#expatriatism

[anastasiaashman-blog]

Villa Langsat: I built this house outside Kuala Lumpur. My father designed it for me. I planted 100 plants in the garden and stocked the fountain with tropical fish. (This is the same fountain an Indonesian workman washed his latex paint brushes in, thinking it’d somehow just go away.) A tiny blue kingfisher took just […]

[anastasiaashman-blog]

Excited to brainstorm next week with Olivia June Poole, the new community director of RocketSpace where I’m now based, a regular gathering of community managers here to bring together all the different community people from startups in this incubator/accelerator/coworking space. Kinda meta. Also, a way to make coworking even more beneficial.   I see it being a way […]

[anastasiaashman-blog]

Question for the #expatwriters, #expats and #writers out there, do you think expat lit differs from travel writing, if so, how? #research — Ruby Slippers (@rubyslippersdxb) March 27, 2014   @AnastasiaAshman yes, it’s what inspired me! What made you specifically speak out about identifying expat lit as a genre in its own right? — Ruby […]

[tenestelapromessa]

How can I express that I'd like to live in Paris...

…without sounding like one of those girls? Honestly, I don’t fetishize French culture (I’ve got my own very strong Italian heritage, thank you very much), but Paris seems like a good fit for me in my 20s and 30s. I could be comfortable there and feel like an adult woman. But how would I pursue music? My education? Obviously this wouldn’t be happening now, yet if I want to make that happen by the time I’m 30 I’m going to have to think about it. I don’t know what to do, all I know is that I have this desire for something different and Paris seems to fit the bill. Okay, first step is a Bachelor’s, then we’ll talk.

And yes, I AM up at 1:30 in the morning pondering this. Maybe my mind has been hitting this more and more since I talked with Lauren and was told I could fit in well there, or maybe I just need a big achievement to feel as though I'm making a life for myself. Though I will say that my growing love for French repertoire over the past couple of years is indeed a culprit. Sigh.

[anastasiaashman-blog]

Thanks to Shelley Antscherl for naming Expat Harem among best expat anthologies in the January/February 2014 issue of Global Living Magazine! And thanks to Summertime Publishing publisher and fellow expat writer Jo Parfitt for the review. “A fine bit of not just good writing, but literary writing, and that is due to the fabulous work […]

[braxtonianenby]

Talking to my dad about dual citizenship

went a little something like this: 

Dad: "Oh you don't want dual citizenship, it means dual taxes." 

Me: "But I get to travel visa free to any commonwealth country which can be good if needed!"

Dad: "Eh, visas aren't hard to get." 

Me: "But they take time (thinking about filming documentaries in places). Anyway, there are some places that are a lot more likely to take a UK passport than a US one..." 

Dad: "But don't you have to give up your previous citizenship?" 

Me: "Dad, I've looked into the laws of every country. That's mostly just Eastern Europe, not the UK... I mean the one downside is that I won't be able to go across borders easily as the UK opted out of the Schengen Agreement." 

Dad: "The EU will break up in the next 10 years anyway!" 

Me: "...Dad, Schengen predates the EU by 10 years."

[anastasiaashman-blog]

Don’t I know it! My own hybrid, cross-disciplinary, limbo-state life and work is founded on this phenomenon that network science acknowledges. Michael Simmons, author and cofounder of iEmpact, explains in “Why Being The Most Connected Is A Vanity Metric” at Forbes that your network is a set of clusters and when you manage to broker info [...]

[anastasiaashman-blog]

I find there are so many ways to be ‘an expat’ (economically, socially, culturally) that studies like this one from HSBC that looks at economic opportunities and quality of life in 34 countries don’t begin to address, and therefore aren’t very useful. Once a fellow expat came to my apartment in Istanbul with its view and [...]