Fools & Foreigners
Back in 2011 when I first moved far from my home in Virginia I had very little idea what I should expect. At the time I had no idea that I was permanently moving to another country but that’s mostly how things have gone.
One thing I learned quickly was that most of my plans simply didn’t work out. Whether it was my lack of understanding cultural nuance, language or just a tendency to make harebrained assumptions - I found myself thinking again and again how “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
Eventually I updated this to my own little saying - “Plans are for fools and foreigners.”
I’ve decided to call this publication Fools & Foreigners because a lot of the stories I’ll be sharing reflect me learning time and again that things aren’t always as they seem. More specifically, they aren’t always as they seem “to you.” Each of us brings our assumptions and perspective to the world around us and travel often results in this fact leading to humorous (mis)adventures.
Fools & Foreigners is about my travels and life abroad as well as the perspective that integrating into foreign cultures has given me on my own homeland.
How I Got Here and What to Expect
Back in 2010 I was wrapping up a B.S. in Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech and preparing to jump into the job market. Like many of my friends I was interviewing with various tech companies and pretty excited to move on to the next stage. Unlike those friends, who took jobs and Google, Lockheed Martin or a government lab, I joined the Peace Corps.
Since that time I’ve lived outside my native United States and experienced numerous adventures (and misadventures) in language, culture and food as I got used to my new home(s). This newsletter is a way for me to relive some of those adventures and share humorous stories of my travels.
Initially, Peace Corps sent me to Kazakhstan where I lived for most of 2011 before we all got kicked out rather abruptly. Next I was posted to Moldova where I completed a 27 month service and still live today. Since then I’ve open and run restaurants, founded a small business association and in the last 4 years covered Moldova as a journalist writing here on substack.
In the process of learning new languages and experiencing new cultures I have generally found that while I am frequently out of place and rarely understood the context of what is going on, things mostly turn out alright.
If any of this sounds interesting to you how about clicking that subscribe button? You’ll get an email from me more or less once a week and I’ll guarantee1 you a story that’ll make you smile, chuckle and occasionally think differently about the wild world we all live in.
To be clear there are no guarantees - how do I know what sense of humor you have? You might find stories about carrying an oven up 3 flights of stairs just to make pizza or how someone stole my car in Ukraine and had a joyride in a sawmill totally normal and boring. What do I know, I think the stories are funny but there’s no accounting for taste.
