Another year has passed and as is traditional here we celebrate the birth of a baby 2000 years ago with another batch of repeats in the time honoured fashion of Christmas TV.
Last year, writing in a bit of rush on Christmas Eve, I was very tempted to just cut and paste the previous year’s Christmas repeats post and see if anyone noticed through the fog of alcohol and simmering family resentments. But no, absolutely not, we thought. We have some standards here at The Working Traveller. When we do repeats we do the right repeats. We rehash new repeats but certainly not repeat repeats.
This year, writing in a bit of rush on Christmas Eve, I recognise that I was on to something in that moment. Cutting and pasting the previous year’s Christmas repeats post and seeing if anyone noticed through the fog of alcohol and simmering family resentments would absolutely be a drop in standards here at The Working Traveller, but if we cut and paste from the previous FIVE years of Christmas repeats posts we can call it a best of compilation and there is nothing to be ashamed of there. Really, there isn’t.
So please enjoy once again some stuff we not only wrote about already but have reminded you about it too and, as always, if you are new here today please come back again; it’s not always like this.
As is appropriate for Christmas this year and next is all about Turkey for us. With our five year residence permits running out and new regulations making it less convenient to continue living here, we decided to postpone a trip to Southeast Asia and spend another year at home in Turkey just in case it is our last.
Living abroad is a subject we have explored in our Why I Live In… series of interviews. We only did one such interview this year – asking Karen McCann what she finds so appealing about Seville – but some of our favourites in the past have included Bogota, Salta, Nonthaburi, Berlin, Freiburg, Bali, Cusco, and Miri, in Sarawak.
Some more interviews worth mentioning are with Kirsteen Marmoud, in Dahab and Peter Gilbert of Sapa, both of which got involved in volunteering in their adopted home towns, while Sarah Shaw passed on plenty of tips for living and working in Seoul.
We could have featured these and many of our other expat interviewees in our other interview series on working abroad. We hope to do plenty more of these features in the future but so far we have put the questions to a superyacht stewardess, a tour guide, an English teacher in Hong Kong, a digital nomad, a PR and social media coordinator for a conservation NGO, and a social media marketing expert.
There are plenty more working abroad posts worth checking out but rather than listing them all it may be a better idea to head over to another compilation post, our sticky working abroad articles list.
A personal highlight from our own travels includes our time volunteering with Safari Volunteers in Thailand, where we walked a lion, feed leopards and gave back rubs to a grabby gibbon. My sister volunteered there a couple of months back and has also worked in a hostel on her current trip. To do the same, check out our list of 347 Hostels Worldwide Open to Work Exchanges. Another 600 suggestions for finding a job abroad can be found on a big page on our main PAYAway site.
I hope that gets you on the way to financing your own travels in the new year. Fingers crossed we will be back on the road in 2016 ourselves. Past trips have seen us getting caught up in the Egyptian revolution, visiting the home of an Iraqi colonel, dealing with child beggars, contemplating our backpacking deaths, hating on mountains, playing Beiruti Bingo, almost breaking up a friend’s relationship in Istanbul, rampaging around Chiang Mai with a water gun and punching a baseball bat wielding Bangkok taxi driver in the face. I can be such a jerk at times.
Merry Christmas,
Shane and Deirdre
Image courtesy Brenna Daugherty
