I went from bossing people around and globe-trotting in my Pradas, to working from home in my pyjamas and failing my driving test twice. Luckily, I married a man with a driver’s licence, a travel bug and a secret desire to be a nomad. These are a collection of our stories as we explore, individually and together, little pieces of the globe.
The Backstory
For more than a decade, I lived in the beautiful, tropical country of Malaysia, a nation that’s more recently been known around the world for having particularly bad luck with its planes. Lived is perhaps a flexible term…I was based in Kuala Lumpur at the regional headquarters of an Asian multinational conglomerate, where I was the head of global communications. This meant I spent more time traveling outside Malaysia than actually living there. Ironically, in all the time I lived there, I didn’t explore as much of the country as I would have liked. Instead, my work constantly took me to new and interesting cities in the Pacific Rim (and beyond) that I could barely point out on the map, where I was fortunate to make some amazing friends and have the rare opportunity to explore a piece of their home and cultures through their eyes.
Skills
Writing
Social Media
Content Marketing
Multi-cultural Communications
The American Chapter
At the ‘ripe’ old age of 35 (as many would have me believe), just around the time I was beginning to giving up on ever finding ‘The One’, I met M. He showed up when I least expected it and after a whirlwind courtship, we got married. Nothing has gone as planned since!
Circumstances forced us to spend a year apart on opposite sides of the globe; he in San Francisco Bay Area and me in Malaysia. In that time, we managed to spend a collective 53 days together, mostly meeting in and exploring a third place.
I finally moved to the US in March 2015, having hung up my suits and stored away my heels, joking about starring in The Real Housewives of the Bay Area, and discovered what it means to keep a house, and be a part of a two-person unit.
The Blog
I have been blogging since 2005, writing mostly about personal experiences. In the last few years, the personal blog has been largely neglected. Work and life got in the way. Since my move stateside, M has been encouraging me to get back to it.
Immigration laws don’t allow me to get a job at the moment (though that is changing soon). With all this free time on my hands, I suddenly had the opportunity to do things I never found time for before. I rediscovered a love for biking (the Bay Area has tons of amazing biking trails), started running again after years, took on some freelance work, and set to discovering the Bay Area with M.
With each new discovery, I learnt a new story about the wonders around me. That’s eventually what led to this blog. A journal of sorts about my travels and explorations, present and past.
Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. – Ibn Battuta
