Travels in the Riel World

I’m a big believer in the benefits of spending time abroad. I think it’s pretty much a necessity nowadays for anyone who wants to work at the top echelons of a major corporation, and it really should be a requirement for anyone who aspires to national political office. Here is what I wrote about the topic in my travel memoir:

The world would be a saner place if more travelers went into politics. Consider the different perspective government leaders would have if they’d spent months of their lives taking buses and trains through other countries, staying in local hotels and conversing with foreigners in bars and cafés. Envision a world where presidents and prime ministers had experience as private citizens wandering through Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Middle East simply because they found it interesting. Think of how their own personal experiences with different cultures, faiths and worldviews would influence policy discussions.

So I was pretty happy to see this story in Newsweek about the worldview shared by numerous members of the Obama administration, including the president, because of their experiences living and working abroad.

The fact that Valerie Jarrett spent her early childhood in Iran made it easier to bond with Barack Obama. The subject came up the first time the two met, at a restaurant in the Loop area of downtown Chicago in 1991. Obama had grown up overseas—spending four years in Indonesia as a boy—and Jarrett was born in the ancient city of Shiraz, where her American father, a medical doctor, helped found the city’s first modern hospital. Valerie’s early languages were Farsi, French and “a little bit of English.” To this day, her favorite foods include lamb and rice with Persian spices. “If I walk into a house and I smell saffron, I’m happy,” she says.

In that first encounter, Jarrett recalls discussing with Obama how their years overseas helped shape their world views. “I guess the most basic way is by being around people who have such a broad diversity of backgrounds,” she says.

For Jarrett’s family, who traveled extensively even after they returned to the United States when Valerie was six, that meant socializing with people from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. “You appreciate and are maybe more open to different perspectives,” she says.

It’s a common point among Obama’s top aides, a surprising number of whom grew up in other countries—the insight they developed by seeing America from the outside in. The former expats include retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, the incoming national-security adviser, who lived in France for most of his childhood; Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, who grew up in Zimbabwe, India and Thailand; retired Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, a child of missionaries in Africa who is a leading contender to become the new NASA administrator; and Jarrett, a close personal friend of the Obamas’ who will serve as a top domestic-policy adviser.

Obama has identified his years in Indonesia, and later travels in Pakistan, as critical to shaping his views on America’s role in the world. “If you don’t understand these cultures, then it’s very hard for you to make good foreign-policy decisions,” he told an Iowa campaign crowd in 2007. “The benefit of my life of having both lived overseas and traveled overseas … is I have a better sense of how they’re thinking and what their society is really like.”

Check out the whole article for more about the experiences and views of these refreshingly global members of the Obama administration.

An overseas assignment can be an exciting adventure for business executives and their families. Unfortunately, it can also be a confusing, stressful experience for families who have difficulty adapting to a different culture or to sharp changes in one’s social network and identity. 

Proper preparation before heading abroad, including cross-cultural training, can be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful assignment, but not every company provides such support for its employees. This NY Times article details some of the challenges that are faced by expatriates and their families.

More and more workers have relocated abroad in recent years, but despite the growing numbers, family issues remain a major factor in the failure of overseas postings.

The initial excitement of an exotic new posting can turn to culture shock, loneliness, identity loss and depression, and it is often the employee’s spouse and children — without the familiar routine of work — who are most affected.

“I thought it would be an adventure, and it was,” said Francesca Kelly, who moved 10 times in the first nine years as a Foreign Service spouse, living in places like Belgrade and the former Soviet Union during the cold war. But it “was much more difficult than I ever imagined it would be.”

Brenda H. Fender, director of global initiatives for Worldwide ERC, an association concerned with work force mobility, said “if the family cannot adapt, the employee will likely not succeed.”

And not succeeding can be expensive.

Scott T. Sullivan, senior vice president at GMAC Global Relocation Services, told the story of a man from Cleveland with an important role in building a large manufacturing plant in rural China. He left the work and returned home when his wife and child became desperately unhappy. This disrupted the project, a joint venture with a Chinese company, which then backed out — a loss for the American company of hundreds of millions of dollars, Mr. Sullivan said, that could have been avoided with a better assessment before the man left home.

Cross-cultural training helps families know what to expect, Mr. Sullivan said, but only 23 percent of companies make it mandatory.

Mexico seems to have caught the attention of the New York Times. In the past week, the newspaper has published two in-depth feature stories about the country. Luckily, this enables us to vicariously explore two distinct regions of that nation.

First, the travel section published a story on travel in Chiapas as part of its Frugal Traveler series.

In Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, green is never simply green. From the air, green rolls over the unending mountains, intense and damp where there are forests and nubbly like rough felt when the trees end. In the streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the hill town in the middle of Chiapas’s central plateau, it’s a shiny layer of Kelly spread thickly across the facade of a Spanish colonial home. In the church of San Juan de Chamula, it’s the toasted green of pine needles strewn across the floor, and it’s the thin threads woven almost invisibly into the white wool tunics of indigenous Chamulan men.

Chiapas green is the golden green of fair-trade coffee beans ready for roasting, and the translucent olive drab of banana leaves wrapped around steaming tamales, and a Day-Glo pear growing in a backyard orchard. Nowhere have I seen so many variations of Kermit the Frog’s uneasy color, and yet there was one place in Chiapas, which I visited over 10 days in October, where green served little to no purpose: my wallet.

Yes, Chiapas is cheap — as is much of Mexico, where the exchange rate has, since September, zoomed from 10 to 13 pesos to the dollar. But Chiapas’s affordability is compounded by its relative obscurity. Apart from the packs of post-collegiate backpackers experimenting with Maya mysticism and awkward hairstyles, few American tourists venture there. Perhaps it’s a fear of the Zapatista rebels, whose 1994 seizure of five Chiapas towns gained them worldwide headlines. Or maybe it’s simply the state’s inaccessibility — at least 12 hours by bus from Cancun, Oaxaca or Mexico City, and about the same by air from the New York area.

Either way, the lack of crowds means that, for not much more than $50 a day, mildly adventurous travelers have unfettered access to lovely colonial towns and indigenous cultures (Indians make up a fifth of the state’s 4.3 million people), to the ancient Maya ruins at Palenque, Bonampak and beyond, to lush, isolated rain forests, to good coffee, to quirky and affordable hotels and even to the shadowy Zapatistas themselves.

Then, the Escapes section of the Times published a story on the charming town of San Miguel de Allende, which happens to house a fair number of American expatriates.

It had been four years since I last saw San Miguel de Allende, the 16th-century colonial Mexican hill town that shelters a happy crowd of American retirees and part-time residents. I was curious about what time, trendiness and progress had done to this place beloved for its preserved Spanish colonial architecture and aura of timeless charm. Now, sitting in the jardín — the loud, leafy central plaza — I began to deduce a complex answer.

A few weeks before my recent visit, San Miguel had been named a Unesco World Heritage Site, and at a nearby table, a group of Americans were buzzing about that success. Yet from the park bench where I sat, I could see something else that was new: on the facade of one of the carefully preserved old downtown buildings was the unmistakable logo of Starbucks.

This, in a nutshell, is San Miguel these days: balancing in a moment of almost exquisite equilibrium between new and old…

While my wife and I were in San Miguel, an international short-film festival occupied half a dozen venues, the play “Shimmer” was in town on tour, a new bistro opened and there was a gala for a local charity. There was a time when Americans retired to San Miguel for its glacial pace and tranquillity. These days, it’s more like a high-end summer camp for aging boomers.

“It’s like Berkeley for retired people,” said Sally Osbon, 55, who, with her husband, Jim, 64, lives half the year in San Francisco and half in San Miguel. The Osbons, whose three-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot house is at the edge of the centro, enjoy not only the climate and the golf, but also what Ms. Osbon called the town’s “bohemian feel.”

When I first heard about San Miguel in the mid-’90s, the knowledge was shared by a friend as a precious secret. Soon afterward, on our first morning there, my wife and I ambled through the most guileless and sweet-natured place we’d ever seen, authentic right down to the donkey-drawn carts carrying water and firewood. Its appearance of being unaffected by its own beauty gave it a quality that was irresistible.

Lots to explore in Mexico, as even the NY Times has apparently discovered.

What is life like for expatriates in Afghanistan? There is an interesting feature in the Financial Times today - an interview with Belinda Bowling, a South African lawyer who currently lives in Kabul. An excerpt:

What brought you to Afghanistan?

When I turned 30 I decided to take a year’s career break from my law firm and explore my fragile sense of national identity by travelling to other countries in transition. My journey took me to Kurdistan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Afghanistan. Entranced by the soft light that envelops Kabul at dusk, I fell in love with Afghanistan immediately. Four and a half years later I’m still here.

You have the only house I’ve been to in Afghanistan where you enter directly into the kitchen.

Typically in Afghan homes the kitchen is an outhouse shed, since the fumes from the charcoal-burning stoves are unpleasant, and cooking – done by women, of course – is a low-status activity. I wanted to bring the kitchen into the main house, so I converted the large entrance hall. I installed a modern gas stove, built a breakfast bar, so friends can chat with me while I’m cooking, and added a wall of open shelves to hold all my spices and condiments.

You have a cat. It’s not very Afghan to have her indoors, is it?

No. My Afghan colleagues think I am a bit of a loony foreigner. Having pets is utterly alien to them. Shortly after I arrived in Kabul I found Screw (short for the Screwdriver cocktail – it’s yellow and she’s a ginger cat) in a sewage ditch. It was snowing and she was whimpering because she had been run over by a bicycle. Like all Afghans, she’s a survivor – she pulled through and we’ve been together ever since.

What’s the best part of the house when it’s 40°C in the summer?

The thick mud walls of old Afghan houses like mine keep the soaring temperatures at bay to some extent. However, I prefer to be outside (as long as there is no dusty windstorm). I had a local carpenter make a large wooden daybed, on which are a kelim and kelim-covered floor cushions, and a low coffee table. One can lounge about on it and read and relax or chat with friends. My other indulgence is a kiddie pool. I spend many summer Friday afternoons on a lilo reading and looking up at the children’s kites in the sky.

So, what’s a reasonably successful, fiftysomething writer to do when her kids are grown and she finds herself falling in love with Guatemala? Well, buy a house and move there for part of the year. Why not? That’s the somewhat surprising turn that Joyce Maynard’s life took a few years ago, as described in this story.

To reach her favorite place in the world, Joyce Maynard flies for five hours from San Francisco, near her main home in Mill Valley, Calif. Then she is jostled for two and a half hours in a hired minivan over dusty two-lane roads beset by construction delays and clogged by buses spewing fumes. Finally, she boards a launch for a 45-minute ride to the tiny dock near her casa.

Ms. Maynard’s two-story wood and adobe second home perches on a green hillside just outside the village of San Marcos La Laguna, Guatemala, on the edge of Lake Atitlán, one of the deepest lakes in the Americas. Three dormant volcanoes, their peaks often clouded by mist, rim the southern shore of the lake, standing guard over the teal blue water. One of them, San Pedro, is perfectly framed in the view from Ms. Maynard’s bedroom balcony, but every window has a spectacular vista.

Stone steps curve gracefully down from the house, through tall wrought-iron gates, to Ms. Maynard’s own dock on the lake, from which she takes her daily swim. On the water, pale blue launches, called lanchas, ferry passengers from village to village. Fishermen drop lines from their cayucas, small wooden dugout boats with upturned prows.

It is here, somewhat to her own surprise, that Ms. Maynard spends up to four months a year, writing and running workshops for writers.

She had no intention of owning a home in Guatemala when she set out to travel there seven years ago with her daughter, Audrey, who was studying Spanish in a Guatemalan school. On her stone patio one recent morning, a tan Ms. Maynard, wearing a magenta camisole and khaki capris, recalled the conversation that changed the course of her life. “I said, ‘I so envy you, Aud, for getting to be here and study your Spanish,’ and she said, ‘What’s stopping you, Mama?’ ” Dramatic pause. “And I realized, ‘Nothing!’ ” …

“I was writing books, I was having a career, but the biggest adventure was watching them grow and launching them into the world, and they’re launched,” she said, stretching her arms wide with an incredulous laugh. “I had a bit of a crisis figuring out what could possibly be an adventure after that.”

The adventure turned out to be San Marcos, west of Guatemala City in the central highlands. The village is poor. Its indigenous Maya population of 2,500 lives in one-room pueblos and cooks over open fires. Tiny adobe markets called tiendas stock a few staples. Women in traditional dress sit with baskets along the dirt and cobblestone paths, accepting quetzales, the local currency, for their avocados, potatoes, onions and eggs.

There has been no shortage of press coverage in the past year or two extolling the virtues of Argentina, and specifically of Buenos Aires, which many have labeled as the hip destination of choice for current expats. The New York Times also just published a story along those lines and explored the city’s unique cultural and artistic mix.

Drawn by the city’s cheap prices and Paris-like elegance, legions of foreign artists are colonizing Buenos Aires and transforming this sprawling metropolis into a throbbing hothouse of cool. Musicians, designers, artists, writers and filmmakers are sinking their teeth into the city’s transcontinental mix of Latin élan and European polish, and are helping shake the Argentine capital out of its cultural malaise after a humbling economic crisis earlier this decade.

Video directors are scouting tango ballrooms for English-speaking actors. Wine-soaked gallery openings and behemoth gay discos are keeping the city’s insomniacs up till sunrise. And artists from the United States, England, Italy and beyond are snapping up town houses in scruffy neighborhoods and giving the areas Anglo-ized names like Palermo SoHo and Palermo Hollywood.

Comparisons with other bohemian capitals are almost unavoidable. “It’s like Prague in the 1990s,” said Mr. Lampson, who is perhaps best known for winning a Bravo TV reality show, “Situation: Comedy,” in 2005, about sitcom writers. Despite his minor celebrity, he decided to forgo the Los Angeles rat race and moved to Buenos Aires, where he is writing an NBC pilot, along with his Web novela, www.historyandtheuniverse.com. “Buenos Aires is a more interesting place to live than Los Angeles, and it’s much, much cheaper. You can’t believe a city this nice is so cheap.” …

And then there are the novelists, journalists and screenwriters, quietly tapping away in their $600-a-month apartments, seeking to make a name for themselves on Argentine soil. Nate Martin, a 24-year-old from Wyoming, moved to the city in November and took a job as an editor at The Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language newspaper, because, he says, “I didn’t want to be a waiter while writing.” For his creative outlet, Mr. Martin maintains a blog, Grating Space. Like dozens of similar blogs written by foreigners, it rhapsodizes about the Argentine good life.

Talk about a change in lifestyle. Emily Prager just wrote an interesting story for the NY Times about her decision to uproot her life and leave New York City in order to move to Shanghai.

I left Manhattan a year ago, after a lifetime there…I decided to move myself and my 12-year-old daughter, Lulu - whom I had adopted as a baby in China - from the old capital of the world to the new: to make a home in Shanghai, a city of the future.

It was a bold move on her part, but the most interesting part of the article is not her decision-making process nor her experiences with the Chinese real estate market, both of which are intriguing, but rather the fascinating descriptions of life in her new Shanghai neighborhood. Here is an excerpt:

There are two types of life coexisting in Shanghai: the Westernized life which is becoming more or less like New York’s, and the old lane life still lived by a good many of the city’s inhabitants, now including myself and my daughter.

Each lane is a perfect little ecosystem. There is a lanekeeper who watches over the lane and a lane sweeper who comes morning and evening to clean it up, to whom I contribute about $5 a month. At the end of each lane is a little house with square windows, which covers garbage bins on one side of a wall and a communal sink on the other.

I can also leave garbage outside my door against the lane wall. The first time I did , I was embarrassed: I put out a big garbage bag stuffed with unnecessary junk while my neighbors had almost no garbage at all. It was clear they used no paper products and ate every bit of food. I have not bought paper towels or anything that I can do without since.

There are recyclers who travel the lanes in bicycle carts and collect boxes, making their living by taking them to recycling stations. They ring their bicycle bells to announce their arrival and you bring out your brown paper or cardboard boxes or bags. They fold every bit ever so neatly and tie it all up with string. Sometimes their stack is four feet tall and four feet wide, a huge burden delicately balanced as they ride slowly away…

People buy fresh food daily. They buy clothes directly from clothes carts or in markets. Things like nail clippers and cotton swabs are sold from carts in the street outside the lane, as are dishes and cups and most other household items. I went to buy some string one day and the man cut me a 12-inch piece. People buy only as much as they need. They do not hoard and their homes are not full of items they never use.

My house is very solid and I never hear my neighbors. In all but two of the other houses on the lane, three or four families still live in very close quarters. (People seem amused and curious, rather than resentful, about the difference in the ways we live, but I am often embarrassed by it.) Windows are always open, even in winter, but the ethic is that one does not look in. Privacy in China is mental rather than physical. You make yourself unaware of who’s right next to you, whether it’s someone shelling beans or having an argument or brushing his teeth in his underwear. People sit out in the lane during the day and chat and laugh. In the evening, if it’s warm, families set up tables and barbecue.

Everyone who loves to travel and who isn’t independently wealthy tends to be engaged in a constant search for new ways to see the world without busting the bank account. Marc Levitt discovered a solution that works for him, as he teaches and consults at international schools.

I was always fascinated by travel. To pass the time in elementary school, I copied maps. When I was 12, I wrote to every game preserve in Africa for a summer job. No responses, however. I did get to do some traveling — a summer in the merchant marine, clown school in Paris, Mexico in the early ’70s. But it wasn’t until I discovered International Schools that my traveling desires were satiated.

These schools, for children of expatriates, teachers, diplomats, corporate executives and missionaries, are all over the world and most use English as their main language. The children and their parents are often referred to as “third culture people,” individuals who spend most of their time outside their passport country. In many ways, they are not dissimilar to many in our migrating world; refugees, immigrant workers, and children of mixed heritage like Barack Obama, who had a Kenyan father and Midwestern white mother and who lived for a time in Indonesia…

This last school year I worked in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Poland and the Philippines and twice in China (Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai). And I love it. Every new country is a challenge. Every new city’s transit system needs figuring out, every new restaurant menu needs to be deciphered, every old building. Most people I meet or geographic feature I engage with leave an impression and, occasionally, a story to tell.

From early 20th century Paris to late 20th century Prague, there is a long history of trying to discover cheap, trendy international outposts for expatriates. Some regard Buenos Aires as a hip and contemporary expat haven, and now the NY Times has labeled Krakow, Poland, as a popular international city for young Westerners.

“There’s a lot of creative energy here,” said Garrett Van Reed, 25, a writer from Pennsylvania, who is part of a growing expatriate community that is turning Krakow into Eastern Europe’s newest bohemian capital. “There’s tons of artists and street performers. And there’s always something going on in Rynek Glowny,” he said, referring to the picturesque main square. “You’re constantly stumbling upon something new.” …

“Krakow has exploded,” said Thymn Chase, 26, a musician and writer who moved to Krakow shortly after graduating from Skidmore College in 2003, and started Lost in Krakow, an English-language zine, which he first published in September to give voice to the growing expat community.

A brooding man with a goatee and long hair, Mr. Chase embodies the backpacker-philosopher type who might have chain-smoked in Prague during the early 1990s. “Within a half-hour of arriving in Krakow, I knew this is where I wanted to be,” he said over a beer at Lokator, a new lounge on Ulica Krakowska. “Krakow has an incredible artistic atmosphere.”

In October, a dozen expats and Poles gathered at Mr. Chase’s grungy apartment in Old Town. Sprawled on beat-up couches and flea-market chairs, they were a motley crew — unemployed artists, Web designers, writers and musicians — eager to make their mark as cultural pioneers, colonizing a new frontier in Eastern Europe.

“I’m in several bands here,” said Anna Spysz, 24, a pixieish guitarist from Austin, who wore a low-cut T-shirt, hip-hugging jeans and fake pearls. “It’s very easy to book a gig here. You don’t have the pressures of London, New York or Austin. And you don’t need two jobs to survive.”

It somtimes appears as if there’s a never-ending quest to find and label the new, hip international city. Paris in the 1920’s set the gold standard for this vision, which always includes cheap housing for expatriates, abundant cafes, a thriving arts scene and, of course, the newest incarnations of Hemingway and Fitzgerald chipping away at a literary masterpiece.

In the 1990’s, Prague was the city of the moment.  Today, a lot of buzz is going in the direction of Buenos Aires.  This is how the city is described in the most recent issue of Newsweek International:

An invasion of foreign artists is transforming Buenos Aires into an emerging international capital of cultural cool. Like Prague in the 1990s, Buenos Aires offers chic on the cheap and is attracting scores of musicians, filmmakers, journalists, designers and even sitcom writers from abroad. Hundreds, if not thousands, have spilled in from the United States, England, Spain and beyond…

Today, while Buenos Aires has yet to produce an expat artist of world renown, the feel of a happening city is there. … Local officials don’t like to hear that B.A. is hot because it’s cheap, but love the fact that it’s emerging as an art colony. Not only are foreign artists settling here for the first time, but creative Argentines are returning from self-imposed, post-crisis exile abroad, creating the most vibrant cultural scene the city has ever known.

The fast-growing Indian economy is drawing business school graduates to South Asia. Despite the myriad of challenges that come with living in India, a number of young businesspeople are jumping at the chance to work in the country and gain valuable global business experience.  Here is an excerpt from a story about this trend in today’s Christian Science Monitor:

Max van Cauwenberghe could be forgiven for wondering how he ended up in a place like this.  Outside his office in this Delhi suburb of 1 million people, cows mill on roads with potholes that could be mistaken for meteor craters. It’s late September, but the sun still broils this arid landscape at more than 90 degrees F., and a dust storm is turning the air to the consistency of sandpaper.

Yet this young Belgian entrepreneur, fresh from business school, simply smiles. After all, he says, there is no place he would rather be than in India.  Just a few years ago, often the only way to tempt expatriates to set up shop here was a lecture about company loyalty or a hefty hardship allowance. Now, an increasing number of interns and even executives are coming here voluntarily to witness - and to fuel - the rise of India Inc. …

A few of them have been world travelers already. Nicolas Nizet has been to Hong Kong and Siberia for internships. Raoul Wouters spent time in Ecuador. But India offered something unique: a chance to see and understand a crucial business trend that peers only know through books and classroom lectures.

These benefits do not just flow in one direction, either, as many Indian executives are eager to bring expats into their companies.

According to the head of Evaluserve, India’s need is great. He and others agree that India already has an abundance of domestic talent. But if it wishes to compete globally, it must have global resources - in other words, it must be fluent in the language and culture of its clients.

That’s where the expats come in. “We are not only an India-centric company,” says Ashish Gupta, head of Evaluserve India. “So to have this mingling of cultures is very, very important to us.”  In all, he estimates, India will need more than 100,000 expatriates by 2010.

Want a bit of insight into what it’s like to be a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in Mongolia?  Owen Johns wrote a piece for the Arizona Daily Star describing some of his experiences.

I am an English teacher in rural Mongolia. My village, Orkhon, has a population of 1,500. We have no Internet, running water or paved roads, but we do have a school, a hospital and a spirit of community.

I live in a nomad’s round felt tent, called a ger, without heat, save a wood-burning stove. The winters push 50 degrees below zero. For a native of Arizona, this is a dramatic change in climate, but one of many things to which I have become accustomed. Everywhere I go, I am followed by choruses of “hellos” from my students. I’m sure it will make the winter warmer. I am a volunteer in the United States Peace Corps. This is the greatest experience so far in my 25 years.

An alluring cosmopolitan lifestyle combined with low costs have drawn a number of expat entrepreneurs to Buenos Aires in recent years, according to this article.

There’s more to Argentina these days than tango, tourism and tasty beef. Lured here as tourists, adventuresome foreigners are increasingly deciding to stay — launching businesses that offer everything from English tea to pad Thai and even California-style burritos topped with guacamole and spicy salsa.

Despite a crippling 2002 devaluation that saw the peso lose two-thirds of its value practically overnight, eviscerated workers’ savings and sent unemployment and poverty soaring, Argentines never lost their famous predilection for living well.

And with startup costs and wages still low in post-crisis Argentina, entrepreneurs say their savings in dollars, euros and pounds go a lot further here — letting them chase entrepreneurial dreams while reveling in the nation’s cosmopolitan blend of Latin America and Europe.

Ever wondered what is was like to be a member of the Foreign Service and represent your country in an embassy or consulate abroad?  NPR just did a two-part series on “Life in the Foreign Service,” including the increasing dangers of assignments in such places as Iraq or Sudan.  There are of course many positive and rewarding aspects of this career, as well, and the NPR piece includes three essays on a day in the life of a diplomat, as told by individuals in Italy, Thailand and Afghanistan.

For further reading, you might check out Tales from a Small Planet, an online magazine full of stories about life abroad for members of the American expatriate and Foreign Service communities.

Moscow is now officially the most expensive city in the world for expatriates to live in, displacing Tokyo atop the annual rankings compiled by Mercer Human Resource Consulting.  The five most expensive cities are Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong and London.  To determine the rankings, Mercer compiled the average cost in each city of ”a two-bedroom unfurnished apartment, a cup of coffee served, a fast food meal and an international paper.”

New York was the most expensive city in the U.S. and was in 10th place internationally.  The most inexpensive major city in the world to live in?  Asuncion, Paraguay.

Nice story in the English-language Japan Times about the increasing numbers of Japanese who are choosing to live and work overseas.  Almost one million Japanese now live outside of their country, a 40 percent increase in ten years.

The newspaper asked several of those expats to share their experiences from Argentina, France, Spain, the United States and other countries, even Libya and Burundi.  There are a number of interesting responses, such as the following one from Australia that points out some of the cultural differences between the individualistic Aussies and the group-oriented Japanese.

This experience taught us the different attitudes toward work between Japanese and Australian people. We Japanese tend to consider work as the center of life … Contrary to this, Australians consider that work is just a part of life…

We were also surprised by the difference in education curricula. When we arrived here, we had to send our older son to a local kindergarten. His classroom was divided into several playing sections, and each pupil was doing what he or she wanted. Some were drawing pictures or building blocks and others were playing with personal computers.  In Japan, pupils have to do the same thing all together in class, and if a pupil cannot or will not join in, then they might be left out of the group and eventually become a target of bullying.

Young adults just out of college have always looked far and wide for experiences.  Now, apparently, the range of options even includes work in Asia.  Two recent articles have reported on the number of young people who are heading to India and China for jobs.

The Deseret News looked at jobs in the IT industry in India, and particularly in Bangalore:

Eric Stuckey, 32, an MBA student at the University of Michigan, jumped at a chance to intern at Infosys as part of a research project on global outsourcing. A former software developer, he wanted to witness the growth of India’s burgeoning IT industry and get experience working with Indian companies.  “India and China are coming into their own,” said Stuckey, who plans to pursue a career in management consulting. “As a business person, I know that I will be working with India and China in the future, and this is a great chance to get a first exposure.”

Newsweek, meanwhile, focused on young expats in China:

…Western firms are looking to scale back on their longstanding practice of sending highly compensated expats to China with housing allowances and hardship pay. Instead, they’re turning to a labor pool of Westerners—estimated at 300,000—who have decided to settle in China, at least while the economy continutes to grow and rents (one-bedroom apartments in Beijing start at $300 a month) stay cheap.

Anyone who hasn’t been asleep or on a silent retreat for the past month hasn’t been able to avoid the protests and debates over the immigration issue in the U.S., particularly as it relates to immigration from Mexico.  But what is less talked about is traffic that goes in the other direction.  Mexico has long been a destination of choice for some retirees and other expatriates, of course, and Tony Cohan wrote a book a few years ago about his own experiences in that regard.

Now, here is an article that discusses the benefits of being able to telecommute from Mexico.  And a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post goes even further, by suggesting that continued integration of the U.S. and Mexican economies would mean not only Mexicans heading north, but increasing numbers of Americans being drawn to Mexico.