“Name?” asked the soldier, head-to-toe camo garb, body armor, birch cane at the ready.

“Sorry?” I responded, ready to stagger into my Stupid Lost Tourist persona.

“Name. What is name?” demanded the soldier once more.

“Who, me?” I felt my confidence slipping. It always starts with a name. Next, you’re in a dark room signing confession papers written in a foreign language. What the hell does this guy want from me?

“Ha ha. No. Name of dog.”

He was grinning now, the soldier. He wanted to hold Floyd, have a cuddle. Soldiers need love too. Chihuahuas like Floyd have that effect on people. Especially in this country.

It’s been a month now, here in Patan, Nepal, the quiet, relatively liveable burg adjacent to Kathmandu proper. As it’s been in all of my overseas work (not including boring Qatar, with all its sand), every day is something new and surprising.

Patan is not a place for people who sleep. My earplugs only mildly dampen the cacophonous circus that dominates the night air. Ten o’clock is when most neighbors have turned down the hauntingly catchy Nepali pop music. Also around this time, traffic noise from the nearby ring road mercifully dies off.

Lest we overindulge in the sounds of silence. At 11 pm, the dogs begin their ode to the moon. On a good night, the dogs tire and revert to their normal job: laying about in the street. Most nights though, they feel a three-set jam coming on, and need everyone to know it. Sometimes our dogs like to join in.

Midnight, the last redeye from Delhi soars overhead. Sometimes the windows rattle a bit.

We grow up hearing farm folk talking about waking with the roosters at dawn but that is a lie. Roosters are contemptible creatures that wake whenever they please, usually while it’s still dark outside. Then the demented ice cream truck horns of the three wheeled buses begins, hauling away less fortunate people who leave for work much earlier than me. By now, our dogs have finally gone to sleep, and it’s time to rise.

My day kicks off at dusk with a ponderous sit on the toilet, managing the previous day’s affairs in the special way only my vegetarian friends in developing countries will understand. Courtesy our solar heaters, I might have a warm water shower but if not, they say cold water showers do wonders for your endorphin gland.

Then some yoga. One window faces the city, another the mountains, the third window faces the guard at my gate, who’s always waving hello to me as I’m mid warrior pose. When the weather cools, I plan to take my yoga to the roof, because the local people expect to see loony antics from their foreign neighbor and I’m the man to deliver.

Put the kettle on the gas. Needs to boil rapidly a couple minutes to kill everything. Grind down my dwindling supply of Sexy Seven coffee, but no worries. They grow and roast excellent coffee in Nepal. I even have coffee berries in the orchard outside my door, between the avocados and mangoes. Give the milk a quick sniff. You can’t get it much fresher anywhere else, and yes it’s pasteurized, but lacking all those lovely preservatives we enjoy in America, milk turns pretty quickly. Yogurt to replace the probiotics I wiped out with the last regiment of anti-diarrheal meds. Add some local honey, granola, and pomegranate seeds. Fiona drinks her farmer market tea, if the dogs are lucky they get a walk, and out the door we go for work.

I won’t talk much about my job in the coming months, but suffice to say, I’m in a place where the hard work and extra hours contribute towards something great. .

And when the day is done, it is done. Nothing comes home with me, even if that sometimes mean I don’t leave until late. I’m not counting the occasional “collaboration” that happens over a couple beers.

Like Mr. Rogers, I swap my Oxfords for my sneakers (or Timberlands during the monsoon rains) and trudge the 25 minute hike home. I’ll have a bike soon, but when that time comes, I’ll miss all the things I notice on foot.

The high school soccer coach who runs his boys down the chaotic rush hour streets with increasingly more intense exercise regiments — last week they carried teammates on their shoulders. The buses with their horns that sound like miniature melodies, festooned with hand painted patterns across the panels and eyelashes on the headlights. The family of monkeys that races across the bird nests of power lines every Thursday morning during my coffee at Top of the World Cafe. The cows that dominate the roads like soccer moms in SUV’s. The SUV’s that get strong armed off the road by said cows. The soccer moms who… well, I’ve learned not to say anything about soccer moms when in a new country.

The three old ladies selling produce on the curb. The really, really old lady baking ears of corn on a smoldering log, plumes of smoke engulfing the road. That one goat, who might be “mutton” come tomorrow. Rusty the Dog. Grumps the Dog. Japanese Tracksuit Guy. The Overly Nice Korean Family. The Bangladeshi shopkeeper who insists my wife needs a bindi. The Negotiating Space Dance I perform with other pedestrians, where I repeatedly step off then back on the sidewalk whilst trying to dodge meandering motorcyclists, bossy taxis, and of course, random cattle.

Actually, that last thing I won’t miss at all.

A place is defined by its people. Patan has some of the best. Last week, little Floyd bolted from the gate, no doubt to chase his personal dragon, a toad venom addiction. The escape happened at noon, as we were informed by our housekeeper, who was in a right state. Being at work, there was little we could immediately do but print out LOST flyers. I received regular updates from our housekeeper and gardener, who had fanned out to all the nearby homes and shops, making inquiries. When we finally started our canvassing efforts, everyone showed genuine concern, even if language was a barrier. Almost all the shop and cafe owners agreed to post our flyer, which was written in English and Nepali. The local animal shelter helped us out with tape. We searched for almost two hours after work. I was nearly back home when I ran into my landlord. He too had been on the search, after our guard informed him of the problem. More than I could’ve expected from any landlord back home!

At long last, Floyd returned home more than 12 hours after his prison break. He was high as a kite on toad venom. An intervention is planned.

Since that difficult evening, people all over the neighborhood still ask about Floyd. Did he come home? How is he? Was he hurt? We are so happy you have now back your dog.

Love this place.

Here, locals consider me a “Good American.” It’s unlike other places, where my nationality was met with nonchalance (which I prefer), overly jubilant praise (usually from Arabs, which felt weird), or on rare occasions, spite (usually from British people). The Good American conversation usually sounds like this:

“Oh. You’re from Am-ERR-ica. I am surprised. I thought you were Canadian. I mean, you’re so… normal. And nice. And you haven’t offended anybody. And you said you don’t very much like war or guns or bigotry. Yes. Surprising. You are a Good American.”

Jeez, Americans! What have you been doing in Nepal these last few years?

The expat scene here is something completely different than what I experienced in other countries. In Lebanon, diplomats and UN staffers hunkered down behind barbed wire and cement walls, far and away from the joyous, frenetic, occasionally life-threatening hustle of the glorious city life. Bali was pretty much a summer camp for over indulgent grownups. Sweden, there was an unspoken climate of anxiety amongst expats, a cloud of shame that followed every person who didn’t blend, every person who failed to put forth a concerted effort to speak the language. Probably a word for that in Swedish, but I’ll never know.

Here in Kathmandu, it’s a combination of all those things. There are more NGO’s on the ground than the alphabet can handle, and everyone is very serious about their work. At least until five o’clock hits. At that point, the bars fill with boisterous conversations, fueled by local spirits of questionable origin. And yet, there’s a “face” that expats wear. A face that advertises “Don’t mess with me, I’m (practically) local.”

Maybe it’s the women who so readily don scarves and saris. Or the men with their locally tailored (read: super slim cut) suits. Or the one-upmanship of local food knowledge — tongue and guts are fine dining here (for some).

I don’t hate it. In fact, I cannot wait to immerse myself in it.

“Well this place is just garbage.”

I like our realtor.  He says what’s on his mind.

“Look at that.  Water damage.  Look:  dry rot.  Up there, old ceiling fan.  Disgusting.  Who uses gold chrome anymore?  Always check underneath the sinks because — aha!  See?  Mildew.  Over here.  Vinyl siding peeling off.  Must’ve had their barbecue set up there.  Dog shit over there.  And there.  And there.  Looks like the dog liked to eat trees.  Big burn pile over there.  Maybe burned garbage.  Who knows.  Maybe burned the dog.”

It’s been almost seven full days of house hunting.  We have three realtors who have shown us every house listed from south Spartanburg to the finger lakes of the Carolina border to the farm fields-turned-subdivisions of Lyman, Greer, and Taylors.  If drivers earned air miles, then I-85 would send me to Tahiti next week, first class.

And we have seen some crap.  Some real crap.

We saw a house made entirely of doors.  You walk into the front door and there are two more doors to choose from.  Each of those doors in turn leads to yet more doors.  Are there any rooms in this house, or just corridors?  I’m still not sure.  It was like a sideshow attraction at the county fair.  Kept expecting an evil clown to jump at me.

We visited a house with an unfettered view of a lake.  For the price, we wondered what was wrong with it.  Here’s the catch:  wall-sized windows looks out to the lake, but they don’t open.  The resident stuck in the climate controlled gulag (with a view) of his own making.

We’d been looking forward to the Boiling Springs properties.  Boiling Springs, for the uninitiated, is the bedroom community of industrial middle managers from BMW, moderately successful business owners, and a surprising number of teachers and administrators.  Very ticky-tack pre-fab housing, but hey, there’s a community pool in every neighborhood!

What we saw, however, was Little Qatar.  A side of Boiling Springs that most of her BS residents don’t realize exists!  Housing that looks as if it were constructed overnight by Bangladeshi slave laborers.  Entire chunks of building left unfinished, yet the houses are somehow occupied.  Teeny tiny bedrooms in one part, enormous, inexplicable, impractical spaces in another part of the same house.  Appliances installed no further back than 2005, but looking like the Circuit City catalogue.  If they named suburban houses like they do beach houses, the names above the doors would’ve read “Good enough for gov’mint work” and “Probably not a fire trap.”  All of it crumbling away, no doubt one day soon doomed to sink into the scenic brown pond across the suburban street where everyone drives 60 mph in a residential zone.  So again, Little Qatar.

The good news is, we found one place that’s not only not awful, it’s actually pretty good.  Don’t want to say too much just yet because I’m superstitious about things, but very soon, we may join the ranks of Americans I’ve avoided joining for so long.  The white picket fenced, green lawned, rocking chair porched mortgage payers of the civilized world.

I’m getting certified to teach gifted-talented students.  The beauty of being in the US is the professional development is paid for by the school.  I don’t have to beg, borrow, or negotiate.  The PD policy is clear and straightforward:  ask and ye shall receive.

I finished my summer theory course already, and it was informative.  Now I’m starting the curric and instruction section.  For our first assignment we had to demonstrate basic technical know-how, including the art of uploading a document to the web.  The professor gave us the prompt you’ll see below, and probably expected a couple sentences from each student.  I thought the prompt was very silly so I wrote a silly answer.  I posted it here because I laughed a lot while writing it and think it sums up my life pretty well right now.

Describe how you will ensure that you set aside time and a place to complete your assignments for this course. What will you do to stay on track?

I have a home office that I share with my wife. My desk looks very expensive, but in reality it is two end tables and a door that I found on a curb in Greenville one afternoon and managed to cram into a Prius. I’m crafty like that.

Also in this office is a solid 10 mbps wireless internet connection, a power supply that so far has proven reliable, and enough banana chips, almonds, and raisins to outlast this course, or the looming zombie apocalypse, whichever comes first.

Tools at my disposal include a stapler, staples, paper clips, highlighter pens, regular pens, red pens for when I’m angry or want to get a point across, and an aged but trusty MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro I purchased in Hong Kong, the spring of 2010. I’m pretty sure I got the best possible price for it, and haggled a carrying case and USB key as part of the deal. The USB drive doesn’t work anymore, but in this modern age, those things are becoming obsolete anyway.

Which brings me to the software. The single greatest invention for an ADD-addled mind such as mine has been cloud technology. It enables me to access and edit documents from any terminal, anywhere in the world. Same goes for the cloud calendar. When a deadline approaches, reminders alert me a week ahead, a day ahead, and fifteen minutes before.   This happens across four different devices, so there’s really no excuse for me any longer to miss a paper, forget my 6^th grade class while I’m making coffee in the lounge, or fail to bring home flowers for my wife’s birthday. She got really ticked off that time I forgot her birthday. Who does that?

My life is a world of distraction. We have two dogs at home, and I believe one of them to be a complete and hopeless idiot. She barks at postmen, the maintenance guy, and often, nothing at all. Nothing. I also like to write and sometimes get caught up in flame wars on social media websites. I read from ten or so online newspapers as well as thick books on Russian history, and I read slowly. Sometimes I wonder how I finished high school, much less graduate school. Fortunately, there are numerous factors that will keep me on track.

I’d like to one day become a curriculum coordinator, and I see a GT certification as being part of that roadmap. I work hard at things if there’s a good reason for me to do so. My wife is an enthusiastic fan of my continuing education, because we prefer to earn more money rather than less money, so she’ll nag me if need be. I also work for a principal who will likely fire me if I blow off this class, since he’s paying the tuition. He’s a fair man.

On a final note, it’s safe to say that I will stay on track with this course because I am a grown up and that’s just what you’re supposed to do. So long as the professor clearly expresses what she would like the class to do, then I will do those things and make a concerted effort to engage with the material.

My beloved Fiona serves a sentence of five months hard labor in Doha, Qatar. Meanwhile, I sit and wait for the time to pass. What is a man, newly quasi-single, to do?

It’s not like “Hall Pass,” mind you. No hanky-panky. I’m a man of integrity and I love my wife very much. Besides, we’ve not even been married long enough to talk about a seven-year itch.

My single friends, envision a life where you continue to do as you do as a single person, but take the pursuit of sex off the table. My married friends, think back to your single days, and how you’d spend your newfound abundance of free time.

My divorced friends, you don’t have to imagine. You know where my head is at right now. Empty, empty space. Lots of it.

The first six weeks were hard. From the first morning of not waking up with her in bed next to me. From the first afternoon of having no one to relate the events of my day.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say those early weeks were also kind of awesome. Evenings a snifter of rare bourbon, all mine to enjoy, without fear that the bottle will be sullied away into a glass of Coke and ice. Warm up the turntable, drop some vinyl, plug in the headphones, close eyes, dream. Write down the movies that play across the insides of my eyelids.

Before long, the new ideas dried up. I began rereading old material, revising along the way. It made me nostalgic for my partner as I relived the doldrums of life before marriage.

I got sad, tired, and bored.

I rearranged furniture. I hung wall art. I tried new things in the kitchen.

I began to go out, exploring my new neighborhood. Some bars were full of college kids, wide-eyed and stupid. Others occupied by a smattering of thick hillbillies, bitter divorcees, and other untouchables. Not sure which was more depressing.

One night very recently I watched “Her.” Spike Jonze’s concept of a man who falls in love with a disembodied woman resonated with me. Every morning and night I talk to Fiona and every morning and night I feel more desperate for her presence.

Which brings me to today. It’s official. I’m in a state of distress. The novelty of life minus wife has faded away. The horrible magnitude of this has finally sunken in.

I’m thankful for the friends and family I have in the area who make it not easier but at least deal-able.

As for now, I count the days.  Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

It was the early 2000’s and like most Americans in their mid-20’s, I was marginally employed and drifting. A move clear across the country had been my first extended venture outside of my zip code, and the West Coast was like Mars. Free minded individuals, unburdened by outdated mores and blasé life ruts. Artists running naked in the streets. Free love anarchist communes and bicycle armies. Unfortunately, poetry wasn’t paying the bills. Foodservice and call centers offered little as far as stimulating work environments are concerned. It was time for a change.

“You should become a teacher.” This was about the seventieth suggestion offered by my father on one of our melancholic Sunday phone calls. I had always entertained the idea, sure that I could trump the hacks who had collected salaries in the sad, sorry school districts, teaching me to hate novels and world history. But then, I had also always wanted to be an international spy, a hard-nosed journalist, a syndicated cartoonist, and a ring-tailed lemur. Wanting something don’t necessarily make it so.

Still, the idea grew on me. Especially when I heard about this whole overseas teaching scheme. The school flies you out, pays your rent, and… did we mention the whole overseas teaching part of this deal?

Life transitioned quickly from Dollar Beer Tuesdays at the local punk dive to Thirsty Thursdays in the university district to falling asleep at 8 o’clock on a Friday night with a glass of wine in my hand, grading spelling tests at my kitchen table. All those naked bicycling anarchist free love artist friends faded away to Never Never Land as teaching became my new life. The plan was to put in three or four years in the American Public system and then nail down a dream job in someplace exotic.

Someplace they speak Spanish. Someplace full of beautiful women who have never met — and therefore never been disappointed by — an American. Someplace without “hipster irony” and other phrases people invent to sound clever. Someplace that delivers white rum drinks on a chrome platter to your beach chair while a teaching assistant grades your spelling tests.

It bears repeating. Wanting something don’t necessarily make it so.

Halfway through my second year, one of my administrators quietly approached me.

“So… you’ve been talking about going overseas sometime down the road, yeah?” he began. “Here’s the thing. We’re looking at the budget for next year, and while I can’t officially tell you what this means for you and the other new teachers, I can unofficially tell you… start looking for that overseas job now.”

Reading into his subtle message, I signed myself up for what would become the most insane yet rewarding decision of my life. With some hesitations, of course. Just two years in the field, I was unsure of my abilities to start teaching in the big leagues. As it turns out, that hunch was absolutely accurate.

What I wish to present in this book is an accurate as possible portrayal of overseas teaching. If you have read this far, you are probably considering it yourself. You may have even attended a workshop about it, where rosy cheeked 50-somethings sing a happy song about the amazing, easy life overseas teachers enjoy. If it is anything like the workshop I attended, they left out the bad parts and replaced them with a slideshow of badly dressed people in front of international landmarks. Or shouldering parrots in the Amazon. Or riding rickshaws in Bangkok. I am here to tell you that is all pretend.

The life of an overseas teacher is gritty and cruel. It is rife with people who spit in the street and generally have detestable hygiene. It is an uncomfortable world of drunkards and hooligans, confidence men and opportunists. Mouth-breathing simpletons and arrogant racists. And that’s just your fellow expats.

Though you will be thrust well out of your comfort zone, there will also be moments of pure bliss. You will work with some of the finest teachers in the profession, and you will work hard and you will work with great enthusiasm. You will behold sights that in your past life existed only in the pages of National Geographic. Yes, that beach exists, and though there may not be an assistant to score your spelling tests there will be a gilded serving platter. Cuban rum even.

Enough pitching. You want to do this thing? Then here is everything you ever needed to know about overseas education, but didn’t think to ask.

Camel-killing temperatures bake the asphalt as my shirt cakes in salty sweat, soaking in the kind of humidity that you don’t think exists in desert climates but let me tell you, it does.  Surrounding me, a mob of migrant workers, queued (in the loosest possible interpretation of that word) to enter a tent marked WORKER ENTRANCE.  An ant-line of laborers files out of the exit a few meters away, bandage on each arm, official-looking government document in each hand.

The men around me look puzzled, talking at me simultaneously in Nepalese.  Gutra-clad Qatari men break into the crowd, shouting orders in Arabic.  The men immediately push into the tent, leaving me in a now-vacant parking lot.  A bus pulls up and what appear to be hundreds more migrants disembark, filling the musky vacuum in which I stand.  I’m confused; this is confusing.

That’s when I see him.  He approaches like a phantasm, his flowing dishdasha swishing in the air despite the lack of breeze.  He seems not to walk but rather to drift, drift like Saudi teenagers in Mercedes Benzes.

He gently grasps my elbow, removes his too-damn-cool-for-a-name-brand sunglasses, and says with the gentle authority of the universe itself, “Mister Sam.  Come with me now.”

His name is Nidhal and he is my fixer.  He is going to fix all of this for me.

I have no business by the WORKERS ENTRANCE, he tells me.  I must instead use the EMPLOYEES ENTRANCE, which apparently is for foreign professionals such as myself.  He seems to crack a smile, perhaps amused at my naivety, but I cannot be sure.

We walk into a building that, while not resembling a tent in any way, is at least halfway as topsy-turvy inside.  Lines, arrows, and ropes form a labyrinth, reminiscent of my bygone hours spent in DMV’s.  Nidhal gestures for me to follow him right past the crowds of puzzled businessmen, engineers, and other foreigners who were told this process would only take an hour.

He pauses outside a door marked only by a number, deep in thought, conspiratorial, like George Clooney right before he does anything.  Now that I think about it, with that close trimmed beard and square jaw, Nidhal looks an awful lot like George Clooney.  Except taller.

Nidhal quietly pushes the door open and motions me inside.  A clearly overwhelmed doctor sits at a desk, piles of files scattered about him.  Speaking in a voice like the wind whirling the desert across the dunes, Nidhal says a few words in Arabic that, like so many words in Arabic, speak volumes more than English.

The doctor responds immediately by taking out an ink pad and stamping insignias across a document with my name on it.  Nidhal thanks him.  We leave.

Nidhal leads me to another door.  Inside, a Filipino orderly takes my document and passport, studying both carefully.

“A TB shot?  Really man?  You’re a white guy from America.  You don’t have TB.”

I reply that he is of course correct, that this whole process is an unfortunate consequence of having irregular chest x-rays due to my Beijing-airborne-toxin-tattooed lung.  He rolls his eyes sympathetically and takes out a needle.

“So,” he asks, “what’s the latest on the airstrikes in Syria?”  I tell him that sadly my citizenship does not make me privy to insider information.  He jabs the needle into my arm.  “Come back in two days.  If it looks infected, I guess you have TB after all.”

Nidhal is not impressed.  He would prefer to see everything wrapped up sooner.  If he could coerce my cellular biology to play by his rules, I know he would.  But a fixer can only fix so much in one day.

This is my first week in Qatar, and my first week back in the Middle East after leaving so frantically in 2008.  I must say, everything is going much better this time and I cannot wait to see what comes in the years ahead.

Part 1. Don’t get too comfortable.

New Zealand was a pretty rough country. Most people think of verdant hills, sheep, the near-total absence of a military, cows, happy-go-lucky locals, and sheep when they think of New Zealand and all this is true but man, it’s a hard place to find work as a foreigner.

New Zealand is rich in natural resources.

We had unexpectedly crash landed on the in New Zealand after an unfortunate episode involving a retired Pakistani-Sabahan warlord.  Taupō was great in many ways.  Located central to the North Island, Taupō is roughly equidistant to Auckland and Wellington.  It was an ideal jumping-off point for excursions into the scenic Northlands, the vineyards of Hawkes Bay, the wild trails of Tongariro, and visits to Fiona’s mad hillbilly family in the Waikato.

Locally, our veranda boasted a million-dollar view of the sunset over Lake Taupō.  Plenty of great restaurants where the staff knew us by name and menu item.  And who can forget our local friends, Jo, Simon, Sally, and a little ways up the road, fellow Beijing veterans Mark and Karen?  Unfortunately, like so many things in life, it is hard to do much in Taupō without money.

Fiona managed to find full-time work more or less straight away. She covered maternity leave for a teacher at a school even further into the countryside than we already lived. I manned the house, spending the day cooking, cleaning, planning our wedding, and thinking about writing. Over and over friends and fellow educators assured us, “A male teacher will be snapped up so quick! You’ll be working before you know it.”

There’s a punchline here, I’m sure of it.

Weeks and months passed.  No snapping happened. For interviews, I traveled further and further out from our home base. At one point it seemed that we might have to compromise on our Kiwi bumpkin values and relocate to Auckland. Yet even there, I sat countless interviews, granted false assurances of “sure things” and “calls back by the end of this week” but without one single job offer.

Really, Auckland?

By May, I was teaching part-time at an English language school for young foreigners. Every afternoon, the following lesson for a mixed group of listless teenagers from the Pacific Islands and ridiculously wealthy, incredibly disinterested Saudis. “Repeat after me: this is a pencil, this is a pen.”

Fiona and I love New Zealand. We want to call it home one day. But we were sick to death of being poor, working at dead-end jobs. We had given NZ a fair shot, just like I had given the USA a chance all those years ago.

We finally decided the time had come to call The Man. Our Teacher Pimp.

“Hey there you two! I’ve some terrific placements for you to consider. Have you ever heard of a place called Backwardistan?”

Our TP, Andy, is a sweet guy. He’s the hokey, somewhat rotund wacky neighbor character from innumerable sitcoms. He’s a businessman first; successful placements are his bread and butter.  Knowing this, we have to do a bit of homework with every offer he sends our way. Backwardistan was immediately off the table.

“You okay with a Slovak-only-speaking workplace?”

No, Andy.

“Their national currency isn’t recognized by most of the world but…”

No, Andy.

“Yes, there’s been an ongoing military coup. That’s why the school’s perimeter walls are built so high.”

No, Andy.

“Well, I’ve got this job in Sweden. There’s another one in Qatar. The Sweden school has been around for 25 years, great curriculum, small class sizes. The Qatar school Fiona remembers, as she worked there back in ’08.

“Both want to hire you tomorrow.”

We’re listening.

Qatar offered a generous salary. Fiona had finished her previous assignment with the school on good terms. The only part that didn’t fit was the grade level. They wanted me to teach babies. I can’t handle babies.

We knew far less about Sweden. Only that it was in Europe and the garrulous head of school was over-the-top eager to hire us. Some place called “Malmö,” once a cornerstone of the Scandinavian shipbuilding empire, nowadays struggling to reinvent itself as a tech industry capital that’s “practically in Copenhagen.”

Pictured: Not Malmö

What they hey. Let’s cross one more continent off our list.

Part 2. Välkommen till Malmö, Sveriges. 

Let me tell you about Sweden.  There’s this couple.  Every time I disembark from my bus, the same couple is at my stop.  Every time.  He always leans against a pillar, smug look on his face.  She alights from her bus.  Their eyes meet.  Suddenly, no one else exists on that platform.  She floats over to him and he embraces her, their lips meet in the sort of fiery, frenzied kiss you only see in European countries.  Every time, it’s like she just returned from a stint of administering aid to sub-Saharan Africa, or possibly serving time for a crime she did not commit, and he patiently has waited for many long years, thinking of her by day, dreaming of her by night.

Except that this encounter happens every afternoon around 3:30 pm.

Every single afternoon.

From the bus station, I browse the outdoor produce market.  Tonight I’m thinking… artichoke and celery root bisque, Norwegian salmon with fresh dill and whipped potatoes, maybe a bit of ice cream with caramelized apples. More on the food later.  Let’s talk about the merchants.  Roughly half the vendors speak Swedish, the others Arabic, thanks to Sweden’s open-door immigration policy.  I find it’s easier to haggle with the Arabic guys.

If you want to see a Swede get bent out of shape, start a conversation about immigration.

In the US, my polite liberal friends jabber on about melting pots and rich tapestries and the American Experiment and their friend Carlos though they have a hard time remembering if Carlos is from Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, or Canada.

My friends on the right prophesize dark days when Americans might one day speak more than one language, and explain with furrowed brows that such a plurality of cultures will inevitably bring about the demise of our pure American society.

Sweden too has its political left and right, though the spectrum is wider, ranging from self-described communists to smiling fascists.  Talk about immigration though, and the lines disappear.  Everyone hates the immigrants, and Swedes won’t sugarcoat their feelings.  They’ll straight up tell you about how these dirty, disrespectful refugee scumbags are wrecking the country.  Corrupting the youth.  Crowding the bus station.  Trying to impose Sharia law.  Not learning Swedish.  Probably up to something right… now.

Left, right, and everything in-between

Part 3.  Folks. 

Shahab was the first friend I made in Sweden.  He left Iran when his currency trading enterprise collapsed, thanks to economic sanctions from my country.  He’s been in a holding pattern in Malmö, waiting for Denmark (with its far more draconian immigration policy) to allow him in to live with his Danish girlfriend.  Shahab cooks a mean rice pilaf.  On any given night, his apartment fills with smoke and santoor players.  He suffers from late night ice cream cravings.

Pepper Republik I met through the Couch Surfing network, or maybe it was MeetUp.  Pakistani by birth, Brooklynite by design.  He owns the world’s most magnificent collection of durbans and rocks a mustache that could destroy lesser mustaches, if he had an ill-wishing bone in his body.  We both enjoy micro-brewed beer, so we drink together whenever possible.  His partner, a soft-spoken Swedish photographer, plays “straight man” in the odd couple.

Linda and Birgitta are our saviors out here.  They are caring friends, eager to show us what Sweden has to offer.  They are the only level-headed people we work with and, defying the Swedish “non-confrontational” stereotype, they are unafraid to speak their minds.  Maybe it’s because they’re not typical Swedes.  Perhaps it’s because they’re not British.

We are friends

British Bob is every twit from London you ever met.  He lived in our flat for a couple months when he was having a hard time not being homeless.  He’s eternally working on his Masters thesis.  He’s sort of male groupie, following legendary musicians around the world and taking their picture.  Except that he calls himself a photographer, not a groupie.  He really likes to remind people he’s a photographer.  It’s hard to have a conversation with British Bob where it does not come up that he is a photographer.  He’s extremely health conscious and won’t eat foods with any real ingredients.  He says he used to be obese, which is hard to believe when you see him dressed every day in a slim-cut paisley shirt, rocker jeans, and elevator boots.  He just wears that around the house, always dressed to the nines, because whatever.  Maybe Steve Vai will show up.

Chicago Bob is every dude from Chicago you ever met.  He runs the only really American bar in town.  More a man cave than a bar.  His self-assured smirk lands him in the beds of strange women most nights of the week.  He is a dispensary of unsolicited advice on the subject.

“Tell you what you should do, bro.  Dump the chick already.  Lookit’ her.  She’s clearly nuts.  Am I right?”

“You should stick with it, bro.  You get past 35, and pickings get slim.  Chicks only get crazier.  Something about their hormones.”

“My buddy over here, Greg, he’s a mess.  Told him, ‘Bro!  These Swedish chicks!  They’ll ruin ya!’  You think he listened?  Lookit’ him.  He’s a mess.”

Chicago Bob, like his friend Greg, like 99% of the other Western expat males in Sweden, came to Malmö in the same fashion.  The sad sorry saga begins with a Swedish girl he met back in his home country, or possibly while backpacking through Argentina, or drunk at a Moon Party in Thailand.  They fell in love.  She said she wanted him and no one else because no one had ever made her feel that way before.  Next thing he knows, he’s moved his entire life to their little love nest in some town rich in ö’s and å’s.  He starts to unpack his suitcase.  She begins throwing things at him, breaking the plates, screaming about how he’s a shit and she never wants to see him again.  His life has been a wreck ever since.

One of my local friends, Drunk Olaf, once told me of Sweden’s role in World War II.

“So, the Nazis were just rampaging shit, yeah?  And Adolf Hitler is all like, ‘Hey Scandinavia, you’re next,’ yeah?

“The Danes, they were all like ‘Rawarr!  Vee are Vikings, you shall not pass!’ and the Luftwaffe took Copenhagen in like ten minutes or something like that.

“So the king or whatever of Sweden is like, ‘Okay listen Mister Hitler.  You can’t invade us.  We are neutral and we don’t want any of your making war.  So we mean, like, if you were to march through our country, we’d just have to pretend not to see you.’

“And that is how Hitler conquered Norway.”

“So,” I replied, “It’s like Sweden collaborated with the Nazis under the guise of neutrality?”

“No no no,” he retorted.  “It just that we are a very meek people.  We’re like wimpy vikings.”

Exhibit A: pacifier tree

Exhibit B: even their wildlife is sensitive

Everyone is abnormally tall.  Even for me at 5’11”. Apparently, that’s 183 cm to the rest of the world, just in case you were curious.

I used to think the Swedish language was like that Muppet chef. Now I realize it’s more like a drunk who’s getting over a crippling addiction to pharmaceuticals.  Maybe that’s why I found it easy to learn.  It reminded me of wilder years.

Malmö makes Portland look like the town you lived in before Portland. Free earplugs at concerts.  Hair metal with cello.  Prog rock that advances from Tortoise to Yes to what Kiwis affectionately call a “hot mess.”

Gypsies.  Gypsies everywhere.  Not those hipster gypsies (hypsies?) you see in Phish lots and Burning Mans, but real deal, Big Fat Wedding-having, Ferrari t-shirt wearing, braided goatee-sporting, 12-year-old gyrating gypsies.

Real deal

Part 4. The day-to-day

We are definitely in northern Europe.  Triangular houses and separate lanes for the motorist, cyclist, and pedestrian?  Check.  Pensioner on a recumbent bicycle smoking a pipe?  Super check.

‘Nuff said.

Want to spend a day cycling?  How about a week?  A month?  Want some company on that ride?  Finding an organized ride or organizing one’s own is crazy easy out here.  Fiona and I spent our few sunny weekends riding the southern coastlines of Sweden and Denmark.

We are definitely in Sweden.  Among other clichés, there’s IKEA.  IKEA, along with Volvo, Ericsson, H & M, and Skype, is a cornerstone of Sverige life.  Moreover, Malmö is IKEA’s world corporate headquarters, so the joke about everyone having the same coffee table is well worn.

I know I’ve seen that chair somewhere else…

Shopping at IKEA happens in stages.

1. Wow.  This place is huge!  Such cool design concepts!  I can choose from a shopping cart or a plastic handbag.  Whoa, are those meatballs?
2. This is neat.  It’s like walking through a carnival maze full of fun things I can take home!  I’m full of meatballs and feel like I could spend all day here.
3. I came here for bed sheets.  Why do I have a colander, ceramic vase, and wire mesh rubbish bin?  How did I upgrade from a handbag to a cart?  Why is my stomach growling?  Do I need more meatballs?  And where the hell are the bed sheets?
4. How have five hours gone by?  They didn’t even have any nice bed sheets.  They were all covered with some kind of garish pattern… dolphins or asparagus or something, I couldn’t tell.  How do I get out of this stupid place?
5. I hope this place burns to the ground, just so they learn you can’t trap people in a building like this.  I keep walking towards the exit signs, but there’s no exit.  Only more cheese graters and lint removers.
6. In the name of all that is holy, why do they only have three registers open?  There are like, 20 registers, but I’m standing behind seventeen billion families in one of three lines and everyone has apparently decided to furnish their house today.
7. I am never returning to that god awful place again.
8. Hmm.  This bookshelf is missing an obscurely shaped screw, and this pillow doesn’t fit into any pillowcase… except for the ones I found at IKEA.  Damn you IKEAAAAAAAAAA!!

MAXI ICA is where one goes for groceries.  I was in the baking goods section, shopping for pancake ingredients.  Carefully, I mouthed the words on the labels.

“Bikarbonit.”  Sounds like bicarbonate.  As in, bicarbonate soda.  Baking soda.  Sorted!

Just then, a man of vaguely Central Asian descent approached me.

“Eh-excuse me,” he began, pointing to a photo of bules, the cinnamon buns that are popular around these parts.  “Do you, ah, know the things I must get to make these?”

I smiled and shrugged, “Sorry man, I’m new here too.  Still learning my Swedish.”

“Ah yes!” he smiled.  “It is so hard!  Good luck my friend!  Good luck!”

The exchange gave me a boost of confidence.  At least I don’t look like a confused foreigner in the grocery store anymore.  Now if I can just figure out which of these twenty varieties of flour is self-rising…

The typical neighborhood grocer has an entire section for just cheese.  Another section for just sausage.  Another, just smoked and pickled fish.  It’s the end of summer, so I was only half surprised that it took me ten minutes to fully survey the seasonal tomato section in produce.  Did you know that Sweden raises more varieties of tomatoes than of Swedes right now?  Half of them are locally grown in Malmö, and most are organic.

It follows then that I’ve been cooking a great deal.  Experimenting.  Ever since I quit smoking last February I am able to taste food.  Lamb tastes like lamb and beef tastes like beef.  Cauliflower and broccoli taste different.  If these seem like no-brainers, you’ve probably never been a hardline smoker.

Another great thing about Sweden?  Sexual liberation.  I’ve seen more side-boob action in my neighborhood park than I’ve seen on the internet.  Incentive to make the most of the great outdoors.  Fiona and I compete for who can spot more public side-boob.

I understand now why Robert Crumb left the United States to make Europe his new home.  The subjects are so appropriate to his drawing style.  My lazy Saturdays are spent in a warm café slowly working my way through the three cups of drip coffee brewed so strong as to produce the lovely tiny yellow bubbles round the rim, and through the window, I’d see Crumb’s people walk past.

Her, with the long, thick legs that could power a bicycle that could power a generator that could power the world if we could just get over fossil fuels.

Him, with the porous nose and thick rim glasses and mustache that’s so post-post-post hipster ironic he’s not sure if it’s still ironic or not.

Her, with those elbows that beg for Crumb’s cross-hatching.

Him, with those short shorts and gargantuan galoshes that scream “Keep on truckin’!”

Part 5.  How working overseas Is sort of like a zombie flick

I was in a bootleg DVD shop somewhere in China — or what is Malaysia?  Or Vietnam?  Can’t be sure.  So there I was, scanning the titles.  Came across an entire row of zombie flicks.  “Zombie Massacre,” “Zombie Rampage,” “Night of the Living (etc).”

A good hour or so must have passed, me reading over those DVD covers, trying to make sense of the poor English-to-Chinese-to-English translations ripped from the IMDb website, carefully weighing options.

Should I get the one about the zombie Nazis terrorizing the ski lodge, or the one about the zombie prom?  Maybe both.  Fuck it.  They’re only a few bucks each.  Not like this is Best Buy.

Like I said, time passed.  I know time passed because by the time I settled on the one about Nazi zombies in the snow, Fiona had made a run of the entire store, paid for her selections, and was ready to get ice cream.

This got me thinking.  Why do I find zombies so damned fascinating?

That was circa 2010.  As I close this epistle from Sweden, after having lived and worked in Lebanon, Indonesia, China, Malaysia, and New Zealand since just 2005, the answer finally occurs to me.

I’m afraid of zombies.

First, consider the zombie.  This is the single most terrifying movie monster and why?  Because you cannot stop it.  You cannot stop it because there’s never an “it.”  Only “them.”  And no matter how many brains you separate from bodies, there will always be more of “them.”

Second, consider the real world.  What do we most fear?  Becoming one of “them.”  Not the dead, but the living dead.  One of the shuffling masses.  Brainlessly attending to our duties, never stopping to ponder exactly what it is that drives us to shuffle.  

Third, consider the relevance of zombie lore to the real world.  According to the Romero model, once bitten by a zombie, you become a zombie.  According to our deepest fears, once snagged by a mortgage, spouse, children, career path with room for advancement (not necessarily in that order), we become a zombie.  How to escape?  Do as they do in the movies.  Keep on moving.

Ever since I learned how to pack a suitcase, moving has been my method.  Girlfriend getting weird and attached?  Leave the country.  Job sucks?  Leave the country.  The premise of every zombie movie is that eventually the protagonist will find an Eden, free of zombie influence.  It never works out.  The same is true in life.

Having said that, Fiona and I have done better than most zombie movie characters.  We haven’t died like suckers, our guts pulled out while we’re still alive to watch it happen.  We haven’t let anything drag out, waiting for the infection to take hold, but too proud to acknowledge the inevitable, thus endangering those around us.  At the same rate, we haven’t done a full-on suicide blitz, running at the hordes with a Molotov cocktail.

Instead, we have stayed on the down and low.  Sure there have been a few risky episodes.  Me cursing out a certain head of human resources.  Fiona throwing a rack of magazines at a certain horrible person.  On the whole though, we’ve maintained stealth mode.  And when necessary, we pull the ejector switch.

Without getting into too many details, the time came to bail out of Sweden.  When you’re outrunning zombies, comfort is death.

“Hi Andy.  It’s us again.  You still got that gig in Backwardistan?”