Alison Maciejewski On Food, Technology & Microfinance Explorations Online: S10E3

Alison Maciejewski made me think long and hard about food photos in our shifting expat lives. How does our wanderlust come through online?  But the conversation is not all serious, we have some fun comparing emoji options on Line (in Thailand) and WeChat (in China), what and where “ugly delicious food” is, and how using teen dramas are a good way to learn the Thai language.

original publication date: December 13, 2018

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🤸🏽Music from
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and 

Key Frame Audio , https://keyframeaudio.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:07

Welcome to Virtual X Pats, where we investigate the interplay between living overseas and living online. What happens to our online presence, our online persona when we change countries? Does anything happen? Does one support the other? Does one conflict with the other? I don't know, but I wanted to find out. So I'm going to interview a lot of expats in order to get to the heart of this question. Is there interplay between our online selves and our geographically varied self effects? I'm so excited to present Allison to you today and the conversation that we had. Allison and I met through the We Are Expats Twitter Rokor account, and that's where every week different expat shows a slice of where they're living at the moment. Now, for those of you that are not familiar, Rocor just means rotating. Super interesting. Instead of just being one person's view all the time, they rotate usually weekly. I'll put that down in the show notes so you can follow that account if you wish. In total transparency, Alison is now on two of my three podcasts. She was on an episode of Expat Rewind earlier this season, and she's over here on Virtual Expats this week. In this interview, we talk about so many things about her online existence. When she was in her home state of California in the US, when she went to Ireland, Spain, when she lived in Thailand for a few years, and now in the Czech Republic, doing a master's degree in international economics and microfinance. Alison was also a chef, and she's lived many lives on and offline, and I think you'll find that her perspective on those two lives colliding is really something to pay attention to. She brings up a lot of things that I hadn't even thought about prior to this conversation. And I think she adds a lot to the question of do our varied geographic lives and our online lives affect each other? So let's listen to what she has to say. Thank you so much, Alison, for joining me today. Please give a quick introduction, a few sentences, what you think the audience should know about you.

SPEAKER_04 2:13

My name is Alison Macheski. I am living in Prague, Czech Republic. I just moved here. I've been here about three months now. Previously, I lived for five years in Asia, mostly in Thailand. I've been all over. I've lived in Ireland. I did a study abroad in Spain back in college. I'm an American and from California. Um, my whole family's in Chile, but I grew up in the US. Nice. Where in California are you from? Well, I was born in Bakersfield, but I grew up mostly my hometown, I would consider Benicia, which is an East Bay city in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of my adult life in and out of San Francisco. I've never been able to live there. It's a bit expensive, but my brother still does.

SPEAKER_02 2:54

So very expensive to live there. I moved there just after the dot-com bust, which made it very hard to find a permanent job, but it made it really easy to find cheap rooms because people were renting out any nook and cranny in their apartment. Yeah. So yeah, it was a very weird time. It's like, okay, I can't actually find a real job, but I can find something to pay the rent. And the rent is relatively low because I'm willing to live in a very small place.

SPEAKER_04 3:17

Yeah, I was kind of shocked when I went back to California after living in Ireland. I was there for two years. I was living in Oakland, obviously, but I had people at my office that were like in their 30s and living with, you know, seven roommates in a house. And I was like, I haven't done that in so long. I don't know if I could still do it.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

And I bet they were still paying like a thousand bucks a month for their room or yeah.

SPEAKER_04 3:43

More because I was paying$12.50 for a two-bedroom in Oakland, and that's now considered pretty cheap.

SPEAKER_02 3:50

That is very cheap. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I got lucky. Let's go back overseas. So can you quickly walk us through your overseas chronology? You did a little bit of that, but can we go from the first time to now?

SPEAKER_04 4:03

Sure. So I grew up living in California. I moved around within the US a little bit. First time that I lived overseas was when I went to a semester study abroad program in Madrid St. Nice. I have family in Chile, but I wanted to do my study abroad far away from them because I wanted to be like independent. So yeah, that was total six months. I studied and then I did a little bit of traveling around and then I went back. After that, I graduated college, went to work, and then in 2010 I moved to Dublin, Ireland for one year with an ex. And then after that year, I moved home for family reasons. So I was back in California for two years. And after that I had the bug, so I said, I want to move abroad again, but I want to go somewhere that is more affordable than Dublin was and not on the Euros. So I went to Asia and was in Thailand for about four and a half years. And then I was planning to do my master's degree finally, and looking at schools here in Central Europe. And then I had a space of time in between, like five or six months, that I needed to not enter Europe but stay in more affordable places. So I kind of went for a month to Cambodia, a month to China, and then spent another three months or so in the Philippines. Now I'm in Prague and I'm enjoying the Czech Republic and I'm doing a lot of traveling already for visa reasons. So how about Prague is going to be my home for the next two years?

SPEAKER_02 5:42

The next two years.

SPEAKER_04 5:43

So you've like a work contract for two years? I'm gonna be on a student visa. I'm getting my master's. I'm kind of like an older student, as they keep reminding me. I'm finally doing it just to get it done. And how long have you been in Prague already? Three months. Had you traveled there before? I came here back in 2008. It was just a vacation and I was here for a couple of days. I thought it was a pretty place. I remember it being much bigger and much more. How should I say this? I at the time I thought it was a little sketchy, like a little dangerous, and now not at all now. Completely calm and small and lovely, and it's a fun place.

SPEAKER_02 6:20

Very cool. Okay, so that's where you've been. Now let's attach it to the online part of it. Before you went to Spain, so we're digging back a few years there. What kind of stuff did you do online?

SPEAKER_04 6:33

Before I went to Spain, I didn't hardly do anything online. Let's put this in context. This was back in 2004. So I think Facebook had just started off. At the time, I think you still could only connect with people at your university. Like for fun, friends and I would go online and do these kind of like rate my face kind of things. I remember that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 6:56

Yeah. How about email website? I'm trying to remember back to till the not just to travel. I left for Taiwan in 2003, and that's when I started teaching in Asia. And yeah, there wasn't a whole lot. Taiwan is when I started blogging, and that's 2003, and that was still a pretty clunky experience.

SPEAKER_04 7:16

So you must have been in the first wave of that kind of thing. Maybe I just wasn't aware that people were doing that.

SPEAKER_02 7:23

No, I don't think I don't think there were a lot of people doing it. And in fact, I was using sites that were meant to be like daily diary sites to do it because the full-on like web press kind of stuff wasn't really usable or wasn't in existence yet. So I was kind of using false. Was it like Zenga and Live Journal? Diary Land of all things. There's still one of them I can't get offline no matter how much I contact them. This is what you mean when you use free services.

SPEAKER_04 7:54

As far as tech is concerned, I've always been involved and interested in what's going on. When I was young, my mother, she was an oil and gas accountant for a large oil and gas company. And we always had a computer at home. I think we got it when I was like seven or eight years old. And so she had this big clunky, it was called a 386, and it was a huge desktop, and she had a huge printer, and she had like a bat matrix printer, and she would have to print out reports. My brother and I would play with it when we were young, yeah, which was probably not allowed. We would play these kind of like little games, scorched earth. I think for his seventh birthday, we got a modem. So we started messing, he was the tech guy, and I was just following. We would mess around with things, and I distinctly remember one time he said, Let's go to the library. I've reserved a book, and we didn't understand how he did it, but he had used the modem to go into the library and his own book on his library card. I think it was hacking because I don't they didn't have a program to do that. I think he just runs in and did it. There were no security firewalls or anything to keep it. So he did it and we went to the library and his book was waiting for him. So that's weird. Wow. But ever since then, like you, I've kind of been into that. Like um, I tried to build my own angel fire website at one point with like all the sparkly gifts and stuff. And I've done Zanga. I would hate to think it's still out there, I'm sure. There's some awful, awful like early college poetry sitting around someone. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

I can see you googling after we hang up here. Oh my god, is it still there? I'd rather not. I'll just ignore it. We're never gonna pretend that doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I accidentally found a forum post from really popular expat forum from Taiwan from 2003, and there's still a list of all the private messages, and I'm like, oh I should probably somehow delete all of that, but yeah, yeah, time, effort, login, stress, no. Okay, so when did you start using the internet in force? Like for either social media or other stuff, putting stuff online or anything like that? Sure.

SPEAKER_04 10:12

So I think even though I've always had family in Chile, we always talked on the phone. So the first time that I when I was in Spain, I had to go downstairs at four in the morning and call my family on a payphone using like an international calling card. Yes, I remember. Even then I was not using the internet. Yeah, like internet cafes, but no one had personal computers. When I went to Ireland in 2010, I started a travel blog to keep my family and my ex's family like aware of what we were up to. And I used to post pictures, and it took a really long time because I'd have to upload every single individual picture from my camera that I had at the time that I'd carry around a big camera around my neck and take photos, upload them to my blog, and then just kind of make comments about what was interesting to me as far as like cultural differences in Ireland. And I was pretty good about it. And I told my family in Chile they could look at it even if they couldn't read it and understand. So everyone kind of kept tabs on me for about a year, and then I went back to the States, and somewhere in there, people got on Facebook, and it was just not necessary anymore. So I just dropped it. Is that the blog that you sent me the link to? The one that you're recording? Okay. It just kind of has a weird drop-off, which ironically is like the end of my time living in Ireland, the end of my relationship at the time. Everything just ended, and then I didn't touch the blog for maybe another six years until I started writing, and I needed to have something to show people as far as writing samples.

SPEAKER_02 11:51

When you were doing the blog, was it just for friends and family?

SPEAKER_04 11:55

It was just for friends and family, but I did end up meeting online meeting people. I made friends with another guy who was an expat, a guy from Minnesota living in Ireland, and I was ferociously reading his blog, and we became friends, and then I started kind of seeing that there were other expats around the world. So I started making internet friends. They we followed each other and asked each other questions, and our family and friends weren't the ones interested in commenting on our blogs. So it was really just us talking to each other. How did you find those folks? Did you find their blogs online and then talk to them? Or yeah, I definitely think I was the one that was doing all the research as far as what is it gonna be like to live in Ireland? How does like how is working gonna happen? Work visas, living visas. I was definitely the research person, so I found them when I was looking for information before moving.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

So mostly you reached out to those folks before, like is research before you move to a place. Did you look for any other expat blogs once you were in the place and just wanted to connect with other bloggers?

SPEAKER_04 12:58

I think I happened on a couple. I don't know if I was actively looking. I remember at the time I was more interested in finding a job. I was blogging in my spare time because I wasn't working. One of the posts that I think is still the most read post was I did an entire post about Irish travelers. It's like a minority group in Ireland, and um it was all about what do people think about Irish travelers and what do travelers think about themselves. And I was, you know, I was at the time I was looking at work working with Irish travelers with organizations, and I just did a post about just kind of the general idea of who they are and what their culture is about, from what I could see. And that post got so many hits because it was right before Big Fat Gypsy Wedding started making the rounds, and I think through that post a lot of people found me.

SPEAKER_02 13:49

How did you start blogging? Like, how did you learn about blogs in general? Do you remember?

SPEAKER_04 13:54

Yeah, I think I started maybe like you, like doing journal things like Zenga and just writing about my day, even though there wasn't anything interesting to write about. So maybe when I went to Ireland, I thought I had something interesting to write about finally.

SPEAKER_02 14:11

So, what do you see as when you're revamping the blog, who do you see as your audience? Is it still going to be friends and family or is it going to be more of a professional thing? Because you mentioned a portfolio of sorts.

SPEAKER_04 14:22

So I've always done regular work. I've basically had two careers. One is working in restaurants, and the other is working in nonprofits doing office jobs. So I kind of go back and forth as I travel because some places I can't seem to get a work permit, and I would never work under the table, but I'm just going to restaurant work is always the same. I do, I do sometimes, but um certainly not where I am now. But anyway, I I've gone between those two and I never did online related things. So when I first started thinking about doing remote freelance writing, what everybody needs is they need to see a writing portfolio. They need to see your samples, and even just to start in at the most basic SEO copywriting jobs, they want to see stuff. And I didn't really want to show them my blog because the blog was a very personal. I think it was, I don't know, and it was six years ago. So I figured it might sound really immature. Who knows? I just I what I did is I bought up some topics like top five things you should eat in Thailand, and I just started writing a couple of things like that, throwing them up on the blog, and then I used it as a link to my published work, and that helped get my foot in the door for our quite a few companies. So gotcha, gotcha. Now you do quite a bit of stuff on Instagram now, right? Yes, I love Instagram, I love food. I'm the person that takes pictures of their lunch.

SPEAKER_02 15:53

I take pictures of so many things now. I went through years where I I took like three pictures because I was so pictured out. And then and then pictures became so much more prevalent on Twitter and Instagram, and I just went, oh, let's do this again.

SPEAKER_04 16:07

Yeah.

unknown 16:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:08

And it's not on Instagram. I think it's I don't know. I so I've worked as a chef for over six years, and I've worked almost every job in the restaurant industry, and I love restaurants, and there's something about restaurant work that's really it feels very productive. When you make food, people eat it and then it's gone. You don't have to question whether or not your job did something, or whether or not your work did its job, uh, people ate it. So I think it's really cool, and I think that chefs are proud of what they make, and so I like taking pictures of pretty food because I know all the hard work that goes into it.

SPEAKER_02 16:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:43

And especially when it tastes good, then people should want to see it and go eat it as well.

SPEAKER_02 16:47

I always have to get meta because I listen to way too many friggin' podcasts. Do you remember the musician Kellis? She did the song Milkshake, among other things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's a really good podcast somebody did on her recently because apparently she was interested in music and in being a chef. She knew she could do music, but she wasn't sure if she could be a chef. So she went into like sort of one of one of those like musical high school experiences, and that led her into her recording contract and all that. And now she's she's starting to work on the food part of it. So it's a really cool podcast. Well, it's funny because after listening to that, like 20 years later, I was like, wait a minute, what other songs did she do? And I actually knew a lot of her music. I just didn't realize it was her. I want to look into that.

SPEAKER_04 17:27

A lot of people cook, like some people don't realize it or they think being a chef is super hard. It's not, it's not rocket science. You it's just a lot of hard work, and making food is just heating up things and making them look pretty. And other people can do it. Some people are talented.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

I'm yeah, I was gonna say you're clearly good at cooking if you're saying it's not that hard. You haven't seen my food.

SPEAKER_04 17:48

Some people are definitely talented in that they can create new dishes and come up with new flavor combinations. And I don't do that. I just do what the head chef tells me to do, and I do it exactly how they did it. And so that's kind of hard to find in kitchens, so I do okay. Do you follow a lot of food social media stuff anywhere? Before I went to Thailand, I was really into following Andy Ricker, and I used to follow a bunch of chefs like Jamie Oliver and gotten away from that after living in Asia because it's very much white guy chefs doing ethnic food and making a lot of money at the expense of food and culture that other people have taught them and not really giving back to their communities. So I think that I've gotten away from that. There's a lady named Mimi I. She's of Burmese Heritage. I think she's living in England. A lot of chefs from the Bay Area, London, throughout Thailand. Chef B, I'm obsessed with. She's a long chef that has a really great restaurant in Bangkok. Yeah, I follow them all Instagram, Twitter, all of it.

SPEAKER_02 18:52

I have a new YouTube channel called Tube to Pod. And what I want to do in this channel is have micro videos of people answering three questions about podcasts. My goal for this channel is to bridge people from YouTube over to podcasts. Not to replace their YouTube viewing, but to supplement it with podcasts. A lot of people apparently still are not listening to podcasts, still are unaware of what they are, what they can do with them, what they can learn from them, that kind of thing. So the three questions are one, where do you listen to podcasts? Two, why do you listen to podcasts? And three, what is your favorite podcast at the moment? Now, if you're interested in participating in this, you can either post a video under two minutes on Instagram with the hashtag tube to pod. Or you can email me your video and I'll post it on the YouTube channel. If you put it on Instagram, I'll record it, copy it over onto the channel. If you send it to me via email, I'll post it over onto the channel. And if you are more tech-savvy than clearly I am, and you know a better way how to get other people's videos onto YouTube, please let me know. Because right now I'm doing a copy and paste kind of thing. So I really look forward to your participation in that. Again, it's under two minutes, it's three questions, it's super easy. I want to expose people on YouTube to another audio experience that I think they would really, really enjoy to spread the joy of a podcast. I think there's a lot of specific niche content out there that can teach us a lot about the world and a lot about the things we're already interested in in moments of the day when we're not doing anything else with our brains. So yeah, it's a push to people to learn more about the things that they're already interested in or learn about things they don't even know exist yet. Anyway, tube to pod. I'll also put the link to the new channel in the show notes. You lived in Thailand for four years. Did you learn Thai?

SPEAKER_04 20:40

Yes, absolutely. Oh damn, congrats. That's that's a challenge. It's hard, but I knew that I was gonna be there for quite a long time. I was planning on two years at least. I find it respectful. I think if you're gonna live somewhere, you can survive without the language. But I know enough about linguistics that you learn a lot about people from the way they talk and the way they interact with people. And not only that, but they appreciate it so much when you learn their language. You're living in their country and you know, hopefully working with people and having friends that are locals. I just think you should. Nice.

SPEAKER_02 21:15

Thai social media, do they have specific programs and apps they use a lot?

SPEAKER_04 21:20

Definitely. So there's a web form called Pantip, and that's super popular. I don't know if it skews younger, but I could read it to a certain extent. So it must skew younger. That I think the language is pretty easy to understand. They use Line exclusively to talk to people. I feel like I need cartoon stickers to express my feelings correctly now. Yes. Like I feel that I am the embodiment of this bear named Brown, and whatever he does to express himself, this is my feeling exactly.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Oh, yeah. On WeChat, it's it's Very similar to mine. I think it might have more functions, but it's very, very similar. And there's there's groups within WeChat, right? And so there's a sticker group and the second, which stickers are just emoticons. We have to relabel things from app to app. And so of course I got myself into the sticker group. And now I have entire conversations in individuals. And I'm like, look, communication is being had. Don't you judge me? Don't you judge me?

SPEAKER_04 22:22

You have my favorite stickers in WeChat. It's a frog with like a humanoid body and a horse and they dance together.

SPEAKER_02 22:29

Yes. Yes. Oh my gosh. I love those cards. The whole series of those two together. Oh, it's so great. It's so great.

SPEAKER_04 22:36

I was only in China for a month, but I think that helps me a lot. The frog and the horse.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

God, it was great. It's great. It's great. And there's so many free stickers, and then there's a sticker group, and then you can actually make your own stickers. So I ended up taking a picture of a few things and making them into stickers. It takes a little longer than I wanted, but it was so much fun to go, I made this.

SPEAKER_04 22:55

I love it. I love stickers. When I first got to Asia, I sort of saw them as like a little bit juvenile, but I think as part of the culture, people act cute. And so I think it goes along. It's it's a cultural experience, and I think it was cool to be able to learn how to use stickers as well. Even in professional settings, people enjoy the stickers. I still have a client that my boss is out of Thailand. And you know, when I send him like, oh, I've uploaded the last assignment, he sends me like a cute little thumbs up guy, and you know, or like a sad face if I'm behind deadlines, stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

Now, do you find yourself accidentally using a like a lot of stickers or emoticons with the folks back home and then catch yourself and go, Oh, they might not want that? Or do you just go with it?

SPEAKER_04 23:41

This is a part of me now. This is me now. I lived in Thailand for that long. I express myself with emojis now. Yeah, it's a lot more than all of my Western friends. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 23:51

I've convinced a few of my friends to go on WeChat, even though they're still in the US. And I've got them hooked on stickers. They're not in the group, they refuse to go in the group, but um, but they will use them and they're like, oh, I like that one. How do I save that? So I'll like teach them how to save them and how to use them and all that kind of stuff. And so it's it's really fun. It's it's surprising. I think it would take off more in the West if we would just get rid of this whole maturity thing. Prague. I was only there once in the early aughts, and I remember there being really cute pictures everywhere, but I wasn't actually active on mobile phones yet. How are they on the cutesy barometer?

SPEAKER_04 24:25

I don't think they're cutesy. I think they're pretty serious here. The cutesiness of stickers, it's kind of like a precursor to being actually close with somebody. I think it's very informal and it breaks down barriers for people that you just meet. Whereas I think Czech people are the opposite end of that spectrum. They're not going to be friendly and informal and cutesy with anybody until way further down the line, until you know someone quite well. So they're the opposite, I'd say. Not cold. Some people describe it as cold. I just think they're pretty cautious about who they treat as a good friend.

SPEAKER_02 25:02

I did need to explain that more because I remembered seeing really cute pictures in a lot of things and advertisements and on like cafe walls and stuff, but the people didn't come across as that kind of cute to see you thing. So it was kind of like, oh, this is a great cafe, everybody's gonna be great. And I'd walk up to the counter and have my like two lines of of of language ready, and they were like, what do you want?

SPEAKER_03 25:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 25:24

And I'm like, oh they're not gonna go out of their way to be pleasant or make you feel comfortable, but I think they're sort of happy to sit in that uncomfortable place and just yeah. So hopefully, if I can get better at Czech, then I won't feel so uncomfortable all the time.

unknown 25:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:43

Well, three months. I mean, are you you're are you studying the language?

SPEAKER_04 25:46

Yep. I took some classes at a language school nearby, like a private language school. I got through four weeks before I had to travel for visa, and then yeah, I hope to get back into it. Even when I start grad school in October and late September, hopefully I can still take more classes. I think the better you get, the lower prices get, the nicer people get, uh, especially traveling outside of the city of Prague. I think it'll be really helpful.

SPEAKER_02 26:15

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Let's go back to your web presence. Where would you say is the primary place you're kind of showing people where you are and what you're doing? Instagram and Twitter.

SPEAKER_04 26:24

I use them differently. So Instagram is a lot of food and a lot of travel photos and just kind of like my daily life. I'd say that's more of like a journal of what I'm up to. And then Twitter. I'm starting to write more about tech stuff because of my work, and I've got all these thoughts and ideas about what I'm doing in my work, and I don't really have a place to share them. So I have just been posting things on Twitter. I meet a lot of people now in real life that I know from Twitter, but I don't I would never meet anyone from Instagram, I don't think. Yeah. So I've made friends from Twitter, but Instagram is more personal, maybe, and Twitter is what I like the stuff I want to put out there.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

Were you using those two when you were in Ireland? When you were in Thailand? When did you start using those?

SPEAKER_04 27:14

I think I started using both of them in Thailand. I think my Instagram actually starts a couple of months before I left for Thailand.

SPEAKER_02 27:23

Okay. So in Thailand and so far in the Czech Republic, are you are you using those two tools kind of the same way that you just described, or did it change when you switched countries?

SPEAKER_04 27:33

I'd say that's pretty much how I've been using them. For the most part, for the last five years, I've been using them the same. I might be tweeting a lot more these days because of work. Maybe I wasn't tweeting a lot before.

SPEAKER_02 27:47

My brain's going a million miles an hour because part of the fine-tuning this podcast into talking about the online lives and the expat lives is I have this theory that when we move countries, our online life can be one of those kind of stabilizing things that kind of helps us to stay grounded while we get going in a new place. But I'm not sure because that's just so far out of an end of one.

SPEAKER_04 28:09

I would say it is a constant. So, for example, when I was leaving Thailand and I had five, six months that I needed to be more or less on the road before entering Europe, I was a month in Cambodia, then China, and then three months in the Philippines. I think that can be a sort of living and unstable life. I think I use Instagram to just show people that I'm okay, like all of my family from Chile, people I know in the States, just to let them know that here's what I'm up to, I'm okay. I still have an apartment and I still am working and I'm still eating nice food. So it's not that my life is all up in the air. So I think there is that sort of thread of like constant interaction. But I do think that as I've moved countries, things have changed. So I used to focus a lot on food when I was living in Southeast Asia. That's really easy. There's a ton of street food. The streets are extra colorful. There are people cooking live in front of you with giant fires, and it's all very visual. Yeah. It's really good. Like it's a huge sensory experience. And then since I've been in Europe, that has taken a steep dive. There isn't street food. There are restaurants, but I just don't know if the restaurant scene here is just in a different place. I think Asia is very aware of having to be Instagrammable. They invent a lot of Instagram foods, and some are good and some are not. But regardless, I think that it pushes people to do things that are visually appealing. Whereas Czech Republic, I don't see that happening. There's a lot of food here that's ugly, beautiful, like or ugly, delicious.

SPEAKER_02 29:48

So I'm taking a lot more pictures of architecture here in Prague and less pictures of Well, okay, hold on. Do I agree with you completely? But I'm also from a very similar place that you're from. So I'm wondering if somebody from Asia thinks the same of the places that we think are slightly more boring to take pictures, and they think that Asia is the boring place to take pictures.

SPEAKER_04 30:07

I've talked to my friends back in Thailand, and I think there is a general consensus that those of them that have visited places in Europe, they know the food is boring.

unknown 30:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 30:20

That the cities are pretty and clean. And I think they ask that. And it's because they visited and they've seen it and they ask if we notice too. And Prague is beautiful and pretty and safe. The architecture's lovely and it's a very different experience than taking photos of the street in Bangkok, which shows something prettier and shows, you know, depending on where you are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I definitely I was backpacking and rather broke, but I still very much so ate to live when I was in Prague. I wasn't like, I'm really excited about lunch. Yeah. I think those I I think we were talking one time about the the fried cheese things in bars. Like that was the only thing I really can remember liking.

SPEAKER_04 31:00

Yeah, smogen east deer.

SPEAKER_02 31:02

And that's not something you want to eat every day. It's fried cheese. But oh my god, what's that good? But that's the only thing that sticks out. I know I had a lot of sausage, I had a lot of beer, but I don't remember any of the other food. Yeah, I think beer is good here. The food's good, it's really heavy.

SPEAKER_04 31:18

I it's not something you can eat, you know, three times a day. My goodness. I'm cooking a lot more at home, which is nice because I like to cook, but in Asia also the price of things is so cheap that you can eat out constantly. Whereas here I don't get to do that. So here I'm taking a lot more food pictures at home, my little yogurt breakfast and things like that, not so much food street or like food stalls.

SPEAKER_02 31:42

Like on Instagram and Twitter, have you heard from folks a lot? Do people that you don't know like contact you and say, Hey, I want to talk to you about this, or hey, and like share something similar, or I think I proactively look for food people online.

SPEAKER_04 31:56

I do follow a lot of chefs, but when I moved to Prague, I certainly I searched like hashtag Prague Food to see what's out here and to see what restaurants there are to go to and what things I should explore. So I actually just posted about this in my blog recently. I met a woman, I started reading about her, and she was posting about like food in her neighborhood. She lives here in Carlene in Prague. She was posting about coffee and like which Starbucks and which local coffee shop and things like that. And it was pretty funny. So I started following her, and now I've met her in real life, and she's a Mexican-American US, and we have a lot in common. And so that was one of my first friends in Prague. So it's kind of nice. Yeah, so I've made a real friend off of Twitter.

SPEAKER_02 32:39

Yeah, now that you said it, I think my experiences have been very similar. Before I got locked out of Twitter 200 times this year, Twitter was definitely more of my kind of serious, like where I would get stuff that I would read, like articles from and those kinds of things, and and kind of professional development stuff. And Instagram, when I even used it before I started getting locked out of Twitter, it was definitely more of just visually scrolling through really cool things that I like to look at, like graffiti and food and and architecture and stuff. But ever since Twitter keeps kicking me out, I've just started to post the same thing on Instagram, on Twitter via Instagram. So it's just kind of everything's the same now.

SPEAKER_03 33:17

Why do you keep getting kicked out?

SPEAKER_02 33:18

I don't know. I really don't know. At least once a month for like the past four or five months, I keep getting emails from Twitter saying, hey, there's been a security breach. You are now locked out. Please do all these 500 steps to get back in. So I eventually do them, but it takes me a few weeks to remember my password and all this kind of find out where I wrote it or did whatever with it. And it's just kind of a pain. And now that Instagram has the thing where you can just, you know, check this area and it'll post it to Twitter. I've just gotten lazy and just been like, look, because it keeps happening. I'm not joking, but that it's happened like five or six times now. And it could be remind I am in a very hack-friendly country. I don't know anybody. So I mean it could very well be I'm not very good with security stuff. The biggest security thing I do is that my laptop is running Linux, but my phones are not. So yeah, anything could be happening. I don't want to blame it on Twitter, but part of me wants to blame it on Twitter.

SPEAKER_04 34:10

Probably Twitter not dealing well with the Chinese firewall and not just not knowing how to handle it well.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

Yeah. But when they were both working, Twitter was a more serious place for me. And Instagram was definitely more of a visual thing, especially since I started adding tiny videos. My God, I'm such a junkie now. Yeah. I need to breathe between like exercises in Chinese. Hold on, pause, I'll pause the listening that I'm doing in Chinese and I'll just scroll through what I miss, what I miss. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 34:38

I think there is that like when I read Twitter now, I'm scrolling all the way back to the last time I read it, which would be days of information. But I don't know. I kind of like just shoving a bunch of information in my head, like reading all the headlines, clicking through to some articles, just like tearing through it and keep reading. I kind of like it.

SPEAKER_02 34:59

Once you find the people that you want to follow, I find it's a lot easier than just looking all everywhere on the web and trying to websites, remember where they are, and yeah.

SPEAKER_04 35:08

It's a really easy way to sort of curate your social media intake instead of having to go through like big name commercial sites. You can do it just through people.

SPEAKER_02 35:18

Hey, when you were in Thailand and you were functional in Thai, did you find yourself using your English-based social media and websites less and using like Thai sites more, or were you kind of using both?

SPEAKER_04 35:31

I dropped using any other apps except for Line because everybody, including expats, use Line. So they don't even do that much phone-to-phone calling because you can call from within Line. Everything is web-based. There's Wi-Fi everywhere. Are there digital payments with Line as well? There might be now, but it's not, it's certainly nowhere near like what they're doing in China. There might be a pay app that's associated with it. People like Cash in Thailand. Gotcha. I really do. I used Facebook, but I definitely dropped off using that. I just sort of use it when I travel so my family knows if my plane goes down, like I'm going here, I'm alive, that kind of post. But I think at one point there's a place in front of Siam Paragon Mall in Bangkok that was the number one most Instagram location on earth. And I think it held the post for a couple of years at a time. So Instagram is huge. Easy for me to focus on Instagram while living in Thailand because everybody Instagrams. There is a profile part to line that I never got into, but it's very much like a Facebook feed, but it's attached to your line profile and to your chatting. People that I work with use it, so I could see their little updates, but I didn't interact with my feed, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 36:46

So you said you were doing tech writing, right? Is that a yeah? Because you're doing a master's, so are you doing the tech writing as like a part-time freelance?

SPEAKER_04 36:55

Totally unrelated. I don't I think they're slightly related. When I started working for nonprofits, I worked for a microfinance organization and I was teaching computer literacy classes. Taught the classes for a year, and then I ran the program for three more years. And it was all about getting entrepreneurs who come from underserved communities to learn how to use computers because they're missing out on so many opportunities and so many free resources if they can't go online and sign up for them. Even registering a business, you can do online these days. You don't write on a piece of paper anymore. So I was getting these people to sort of start their first email and try and build their first website for their restaurant, things like that. So since then, because I've worked with restaurants, I've always had this kind of play between both careers, but I started working in writing because I knew I was gonna sort of be on the road and I didn't know how I was gonna have income. In Thailand, I was working in restaurants, I managed my friend's restaurant for a year and a half, and then I was like, what do I do to prepare for leaving? And a friend of mine, Emma, she's a Muay Thai fighter in Thailand, and she's serious about training, and then she was teaching English on the side for so long, yeah, just to have her visa. Well, she started writing, and she was telling me telling me about this SEO content writing gig that she had, and I thought it sounded like a good setup. So I just every once in a while I'd ask her about it, and she'd be like, Yeah, I made this much more money this month, or you know. Yeah. And I was like, Oh, maybe I can do that for my entire paycheck then. Anyway, she's out there, she's got an entire blog of her own where she writes all about what it's like to be a woman fighting Muay Thai in Thailand. Uh, it's called Under the Ropes. She's got a blog, she's got a Twitter, um, she's really involved in the female fighting community, and she's doing really cool stuff. I don't understand it all, but I do like to go to fights and watch her fight. It's really cool.

SPEAKER_02 38:55

So wow, that is one tough person. That is an intense martial art, let's just say.

SPEAKER_04 39:11

So, yeah, so she got me into it and I started SEO content writing. And I soon found out that it was better money for me to go work with like software clients and to take on software jobs than it was to do the sort of face cream and you know, cruises, Disney cruise, things like that. So, yeah, so I started just falling into more tech writing. I had done tech in my previous work, I knew about generally what was going on, and then one of my clients in Thailand really took me under his wing and taught me a lot about what's going on in the business world of tech these days. And so that's how it started. I spent some time in the office there in Thailand, and then I from there started getting a lot of jobs and connections, and now I'm doing it full-time.

SPEAKER_02 40:00

Very cool, very cool. Do you find that since you're on your computer doing that all day, that you're kind of taking breaks and looking more at social media than before, or it's just kind of sane?

unknown 40:10

It's constant.

SPEAKER_04 40:11

It's kind of it's constant because yeah, because freelance writing is really weird. I'm not a super structured person, so I don't have a time that I have to be at work. I just have deadlines. I could spend 10 hours writing something, and I could spend one hour writing it. As long as it's done on time, it's fine. So, yeah, sometimes I check in Twitter, I'm reading other articles, I'm have a million windows open while I'm writing my assignments, and it can be helpful sometimes. I think I learn a lot, and I think it often helps me later when I'm looking for research information because I'm like, oh, I just read an article about this. I know there's a new study about this happening. So it helps me in my work, but it's also distracting. But I kind of function well in that weird.

SPEAKER_02 41:00

Oh, I do too. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:01

Yeah, yeah. Do you double screen? I wish I could now. Now I just have a teeny tiny little uh laptop. But when I was in the office in Thailand, I had two screens set up and it was really nice because I was like doing work over here, doing stuff for another client here, checking the Twitter over there and so cool, so cool.

SPEAKER_02 41:19

I just saw this Kickstarter last week. I think they actually start shipping them out next month, but it's this laptop second screen that hooks onto your laptop and it actually can hook to the back to the point where it can be like if you put the screen down, it can be like a scratch pad also. And it's so cool. It's actually the same size, like it's not like if you just have a tablet there where it's a little bit lower. It's actually the same level as your screen itself. And I just sat there and was like, okay, I'm in China. There's a whole tech industry down in Shenzhen, somebody's gotta be copying this. Where can I find this? We'll have it in about a month. Oh my god, I know I was so I started like taking pictures of the Kickstarter, and I'm like, sorry guys, thank you for the idea, but I have to go find this now because you're not gonna ship to China. So yeah, and it wasn't that expensive. It was only like only it was only$200, but it's a complete other screen. And you know it's connected, not like a tablet.

SPEAKER_04 42:12

You'll find it for$20 and it's gonna be great.

SPEAKER_02 42:15

Oh, I don't know about 20. I would pay up to$100, even without the function of having like the scribbly thing, just to be able to have that dual screen again. I had that in grad school and it was amazing, but that was a desktop, and I'm back on a laptop, similar to what you're talking about. So it's just like I miss it.

SPEAKER_04 42:33

I'm partial to like being a teeny tiny one. The one I've got now is like one of those little netbooks where the top can pop off and be a tablet. I've never ever used a two-in-one. Yeah. I am not a fan of the tablet at all. Like I want my computer screen to stand up on its own. So it's just a laptop to me, but it's tiny and I can throw it in my purse. I can walk places with it. I don't feel like it's gonna get stolen because nobody thinks I have a computer in my bag because it's so yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:02

I went through my master's degree on a legit netbook. It was about maybe six or seven-inch screen. And I would hook it into a um a screen at home and I would just take it to my classes as it is, and it was so light. And everybody else has these giant, like 12 16-inch screens, and I'm like, heck no, I'm gonna get to and from school, walk around this giant campus. No, no, no, no, no, no. And it was a little bit slower, but it worked great. And I actually miss it. I like small computers. I don't know why they got so stinking big.

SPEAKER_04 43:29

I don't know either. I feel the same about cell phones, I just want it to be smart. Like, I want it to be small and portable, and you know, I'm working, working in tech, and people think I should have gadgets, and I don't. Like, I feel very minimalist about my technology. I want it to be simple. I'm not doing anything cool. I'm word processing. I could do the same thing on the old 386 desktop that I that we had in our house when I was seven years old. So I literally just need the same, like very little capacity. For anything.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

Well, I was thinking I could have the tablet and a flip phone because I miss flip phones. I miss just a phone being a phone and that's it. And then the tablet could be everything else that's visual. But I don't like the tablet. There's too many things that don't dive with my other technology. Like it should sync more. It should be easier to use. Everything should exist. And yet Audacity, which is the thing that I podcast edit on, doesn't have an app, which I don't know how that's possible.

SPEAKER_04 44:26

Oh, it's a desktop.

SPEAKER_02 44:28

Yeah. And there are editing software for tablets and they suck. I've tried so many of them and they're awful. And that is a huge part of it. So yeah, so I'm like, for the fourth time, I'm like, forget it. So now I might have to buy like just a big cell phone and carry that around instead of my laptop.

SPEAKER_04 44:44

Yeah, I think I think that would work too. Some of these people have these giant, well, especially in Asia, they like to have a real big cell phone and it looks like a tablet to me. It does. It does. It looks like a book. I'm like, are you reading Kindle? No, they're sending stickers to their friends.

SPEAKER_02 45:00

I know, I know. But I do do recording and the editing, I think would I don't know if it would work on there either. I'm just so sick of carrying around this laptop. Because I mostly work from cafes and restaurants. I'm not motivated at home. I have to go out and have somebody else make my coffee and then I have to sit in their chair in order to get something done. That helps a lot. It helps for focus.

SPEAKER_04 45:22

I'm much lazier at home than I am at a coffee shop.

SPEAKER_02 45:24

Oh, so much. Oh, that needs to be clean. That needs to be arranged. Maybe I need to watch that video before I get to work. No.

SPEAKER_03 45:33

Hey, did you feel in it today?

SPEAKER_02 45:35

No, oh, it's so bad. I am the worst self-starter. I have to get out of my apartment. When you first got to Thailand, because you have a nice chunk of four years there, during your time there, did you find that how much you put online about your experience was more during a certain period, or was it kind of the same the whole time?

SPEAKER_04 45:53

Started using Instagram right before going. I think it was, it must have been an explosion because I was in awe of all of the food, all the things I was seeing. I mean, I guess there's culture shock, but it was more like Thailand is a really visually exciting place, colorful, and people are outside at all hours of the day and night, and it's there's just a lot going on. Everywhere you look, it's there's just cars and traffic and people yelling and motorbikes and just yeah. So I think I did I did just start posting a lot. I think later on, as happens for an expat, things that used to be really exciting and new, they start to look normal. So I found that later I would only post when people would come to visit, and then sort of through their fresh eyes, I'd realize, oh, actually, this temple is really beautiful, even though I see it every day. They think it's gorgeous and golden and sparkling in the sun, and I should take a picture of it. So I think, yeah, I think it fell down. I think I got more into the food scene and not so much the street food. The food scene cooking-wise, restaurant-wise, or yeah, I think I had a great opportunity to work with a chef from Australia who knew a lot of people that had restaurants in Bangkok. So through working with that restaurant, I got to sort of go around and learn more about some of the what would I call it? In Thailand, they say high so some of the more high society kinds of things that were going on in the food scene. So molecular gastronomy with Indian food. Oh things that I didn't know were going on when I was so focused on the street food when I first arrived. So yeah, so I started hearing about like cocktails happening, like newly invented Asian-style cocktails. Started looking into the different levels of Thai food from street food all the way up to something that I think resembles molecular gastronomy, stuff like that. Where I didn't ask you yet. Where in Thailand were you living? I was in Bangkok. You were? Do you listen to a odd podcast, by the way? No, I've only listened to like two.

SPEAKER_02 48:01

What? Okay. The Bangkok podcast is actually really good. Greg Jorgensen is the main guy in all three seasons. The stuff they're talking about is really down to earth, very much so about living in in Bangkok and that kind of thing. So I highly recommend it. I think it's really good.

SPEAKER_04 48:19

I would love to listen to it. I it's cool that they have a podcast about it. Every time I meet people who have visited Thailand, they're always like, Oh, I didn't like Bangkok because they kind of spend one day in the touristy areas and then they go to an island. Yeah. But Bangkok is so cool. Like it is one of the coolest cities I've ever been to. And I know I live there, so I'm partial, but there's just anything you can imagine, you can find it in Bangkok. Like it's such a cool, massive, massive city, and not quite as massive as some of the cities in China, but it's there's just a lot going on. And I think that there's a lot for people to still discover and learn about it from the outside. And it goes so much further than just like uh an airport stop.

SPEAKER_02 49:03

Yeah, or Koh San Road. A lot of people go there and they go, Oh, this isn't really my scene, and then they stop. And it's like, guys, that really isn't Thailand either.

SPEAKER_04 49:11

Kaosan Road exists in every country in Asia. Um, it's in every city that tourists go to, and it's just a street full of. Sure, there's some street food, but it's an overpriced place to get money off of tourists, and it's full of tourists. It's not that full of anything that's happening locally. Awesome.

SPEAKER_03 49:32

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

SPEAKER_04 49:33

Check it out.

SPEAKER_02 49:34

Are you enjoying this conversation about our virtualness and our geographicness colliding? Me too. Hey, I would love to interview you. Do you live in a country that is not your home country? Let's talk about your experience. Let's do it. Contact me at Steph Puccio, S-T-E-P-H, F-U-C-C-I-O at gmail.com. Or you can hit me up on any of my social media platforms. I am Steph Puccio on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr. So contact me. Let's line this up. I would love to get your opinion into these questions. Out into the world. Let's do it. Do you see yourself staying on Instagram and Twitter in the future?

SPEAKER_04 50:18

I do. I my Instagram is slowing down. I think it's less about food these days and more about architecture. And I assume when school starts, I'm not going to be traveling quite as much as I have for the last five years. So yeah, so I think it's going to slow down. Twitter, I feel like I might pick up more because I, like I said, I need an outlet for some of the things that I'm learning and some of the things I'm doing at work. Sure. I'm also new to some of this artificial intelligence and machine learning and automation. This is all new stuff to me. So I not only have to research about it for my work, but I really need to connect with people who are more experienced in these fields and get their ideas because I don't want to come off sounding like an idiot for my client. I need to find those people, and a lot of them are on Twitter. There's a lot of information out there about tech. So it's good for me. It's a good place to be.

SPEAKER_02 51:10

Yeah, I keep forgetting to talk about LinkedIn because I'm so used to it being such a silent existence compared to other social medias. But it's actually coming alive the past few years. I also agree.

SPEAKER_04 51:23

LinkedIn is kind of silent. It's always been this sort of like you only look at it when you're looking for work. But now that I'm freelancing, I am constantly open to new work.

SPEAKER_02 51:33

Yeah, I accidentally downloaded the app for some reason and now it shows me notifications. And when there's a little red thing with a number, I tend to check stuff apparently. So it's got my attention. LinkedIn has got my attention.

SPEAKER_04 51:46

So and there's well, I think it's valuable for sure. Find out a lot about what people are doing in their work, which is also interesting. People don't often post about their work in social media. Right? Exactly. Friends of mine that I haven't seen maybe be since before I left for Thailand are like, Do you even work? Because they see my Instagram and they see my Facebook and it just shows travel pictures and food pictures, and they think I'm on this massive, massive vacation. Yeah, yeah. And they don't realize that I've been working full time this whole time. And it's because I don't want to post, you know, there's nothing exciting about. Well, first of all, if you're working under the table, you don't do a lot of posting about that.

SPEAKER_03 52:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 52:25

Number two, like when I was managing the restaurant, you know, it just wasn't exciting stuff. Our restaurant had its own social media where we were posting to, but I wasn't posting to my personal stuff about like today I had to fire some guy because he showed up late for the fifth time.

SPEAKER_02 52:41

Confidentiality issues. I mean, there's a lot of stuff you can't talk about with work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely, definitely.

SPEAKER_04 52:48

What happens at a restaurant? Oh, a lot of people came in and drank a bunch of tequila and got drunk again. It's the same thing all the time. So it's not exciting to post about.

SPEAKER_02 52:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. What is your master's going to be in?

SPEAKER_04 53:00

So the master's is going to be in international economics and diplomatic studies. What I want to do is I want to get back into microfinance. And this program is really, it's one of those vague ones where, like, you can choose modules from all these different departments. And I chose it that way because I'm interested in learning how tech and microfinance can go together and do new things. When I started in microfinance work, I was working in tech and I saw so much potential for small business owners to save money, for people to reach outside of their community, for people to find success in their business and change the face of neighborhoods by using technology that's free. And I've also done some freelancing work for one company, for example, that's getting a lot of they're what they're doing is they're getting a lot of nonprofits together in developing parts of the world. And they're using that corporate method to demand better prices for their broadband services and sort of acting as an advocate in parts of the world where maybe there isn't a lot of community support behind NGOs for a good reason sometimes. So I'm interested in studying not only economics on the international level, but how can technology work to further development projects? I'm not, I don't even know how to put it yet, but you know.

SPEAKER_02 54:33

No, I totally understand what you're talking about. I totally just yeah. It's amazing because mobile phones are ubiquitous, like everywhere. Even in even in a lot of developing countries, people will have mobile phones because they're so cheap and plentiful.

SPEAKER_04 54:47

And I think they're more available, more accessible than computers and broadly in a lot of places.

SPEAKER_02 54:53

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it it should have already changed a lot about the marketplace. It has a little bit, but not as much as having a computer in your pocket should. So it's very interesting that you're going to study that because it's like, wait, what's happening? What barriers have have presented themselves that wouldn't be the technology? Because the technology is working. So what what's happening? Why isn't this helping more than it has?

SPEAKER_04 55:19

Sure. And I think something that I realized over time is, and you would know very well about language barriers. We think the internet has all this information, and it's because English. And I think that that's interesting. So what my friends in Thailand were reading as far as their forums, where they got their information for travel, was completely different than the places that I was getting my information from. And I could get information from the international community. I could read what foreigners were writing on TripAdvisor because they had translation apps. They have built-in translation plugins. Right. I can look through Wikipedia. But my Thai friends couldn't, you know, some of them couldn't. And they had to get all of their information only from Thai people who had traveled extensively out of the country, which is not a large part of the country, frankly. So I think there is a huge barrier to access of information on the internet based on language.

SPEAKER_02 56:26

There is. I forget the percentage, but I I do remember seeing one time when they broke down like how many websites are in the different languages. And it's it's it is it is very, very, very, very, very skewed. Online translations are folks are trying.

SPEAKER_04 56:41

They're awful, but they're also amazing.

SPEAKER_02 56:44

Yeah, right. I mean, there's some Chrome extensions that do amazing things with uh Chinese websites, right?

SPEAKER_04 56:51

And then there's sometimes my entire museum in China and I couldn't read anything, and I used my Google Translate app to real-time translate the museum plaques on the wall, and it was a really cool museum. And had I not done that, I would have walked around for half an hour, walked out.

SPEAKER_02 57:09

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But would that help someone who speaks uh speaks or reads a language that's spoken by only a few thousand people in this one village?

SPEAKER_03 57:19

Yeah, probably not.

SPEAKER_02 57:21

Yeah, because there's so much available, it's just how do you get it?

SPEAKER_04 57:25

A lot of it in English, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 57:27

And there's, you know, and the other it goes both ways. There's a lot of people writing about Thailand. What to do in Thailand, where to eat in Thailand, the best place for this, the best place for that. Do you know who writes that? Tour.

unknown 57:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 57:39

Tour who travel right and who go through Thailand and hate Bangkok and stay there for one week, go to Kaosan Road, and they're writing all about Thailand and what to wear and what to do and how to act. Yeah. And a lot of it is frankly wrong. Yeah. Um, every article I see about what to wear in Thailand is so completely wrong compared to what the local culture considers respectful that because we can't read in Thai, I can't go and read on a Thai website, which is the best Song Dam in the entire city. I can't, you know, I'm just not reading at that level. So tourists, it's completely a blank space for them.

SPEAKER_02 58:18

So yeah. I think that's one of the things that's really exciting in Shanghai right now is there's a lot of Chinese, I want to say people in their 20s and 30s who went overseas and came back to English speaking universities and whatnot. And so they're producing stuff in English, English and Chinese sometimes, but in English sometimes. Like there's a number of podcasts that are being produced by Chinese, there is a few podcasts that are being produced by Chinese women in their 20s and 30s about Chinese topics, uh, political topics or social topics, cultural topics, those kinds of things, all in English. They're interviewing people in English and they're talking to each other in English, and it's so it's really, really accessible to the rest of us that don't know Mandarin Chinese. I wonder, yeah, how do we get that in more places? And do we need everybody to speak English instead of us all learning? I mean, we can't all learn every language though.

SPEAKER_04 59:07

Yeah, I think that that's a total, that's an entire conversation, you know. Like tourists can't be expected to learn every language. As I travel, I try and learn a couple of things so I can be polite, but it's clear that I can't speak the language. It took months and months of serious study to be able to speak Thai and be understood by Thai people. And it took me almost two years to be able to read and write at a very, very basic level. The other direction is completely ethnocentric. Everyone should just learn English so we can get along. No, that's not fair because I come from an English-speaking country.

SPEAKER_02 59:45

Yeah, it's really and really not. And there's a lot lost when you have the translation. Like I just read a book about Shanghai, and she was using the opinion, which is, you know, the the trans yeah thingy that I can't think of right now. Yeah, yeah. She was using that instead of the characters. And I'm I'm learning Chinese, so I wanted to see the characters. She could put the sounds of it there, but that doesn't tell me the meaning. The characters themselves can show you a little bit of the meaning, and I was like, ah, you've kind of whitewashed it a little too much for me. Because I want to help you mnemonics too, to remember things when you see it. Yeah, and she could have put both. There was one page where she actually did that when she was talking about food. She put the care the Chinese characters, the pinion and the English together, but throughout the rest of the book, except for that one page, it was just the pinion. And it there was so much meaning lost in that. And I know most people read it, standardized pinion. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:40

Yeah. Oh. I mean, well, even Thai doesn't have doesn't even have standardized opinion. So I get a lot of Thai people trying to spell things out for me so that I can understand that doesn't make sense because they don't have a romanization of Thai. Really? They have romanization, but they don't have a standardized accepted set of rules. So for example, in Thailand, there's this there's a station called Chitlum. Chitlom can be spelled five different ways. It's different on the map, on the station sign, on the street sign, on the name of them all. They're all spelled differently.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:14

When I lived in Taiwan, they used pinyon and wade guiles, and they would switch which one from on the same street within just a few blocks, you'd see different the different spellings. And yeah. If you couldn't read the characters, you were just dependent on that, and just like, wait, what happened to the street I was on?

SPEAKER_04 1:01:32

And the weird thing about type romanization because it used to be a large British expat population, so it's developed for British people to be able to read. It's got a weird British accent when you read it. Like they spell LAP L-A-R-B a lot of times, and that's because a British person wouldn't pronounce that R. Yeah. They want a British person to say the correct noise. So then you get a lot of other expats coming through going LARP, LARB, I want to eat some LARP, and people are like, What the heck are you talking about?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:02

Wait, how do you actually say it?

SPEAKER_04 1:02:04

LAP.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:05

Really? I've been saying LARB for years. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:09

Wow. Okay then. Imagine like a British person being like, LAP, that's LAP. Yeah. So you you learn a lot of bad pronunciation as well. And as soon as I started being able to read Thai, I was like, Whoa, I know why people don't understand me.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:24

Well, okay, since we're talking about languages, did when you were learning Thai, or now when you're learning Czech, are you using any apps or websites or any audio and stuff online?

SPEAKER_04 1:02:34

So when I was learning Thai, I got some CDs in my first Thai school, but they weren't that fun. There are some really cool learning videos on YouTube. Like there's this girl, Maud, and she does learn Thai with Maud, and she's got this friend named Pear, and they do these like top 10 mistakes that foreigners make when speaking Thai, and that kind of thing really helps. They do really good pronunciation rules and things like that. I wanted to watch TV because that's exciting. So I started watching Lac Horn, which is Thai's soap operas. Yeah, yeah. And I got really into teen dramas. Like there's one called Hormones that's kind of like the UK skins and it's supposed to be like really edgy. But I think watching those programs really helped me to listen to Thai because even when Thai people speak to you, they're slowing it down or trying to make it really simple for you. Yeah. But not using a lot of slang. So watching the TV programs helped a lot. And I had to watch them all online because I didn't have a television. I'm always looking at foods. So there's a couple of guys that are expats, but also know Thai well enough to write in Thai the names of foods, the ingredients and recipes and things like that. So there's this guy, Mark Wiens, who runs Migrationology.com, and then there's another guy, Dwight, who runs BKK Fatty. And they go around doing food blogging and all kinds of food-related stuff. And both of them, in their publications, they write in Thai and in English what things are. And that helps me a lot, especially just like ordering at restaurants.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:09

Really cool.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:09

How did you stumble across all of these sites, websites, and TV shows? I think again, well, the TV shows I just asked my friends like what's cool, what's hip? Like, what are the kids watching? They were telling me the other stuff, the food stuff. I definitely looked at before I went there. I was researching a ton about Thai food, and I knew I was going to be cooking at some point. So I was trying to figure out what kind of restaurants I should be looking at. And yeah, and I anyway, ended up meeting those two guys in the course of my time in Thailand. They're nice guys doing good work.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:40

So it feels like there's so little boundary between the online and offline. It's like you some people told you about the stuff online, so you watch stuff online, you meet people online, you meet them in person. It is there is there any boundary between the two anymore?

SPEAKER_04 1:04:54

Well, gosh, I think it depends on where you live because I I see a distinct difference here in Prague than what I saw in Thailand. In Thailand, everyone's on their phone constantly. Some people look down on that and they say that you know, we're stuck to our screens, we're not interacting in daily life. Well, frankly, I don't want to interact in daily life with random people on the train. Right. I want people that have similar interests to me, and I want to interact with my actual friends and people I know. So the fact that I'm messaging someone I actually know instead of talking to like random old guy on the train, I'm not bothered. Yeah. Like a fan of technology and what it does and how people use it. So yeah, there's a lot more of that in Thailand than here in Prague. I don't see a lot of people on their phones. I'm often the only one staring down at my phone. But they're not talking to each other either.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:43

Yeah. Oh, I know. I know. There's a great old school picture of people like in the 1950s on the subway, and I think it's New York, and they've all got their newspapers up.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:54

And they're like, yeah, technology really divides us. It's like, you know, hey guys, we never really just talked to. People on the subway. Not the phone's fault. It's just we're going to work. Why would why do we need to? Random.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:07

I would like less of talking to random strangers than more.

unknown 1:06:11

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:14

I'm so on that page. The older I get, the more I want to talk to people I want to talk to about things I want to talk to, and the l the more intolerant I am of small talk.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:23

Yeah. And I think, you know, there's some kind of like movements in feminist circles that kind of reinforce some of this. Like, you know, in the past, if a random guy on the street starts talking to me, I would feel compelled to give him my attention and time just because he's talking to me. A couple of weeks ago, you know, a random older grandpa walking down the street is telling me in check something about Hesky and pointing to my face. I think he's saying, Oh, my face is beautiful. But my reaction is, I don't care. Who are you? I don't need to stop. I'm on my way to do something. Yeah. What I'm doing. I'm not here to talk to you or to entertain you, or you've got a lonely life. I'm very sorry. But it's not my job to socialize with you. I'll socialize with my friends. Yeah, exactly. You know, that's a weird new attitude, but I'm a fan of it. I live in a neighborhood of Prague that has a lot of bars and a lot of people coming through as tourists and on stag dues, and I don't need people talking to me.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:29

Yeah, no, no, no. Agreed. For people who are going to their first location overseas and they're thinking of upping their online present presence, but they're a little bit hesitant to put that experience online because they might regret it later. What what would your advice to them be?

SPEAKER_04 1:07:48

Well, two things. One, you don't have to. You don't have to have an online presence just because you're going abroad. Plenty of people don't. When I first started, I tried travel writing and I found out I'm not really a fan of it. I like to travel. I like to take pictures and do Instagram, but do I like recommending to other people what to do on their vacation? No, I'm not particularly. And what I do on my vacation, you know, sometimes can be hard to explain. Like uh go talk to a random guy on the corner, ask to borrow his motorbike and give him some money under the table and see if he'll let you take the bike for three days. That's not something I can write about. So you don't have to write about traveling. No one says you do, and you don't have to create a persona that makes it look like every vacation you go on is some sort of inner spiritual journey. I didn't learn about myself by living in Thailand any more than I will by living in Prague. It's not, you know, these places are not like magical spiritual destinations. They're where people live, and a lot of people have their regular lives there, and there's no reason to I don't know, to write about them in a more fantastical way than other places. But I do think that informative information is good. So the kind of thing that like Mark Weins and Fai Dwight are doing about Thailand is super informative to learn about how people eat and live in Thailand, how Thai people order food and eat their meals. It's just informative. They're not telling anybody what they should do and they're not making value judgments on a culture that's not their own native culture. I appreciate that sort of writing. I kind of don't like the sort of writing that people go through as a tourist and talk about a culture that they're very unfamiliar with. Yeah. I spent four years in Thailand and there are plenty of things that I don't understand.

unknown 1:09:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:50

So when tourists come through Thailand and say, Thai people are like this and Thai culture is like that, and here's what you do. Well, you don't. They're not like that. Yeah. So yeah, I think information is good. Sharing information that's hard to get access in your language is good. Wanderlust is like an annoying to me. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:13

So it sounds like your advice is think about why you want to have an online presence. Why what do you want to post? Why do you want it to be does it need to be?

SPEAKER_04 1:10:22

It can also be embarrassing. Like there's a girl that I went to high school with that came through Thailand while I was there, and one of her first Instagrams is her feet up on the back of a bus chair going, God, it's good to put your feet up. Well, putting your feet on things in Thailand is considered extremely rude and disrespectful. Um, there are articles written about it constantly in Thai news about foreigners doing disrespectful things. And here she is thinking that it shows how well traveled she is. And unfortunately, it's embarrassed if I didn't tell her that. So I just let people make those mistakes and you know, I try not to make them. And if I do, you know, go back and say something about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:07

There's a book club in Shanghai that has a really fun book club group, and they interview readers occasionally and post it in their online magazine. And the last question that they ask the reader is really cool. They're like, what other question do you think we should ask people? And I always mean to put it in my questions and I always forget, but I'm remembering this time. So going forward, and right now, um, what questions do you think are missing when we're talking about like the online life, the expat life, or what what else needs to do or can be teased out, played with, investigated?

SPEAKER_04 1:11:42

I guess what would what's an interesting thing to think about, but it's all theoretical, is how would your expat life be different without technology? I often think about pre-Skype and post-Skype, being able to video chat with people, smartphones, being able to have chat apps and talk to people in all time zones at any time that I want to, and then think back to the time that I was like at 4 a.m. on the phone, on the pay phone with an international calling card, and it's just very different. I think I was more isolated, and I think I was more dependent on the immersive experience, and I was probably experienced a lot more culture shock because of it. Technology is making our lives easier. Gosh, people are living off of travel. I made some money off of it. I don't like to do it, but but I wouldn't be able to have the job I have now without technology. You know, what was it like in the 50s? What was it like in the turn of the century when people were the turn of last century, when people were traveling?

unknown 1:12:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:46

People did it. The reason more people are doing it now is because it's affordable and because see what it might look like. It's not as scary anymore.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:55

Um for better or for worse, more people are doing it.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:58

Yeah, no, I think you definitely hit on something with the isolation thing. A lot of people say, oh, don't go into the expat bubble, don't go online too much. But you can meet people from your online experiences. You can learn things and then go places and find people who have similar interests when you find stuff online and then it goes offline. So there's a lot of relationship between the online and the offline now that I think a lot of people don't think about when they say, oh, don't go online, just just go out and do things. When you like culturally, linguistically, you're like a baby when you first arrive in a new country in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:30

Yeah, it's good to have friends, and these are people that can help you. Like they can tell you, you know, don't put your feet up on things. They can tell you, um, here's actually how you order the thing that you want to order, here's where you can buy the foods you want to buy. And and they actually can help introduce you to local culture in a way that, you know, when I first moved to Thailand, I couldn't speak Thai. How am I supposed to have a Thai friend? Thai people speak English, but they exist in Thai. It's a normal and simple and acceptable way to make your first friends. And and at some point, if you have local friends, that's good. But I don't think there needs to be so much value judgment on all of that.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:06

No, I don't think we need to choose. I think we can use everything available. Yeah. I like that question. I'm gonna add that. You are now question 16. Thank you very much. Well, thank you so much for this chat. My goodness, there's so much to think about from what we've we've talked about already. Well, thanks for inviting me. It was really fun. It was nice talking to you. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Virtual Expat. And special thank you again to Damon Castillo for the music and to our special guest at this time. If you'd like to be interviewed for this podcast, just send me an email or contact me on social media in the show notes. You can find all my information or you can just jot down right now. You ready? You ready? Here we go. Death Fucho, S-T-E-P-H-F-U-C-C-I-O, Gmail, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr. There you go. Contact me. Oh, also LinkedIn too. You know what? I keep forgetting about that one. Hey, thank you so much for listening. And I look forward to your questions, comments, feedback, any information, and volunteering to be on the podcast as well. Thank you so much and have a wonderful, wonderful day. On or offline.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:19

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