My New Nomadic Life

Last month I went to an organic winery in Signagi, Republic of Georgia. It was a three hour trip from my base in at Tblissi, through a desert and a range of multi colored mountains, which stood out in unlikely brownish-purple and brownish-red hues against the sweltering summer sky. The wine maker’s dog, dusty but calm and affectionate, slept on top of my foot as the wine maker talked about his process, explaining that Georgian wines are fermented under the ground in earthen pots, without the use of yeast.

Eventually the wine maker started asking me about myself — basic stuff like where I was from, where I lived, and what I was doing in Georgia. It was the second question that was the most complicated to answer.

I don’t live anywhere at the moment. I’m challenging myself to adopt a nomadic lifestyle for one year.

I guess that I have a reputation among friends and family as somebody who travels, but in fact up until now that was only partially true. I’m somebody who spends a lot of time outside of my country of origin, but I tend to pick a home base and stick to it.

I taught English in China for eleven years, dedicating more than a decade to a single school in a single city. During that time, I only ventured out of the country once for a four day trip to Thailand, choosing instead to spend my long holidays taking intensive Chinese lessons and professional development courses for teachers.

I hung out in England for six months, but that was in 2021, and the travel restrictions of that particular era kept me firmly planted in the UK.

In 2023 I landed another teaching gig in Poland, where I stayed for two years. However, laws related to the Polish residency permit meant that I wasn’t supposed to exit the country until it was fully processed, and so even with all of Europe at my doorstep, I had to stay put.

My experience in Poland is actually what led me to my current adventure. When I initially accepted the job, I was excited about the possibility of visiting European destinations I’d been dreaming of, such as Romania and Finland, and the myriad of inexpensive flights and travel routes only served to bolster that excitement. However, I also understood that the residency permit could be a lengthy and limiting process, and accepted that for at least the first six months, my exploration would be confined.

That was fine. I was looking forward to spending time in Kraków and Warsaw, to catching my first glimpse of the famed Christmas markets, and to gorging myself on pierogis. Besides, I had a job to do and limited free time. Even with Warsaw just being a ninety minute bus ride from where I was living, I was spending so many hours making PowerPoints for my classes that it took me two months to squeeze in a visit. To be honest, as somebody who has been in the foreign teacher scene for seventeen years and cares deeply about it, I can be overly critical of people who I perceive as taking a job abroad to travel rather than to work, and would sometimes join friends in complaining about “Eurotrippers”. I felt like as long as I was patient and dedicated myself to my school and my students, I’d eventually get the legal status I was waiting for and be able to slot in a few trips between my intensive work schedule.

If my sense of responsibility and my wanderlust were sometimes at odds, at least I could fall back on my resolve to let responsibility win every time. That’s what being a teacher meant to me.

A year passed with no word on my residency application. I signed another contract, and spent three weeks of my summer vacation checking out as many Polish cities as I could, studying Polish for four to six hours a day, and endeavoring to transcend the tourist trail. I signed a contract to continue at my job, the new school year started, and I kept plugging away.

In November, I got the news that my residency permit had been rejected. It happens to a lot of people. There’s a clear path to contest it. However, the reason was something that I couldn’t live with. My boss, a chronic procrastinator, had accidentally submitted my paperwork a day late.

Since the age of sixteen, when I got my first real job working at a cashier at a tiny village candle store in Maine and continued at that same shop for seven summers, I’d always been a loyal employee, maybe to the point of naivety. Realizing what had happened made me want to quit my job in the middle of the school year, something I would have never imagined myself doing before.

For three days after I received my residency permit decision, I didn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours a night. A friend of mine had given me a jar of gingerbread flavored honey as a gift a few days earlier. Since I couldn’t deal with grocery shopping and had no appetite anyway, the only calories I got during that time were from putting heaping spoonfuls of the stuff into the coffee that I was mainlining to get me through my lesson prep.

At two AM on this third morning, I sent in my resignation. It wasn’t the best time to look for a new place to work, but I had already hatched a wild, sleep deprived plan to make my online teaching side hustle into my full time job, and bounce from country to country for a few months, until I could figure out what else to do.

It’s not what ended up happening.

My employer got in touch with me and we made a plan. Americans in residency limbo typically have the option to leave Poland, return, and start a new application. It wasn’t certain in my case, because there was a possibility that the late submission of my documents would be counted as a Schengen overstay, and I’d be denied entry. However, my employer offered me a fully reimbursed hotel and a flight to Turkey, and promised to pay for me to fly wherever I wanted to go next if I wasn’t allowed back into the country. He’d even have my possessions shipped to me.

Leaving my students in the middle of the year without at least trying to work things out felt wrong, so I agreed.

When I arrived in Antalya, it was a little after four in the morning, and I couldn’t check into my hotel until two in the afternoon. I dropped off my bag, and walked forty-five minutes to the beach, where I watched the sunrise. I was tired and in a disorienting place I’d never before dreamed of visiting. The water was vivid blue, and I quickly learned that Antalya was inhabited by countless numbers of friendly street cats, who were more than willing to keep me company. I got breakfast at a cafe when things started to open up. It came with unlimited tea. The weather was warmer than it was in Poland.

Over the course of my five days in Antalya, I started to feel okay. I had no intention of spending the whole time moping, so I did stuff. I went to a coffee workshop where the instructor read my fortune in the coffee grinds. He told me that somebody was thinking of me. At the exact moment the words were out of his mouth, my phone pinged with a message from one of my Polish friends, who just wanted to let me know I was on her mind. The “fortune teller” was more surprised by this than I was.

I visited Pamukkale. The bus ride was long, and I spent it talking to a British woman who was visiting for medical tourism. At first I walked around with her, swam in the hot springs, and checked out some ruins. Later, I wandered off on my own, and quickly realized that I had no idea how to find the bus. While searching and panicking, I paused to look over the salt terraced cliffs down into the valley below. In face of this stunning view, I was overtaken by the unshakable desire to spend the rest of my life getting lost in this way.

I made plans for what I’d do if I couldn’t return to Poland. I wrote out lists of which countries I wanted to see, and how I’d afford to get there. I looked up cheap hotels with good internet. I started to look forward to it.

My online teaching platform is draconian about teachers never missing lessons. Just a few cancelled classes can get your profile deleted. While I was in Turkey, I had a twelve hour day filled with classes that had been booked by students months in advance, so I taught them. There were no problems. The internet held, and the kids didn’t throw a fit because I was missing my ring light and my entourage of puppets. It served to not only reinforce that this was something I could do if Poland didn’t work out, but that this was something I wanted to do after my contract was finished.

As it happens, I had very few problems reentering Poland and getting my paperwork correctly resubmitted. I was almost disappointed, and that sense of loss at being handed back my job and my normal life was the final confirmation of what my next step should be. As I finished out the school year and fulfilled all obligations, I mapped out my route— the route that I’m currently on.

Saying goodbye to Poland on June 16th was sad, and that’s a good thing. It meant that despite the residency permit stress, I’d still had an experience that was hard to let go of. I’ll always be grateful for that.

From Poland, I started out with a whirlwind eighteen hours in Qatar, where I saw camels for the first time, and met with an old friend from my China days. I went on to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and Armenia. I crossed my first land border, rode my first horse, and saw so many mountains that I’ve almost gotten used to them. I stayed in each country for anywhere from four days to one month.

In Georgia I happened upon a shop filled with cute stickers and almost bought them for my students, before remembering I no longer had in-person students to hand out stickers to. On a boat trip in Kyrgyzstan one thirteen-year-old boy came up to me to practice his English, and it somehow turned into all of the kids in the boat crowding around me for an impromptu class. It was fun, but it made me miss Poland.

I’m in the UK at the moment, visiting another one of the friends I made in China. In the last two months, I’ve learned more about how to make this nomad thing work. I’ve realized that I need to focus on longer stints in each country to prevent burn out. I’ve come to the decision to leave my suitcase at my friend’s house and travel with just my backpack, because it will save me hundreds of dollars on flights. I’ve let go of certain places that I was hoping to visit, like Morocco and Tunisia, in order to keep costs down. I’ve also added some places to the itinerary that I hadn’t originally planned on, like Bosnia and Oman.

My goal is to do this for at least one year, as a challenge to myself. I want to see and learn as much as I can, and learn at least one new language (probably Spanish). I want to push myself to start writing again, and document more of my experiences. I want to balance life and work better than I have in the past. I want to get better at navigating by myself, and proficient at coping with loneliness.

This isn’t forever. That wouldn’t be sustainable, and it wouldn’t fit my personality.

When I was applying for my job in Poland, I also got offers in Taiwan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Kuwait, Uzbekistan, and Honduras. I couldn’t choose where to go because I wanted to go everywhere. This is my chance to go everywhere for real, and when I’m finished, I hope I can find one school in one country where I can settle down for the rest of my working years.

In the meantime, I’m going to make the most of my journey, even if it means not being able to give a concise answer as to where I live.