Agree on the privacy settings, not on the not complaining about work online...work doesn’t own the Internet. Work doesn’t own one’s expressions of opinion outside work hours and purviews. Definitely keep those privacy settings up, but do not ever feel you cannot say what you think.

And again no. I identify as an expat because there is no better word. I’m not quite an immigrant as I probably won’t stay forever and I visit “home” once a year. But I live a local life, have a healthy mix of local and foreign friends, rent a local apartment in a non-expat area and make a local-ish salary (I’m…

Yeah no, I’ve lived abroad for a decade now, and I still refer to myself as an ‘expat’, because I don’t intend to get citizenship here or stay *forever* - I will leave someday. I may not go home, but I probably won’t grow old here. Or maybe I will. I don’t know. But I’m an expat for want of a better word.

Nope. That Guardian article was full of shit. An expat intends to go home someday. Doesn’t matter where they’re from or what color their skin is. An immigrant intends to stay forever.

There are socio-economic issues of privilege and inequality that make it so that more expats tend to be white (we have prosperous…

Fair enough. I don’t disagree.

Yeah, tutors and centers vary in quality, even though they’re all overseen quite strictly by Cambridge. But it has happened that tutors have gotten overzealous in insisting that this be done, like, ALL THE TIME, because they think that inexperienced teachers really don’t ‘get it’ and need to practice it again and…

Yi Guan Dao?

I wouldn’t say it’s a “tradition” in Taiwan. Sometimes it happens at funerals and even weddings (more commonly in the south of Taiwan). In those cases, the point is to give the spirit of the deceased - usually this is done for a man who’s died - a final ‘good time’ before his ghost is whisked away into the ether.

But…

Point taken.

I get around this by not having any valuables.

If they’re already begging from strangers, isn’t that a little like closing the barn door after the horses have left?

The thing about CCQs in class, once you get the hang of them, is that you are really meant to employ them when you can be reasonably sure the learners don’t understand. Look for facial expressions. If they look confused or blank, ask a CCQ to draw it out of them. The whole “the instructions/idea/language point was…

The kid tells you he wants money to buy baby formula (or milk powder) for his mom to give to his/her new baby sibling. The money never goes to baby formula, it usually goes to a gang lord. Even if you buy them the formula directly, they will sell it or trade it back to the store for cash (the store knowing that the…

I totally fell for the baby formula trick in Nepal in 2000. But I was 20 and really didn’t know. Now I do.

Ideally I would pack school supplies (notebooks, pencils, sharpeners, folders, small game prizes, erasers, chalk, but not slate as that’s hard to transport) and find a school in need during my journey, and donate to it. But, I never can seem to do it. It feels weird to be Whitey walking around like “hey so, any…

I tried that, but I couldn’t manage to carry around enough dollar store stuff every day and have a bag that wasn’t unwieldy or awkward to get into to pull out a small gift. So I stopped. I tried candy for awhile, but a lot of those kids don’t have access to basic oral hygiene, so candy is definitely NOT the way to go.

…

I don’t know why this is my favorite CAH play, because it’s not particularly crass, dirty or terrible, but my sister once played “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for...”

This is truly terrible of me and I hope my mom in heaven will forgive me for it. I mean I’m an atheist and I don’t really believe in heaven but I like to sometimes feel as though my mom is there. I think she would call for mercy when I reach the pearly gates someday, seeing as she has burned the same person.

Heard this one before. urban myth.

“Hey you’re pretty cool now which is great because I’m a lame-o. You have actual friends and a life and you travel and love your job and your husband is a cutie and YOU SPEAK CHINESE and also two cats! Go me, I guess. It DOES get better*.”

*except that phase wasn’t a thing yet in 1996.