taking photos. She loves connecting with expats because they get it; they understand being the stranger and the crazy ups and downs of the expat adjustment lifecycle in a way that locals and friends and family back home mostly can’t. The transient nature of expat life has not stopped her putting down roots: she was always a European, but she now considers herself a local in more than one country.

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Dave Hazzan

Dave Hazzan is a Canadian that has been living in the Seoul area for 14 years. He has five years of experience writing about Korean society and culture. Dave has been published in over 20 magazines and newspapers around the world, including in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Singapore, Australia, and here in South Korea, where he writes regularly for the English-language press. He’s covered nearly all areas of Korean and Asian life, but especially the way Korea views the wider world and is viewed by it. He’s also done in-depth reporting on Korean music, art, social affairs, international politics, food, drink, and expat affairs.

The following passage is an “about me” adapted from Dave’s 3-part article on South Korea in Outpost magazine. You can read the article in its entirety here: “Visit Korea in 2 Weeks.” 

Dave and Jo

I came to Korea on January 15, 2002, on Asiana Flight 271 from Seattle to Seoul. I was 25 years old, and had been drunk and/or stoned for about a year.

I had been living in Vancouver, in a basement apartment on 20th Street and Cambie. I was jobless, broke, and deeply in debt. When I had money, I drank. When I didn’t have money, I sat on the couch and stared vacuously at the wall, too depressed to open a book or even turn on the hockey game.

I smoked enough pot to stuff a loveseat, and when the doctors prescribed me Ritalin, I crushed the pills up and snorted them, fistfuls at a time. When my girlfriend woke up in the hospital from emergency gall-bladder surgery, I was at a Halloween party in the East End, blasted on ecstasy, with no nagging feeling at all that I was forgetting something.

I went to the new Korea. Travel to work there came like a saving angel, as it has for so many young, unemployed Canadians. In my five months in Vancouver, I had sent out hundreds of resumes and applications (or so it felt), and had gotten two interviews, neither one successful. When I applied to Korean recruiters, I sent out six resumes and was interviewed by all of them. Within a week of accepting a job I was in Seoul, teaching kindergarten and primary school, of all goddamn things.

If Vancouver is the world’s most liveable city, Seoul is its most explosive. It explodes with red Christian crosses on tin roofs, a dozen to a block. It explodes with dilapidated brown brick housing, at the feet of monstrous white tower blocks that go on for miles. People burst out of its shops and offices, restaurants and bars, subway stations and temples, bus shelters and car parks, roads, highways and overpasses, trees and rivers and mountains, and it never seems to end.

You can hop on a train at any one point and get off after two hours of random transfers and swear you haven’t moved an inch. You are always surrounded by this amorphous mass of people, things, food, drink, smoke, sweat and life that can only be called Korea. In the day, it is like some kind of Asia Disney on meth. At night, it looks like Blade Runner.

Most teachers back then just did a year, took their money, spent two months in Thailand getting blasted, and then went home to kids, car, and mortgage. But I stayed. I had a plan.

I moved out to Ilsan, a new and modern satellite city north of Seoul. I found a decent job and got promoted. I got a girlfriend who became a fiancée who became a wife. I wrote in the mornings and worked in the afternoons, and completed a master’s degree. And then every four years, we strapped on a backpack, quit our jobs, and disappeared.

The nearest flight to the Banana Pancake Trail is to Hanoi, about four and a half hours away, and North America, Australia, and Europe are a solid 10 to 14. So the best way to explore, leaving from Korea, is to make it a good, long trip—and crawling through China is guaranteed adventure.

But don’t forget Korea, and don’t make the mistake most visitors do of spending a day in Seoul and then moving on. The country is small, but it is fascinating.

I have spent three-quarters of my adult life in Korea, or backpacking somewhere in Asia. We have no house, no children, no pets. People often ask us when we are going to settle down and return to “real life.” We are living real life—it’s so real, I feel it in every breath. People who say this isn’t real life think real life has to suck.