The High Street in my new home. That's the Queen's primary residence up at the top. (Photo by Ray Stanton)

Even us nomads have to get back to grown-up jobs every now and again.

Even while I was doing this my mind was on what I was going to do with myself. Camel riding the Sahara = conducive to deep thoughts.

Faced with the prospect of another bar/retail/waiter/hourly job during my tour guide off-season, I experienced a moment of clairvoyance when my second season as a tour guide ended last month. “I’m going to live in a normal house and cook normal dinners and work normal hours,” I thought. It was less of a thought actually, more of an fantasy image of my future life. The thought of stability made me as happy and excited as the trip to Morocco I was on when I had it. Actually, as I was riding camels through the Sahara, surfing in Taghazout and fending off merchants in the souks of Marrakech, 10% of my brain was thinking about the daunting job hunt I had ahead of me.

Thing is, I’ve been out of a my chosen industry for three years now. I worked at an ad agency and newspaper in Minneapolis, but that was back in what feels like forever ago (2009, actually). Could I just tie up my travel and tour guide experience, put it in a container and throw it in the corner of my brain filled with the rest of my no-longer useful knowledge? Left to decay over the course of my life, I would look back decades from now and realize I scarcely remembered how to book a cheap flight, rebook cancelled ferry tickets for 50 people or understand the political complexities of 1930s Europe. The knowledge I will have once possessed will have long-since fallen by the wayside, just as so much training into the rules of Lincoln-Douglass debate did; or the methods to writing a term paper on no sleep; or the difference between 3/4″ tape and a BetaMax.

No, I can’t allow my future self to forget the knowledge my present self has from working as a tour guide. My three-year sojourn away from the bad economy in the media industry led me to an industry I loved even more: Travel. I want to spend my working days making dream holidays for people. I want to live the life where taking a jaunt to Morocco, Italy, Greece or Croatia isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime getaway, but just another day at the office.

That’s why I’m pleased to announce some pretty major changes in my life. Today, I started my first day at a new job. My new employer is launching a new product in 2013, and I’ve been asked to help with the launch. The product I’m working on specialises in charter yacht trips down Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast. It’s a big step forward from my two years as a tour guide, and I’m very excited to be working with a small, family-owned business.

Of course, a permanent job means a permanent location, which is why I’m writing this from the comfort of my new flat in Windsor, England. Rubbing shoulders with Elizabeth, I now share a city with the castle in which the Queen of England spends most of her time. I’ll keep you posted on any sightings.

For now though, I must go. I have to do something I can’t believe I’m excited about. I have to wash my dishes after cooking myself dinner — something I haven’t had the opportunity to do since I last lived in my own flat in Galway, way back in April 2010. Stretching my legs around the world was nice, but now domesticity is appealing to me as much as traveling once did.

Celebrating my birthday last week and Two Passports' birthday this week

“I quit,” I said with my chuckle. “I’m not sure I can give you a full two weeks’ notice.” My boss looked at me and smiled. “Good for you.” He had counciled me on making this big life decision. I went back to my desk and typed up an announcement  of sorts. I was going to quit my job, break my lease and move overseas. Indefinitely. That was three years ago today.

Because of the anniversary, I’ve been combing the archives of this little blog and feeling some schadenfreude for the poor sap who won’t just settle down and live in the moment.  At the beginning of December 2009 I wrote this:

“I need to learn to better deal with uncertainty, to let go of my stresses and have faith that the universe will guide me to the proper course. I’ll be very interested in reading this post in a month with the knowledge of where I ended up.”

If only I could send a message to that guy and tell him where I am now: I’m in London’s Gatwick Airport preparing to tick my forth contient off the box. In an hour I fly to Morocco, where I’ll be touring traditional berbers, riding a camel in the Sahara and even taking a surfing lesson.

In the meantime though, I’d like to show you the highlights of some of the archived posts I’ve been reading. First and most noteably, I was almost deported upon entering Ireland. As I struggled to find a way to pay the bills, I went through some odd job interview experiences, most notably when I found myself way out on the side of a highway in Galway after an interview went horribly wrong and I was found myself suddenly hired to sell make-up door-to-door.

As I settled in I found myself alone during Christmas. The writing is alright, but the pictures that accompany my expatriate Christmas blog are among my best.

Due to the strange facet of blogging that is SEO (search engine optimisation), what continues to be my most popular entry was a one-off in which I listed my top ten expat discoveries of everyday life in Ireland. I wrote more narrative posts, too, like when I endured my most embarrassing travel experience after being tricked by an Irishman. After getting a job as a lowly stock-room employee in Ireland, I was almost fired when I told my boss to “settle down.”

Before long, that job was getting tiresome for me and I found a new opportunity managing a hostel in Wales. After moving to the U.K. I had my first experience with Britain’s Big Brother-like network of cameras.

Before long though I was off to my next experience after I was hired as a tour guide through Europe. On my way over, I learned the hard way what happens when you deny the TSA the opportunity to frisk you. As a tour guide I faced some challenges, like when one of my passengers witnessed a suicide or when I witnessed a grisly car accident.

After suffering through a Christmas returning to my old high school job, I thought it was time for a new country. I decided to move to Australia and discovered the oddities of Australian slang.

More recently, I’ve written about suffering the death of a family member while abroad (even if the family member in question was canine).

In the midst of it all, I produced a failed attempt to turn Two Passports into a multi-authored blog. While I’ve since abandoned that experiment, the masthead serves as a reminder of its existence with the pluralized tagline “Stories of lives lived abroad” (I’m still working on finding a new masthead). While the multi-authored idea didn’t take off, there were some great posts I’m proud to have hosted about living in Tanzania, Buddism in China, and British versus American English.

Finally, I started a series of travel videos using a GoPro camera, a series I just recently restarted.

…and that brings you up to date on my last three years. Thank you all for taking the time to read Two Passports and especially for those of you that have left comments. Everytime I go home I’m reminded of how many more people read this blog than I think. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started a story and had someone stop me. “Oh yeah, I read this in your blog.” It has meant so much to me to hear your words of support during the hard times and congratulations during the good ones. Here’s to three more years.

Salut!

-John O’Sullivan

Jumping for joy at being 27

Some weeks of memorable anniversaries for me start today. Three years ago on November 1 I posted my first entry to Two Passports. That entry was in anticipation of an event that I celebrate the third anniversary of on the 14th of November, the day I became an expatriate.

Finally, today is my birthday. I turn 27. Twenty-Seven is the twilight of my twenties, when the term “late twenties” can be said with ever-increasing accuracy and, notably, when a whole boatload of famous people have joined “The 27 Club” (aka died).

Amy Winehouse, Curt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and many other musicians never made it past 27, and I can see why. There’s a sense of invincibility that comes with being 27. My confidence in myself has increased so much — I look at some of the posts I made on Two Passports and can hardly recognise the guy writing them. He’s so unsure of himself, of his direction in life and what other people are thinking of him. Fast forward three years. While I don’t have much more of an idea of where I’ll be in three years as I did when I wrote those first blog entries, I’ve come to terms with living in the moment and enjoying this amazing opportunity to live abroad while it’s available to me.

In my early twenties everything was tentative. I wasn’t an expat, I was “living abroad,” a term that implies a finite end date. I wasn’t working as a video editor at one of the world’s leading ad agencies, I was “just” working an internship and hoping for something more. I wasn’t working a dream job in an industry where jobs were almost impossible to come by, I was “only” working in a contracted position at one America’s top newspapers. A side-effect of my early twenties was to temper expectations, to cut myself down before people had a chance to judge me for themselves.

Well, no more at 27 years of age. I’ve got the confidence in myself without the stigma or responsibility of old(er) age. For those members of The 27 Club, that confidence enabled their depression of drug addiction. God-willing I won’t follow the same path, but today, twenty-seven is sounding alright to me.

Attending one of President Obama's healthcare rallies in Minneapolis in Summer 2010, just before I moved to Ireland.

I’m the guy who got into arguments with friends in college who said they wouldn’t vote. I chastised a classmate of my when I was first studying abroad in Ireland in 2006 for failing to obtain an absentee ballot. I worked on GOTV (Get Out the Vote) campaigns in 2004. I believed (and still do) that voting is not just a right but a responsibility every American has a moral duty to fulfil.

But this year, I can’t bring myself to vote in the American presidential election.

Even though I’ve lived abroad for nearly three years, I’ve continued to read more American media than most of my friends back home. I’ve followed this ridiculous election cycle/bad reality show for its  two year existence, and I’ve listened with increasing disbelief and candidates argue against concepts so central to European life that it gets translated into garbled, white noise. “Does not compute,” my brain seems to tell me as I hear Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Joe Biden and Paul Ryan argue not how a government should provide basic healthcare to its people, but whether it should at all.

They talk about reducing the burden on college students by making student loans more readily available, as if adding more student debt is a solution to a country where I can emerge from university with thirty-freaking-thousand dollars in debt (payments starting six months from the day I graduated, regardless of my ability to pay). Remember, the UK was a place where students rioted and attacked Prince Charles and Camilla’s car over a tuition increase that would increase tuition to $14,500 (that’s in US dollars. the average US tuition rate is $21,500 for public, $42,000 for private universities).

The presidential candidates argue over not just abortion, but whether birth control can should be included in government healthcare plans when Viagra long since has been.

They talk about gay marriage as if it’s not a forgone conclusion that every person should be free to make whichever choice they’d like regarding whom they would marry.

And although I’m inclined to cast a vote for President Obama due to our similar policy positions, the fact that he entertains the debate instead of brushing off these counter-arguments like the Crazy-Homeless-Person-Shouting-in-the-Street arguments they are is insane to me.

I don’t actually think he should brush off those arguments, speaking from a political perspective — but I find myself increasingly removed from the society that allows these debates to continue.

That’s why I’ve come to the conclusion I can’t vote this year. I’m too far removed from the the country that is staging this election. I moved out of America before President Obama had finished his first year in office. I’m no longer a resident of the United States of America.

It’s where I’m from.

It’s what I sound like.

It’s informed much of the person I am today.

But it’s not where I am now, and hearing debates over issues that are so far from European culture has made me realise I don’t want to be part of the machine this election cycle. It would be far more appopriate for me to vote in a U.K. election.

If only doing so wouldn’t threaten my the status of my U.S. citizenship.

My dog Amie looking as intelligent as ever.

Amie, our family dog since I was 16, must be the dumbest dog on the face of the planet. She’s dumb in an adorable “aint that special” kind of way, but there’s no denying that she is D-U-M-B. Thanks to her Habsburgian underbite and her massively oversized tongue, she always has a bit of her tongue sticking out of her mouth. She licks the couch regularly, trying in vein to extract some sort of taste out of a piece of fabric she’s licked countless times before. Sometimes mid-lick she’ll seem to forget she’s licking anything and rest her head on the couch, tongue still draped over the couch cushion.

This year's family Christmas portrait — look closely and you'll see Amie's behemoth tongue going for a lick of my sister, Kate.

Thanks to my sister’s unnatural holding of the dog like a baby, She will sit not like a normal dog, but like a human — she’ll work her way into the corner of a couch, leaning against the backrest with her paws just hanging there and her legs spread apart. I’ll come into the room to see her sitting like a human with her tongue sticking out. “What?” her expression seems to ask me.

She has no idea how to share a bed. Before Amie we had Charlie, another boxer dog that I trained to sleep curled up in a ball at the bottom of my twin bed. Now when I go home I sleep in a double bed, yet somehow more space doesn’t mean more sleeping room. If I let Amie sleep on the bed I invariably wake up in the middle of the night grasping the sheets as I fall off the bed, pushed by a three-foot (one metre)-high dog that somehow finds the twin bed not big enough for the both of us.

She has the giddy excitement of a kid in a candy shop everytime I go to let her in from outside. She’ll run up to the door and spin in circle at an alarming pace. She’ll look at me, look and the door, then jump in a circle two or three times and repeat. It never fails to crack me up. Even at nine years old, she has the energy of a puppy, running around exploring everything she can. Last year I strapped my camera to her back and captured this hilarious dogs-eye-view of her exploring.

Last week while talking with my parents I got the news: Amie died on Friday. The news came as abruptly to me as it appears in this blog. Apprently she had been having seizures and the vet recommended putting her down, which my parents had to do while my sister was as summer camp (working as a camp councillor) and I was in Athens (working as a tour guide).

Getting the news has thrown me into a headspin. When we got that dog my family was all living under the same roof. When I went to college, got my first job and later began traveling through Europe, I would always return to a few familiar things. My house. My parents. My sister. My dog. While my life has been ridiculously dynamic the home life has remained comfortingly static. But as much as I’d like time back home to pause while I go on my big adventure, it doesn’t. My parents get older, retire. My friends get promotions, wives and babies. The more I’m over here the most I’m missing over there. The next time I go home (whenever that is), it will be with one less familiar thing. I’ll miss having that dumb dog jumping around in circles to greet me. Here’s to you, Amie.

Kathy's excellent blog, which you should probably read

“Kathy Dorn has cancer.” My parents told me the bad news when we first met up on their European trip last year in Florence, Italy. While you may not know that name, Kathy Dorn has been a friend of my family’s for my entire life. She’s one of those acquaintances that is a great representation of small-town living: She’s someone you get to know incrementally through run-ins at the grocery store of high school football game. She’s even continued to read and occasionally comment on this blog (hi, Kathy!). She’s also in the process of writing one of the most beautiful end-of-life blogs I’ve read. You should probably read it, too.

“Uncle Malcolm is in the hospital.” Again my parents delivered bad news, this time over e-mail. If you’ve read this blog for long enough you’ll remember that Uncle Malcolm is my great uncle, the last living relative born in Ireland, and my father’s namesake. We’ve connected in the last five years and I got to chat with him on the phone his 88th birthday this year. He’s been recovering from a fall and has been in the hospital for quite some time now.

Our dumb old dog that's so ugly you can't help but love.

“Amie had a seizure,” my sister told me over Skype. Amie is our dog of nearly a decade who my dad found this week walking around the living room with symptoms of a stroke. Luckily, those symptoms seem to have gone away with time, but it was our first scare as the family dog entered her geriatric years.

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have the dynamic part of my life be isolated in my travels. My home life has remained blessedly static over the past two and a half years. Every time I return home, everything is pretty much how I left it. I suppose that’s why these reminders of mortality have such such an effect on me.

If you’ll allow me to butcher one of science’s most famous equations, Einstein theorized that time spent traveling at great speed was experienced differently than time spent at home, so if you travel around at light speed for seven years you’ll return home to find hundreds of earth years have passed. As I get dispatches about family, friends and pets from home I become more aware that even though I’m out here living my own adventure, life and time continue to go on back home whether I like it or not. Damn you, Einstein.

A picture taken by The Aussie Girl in Venice last October.

Before I say anything on the subject, you must know one thing: I did not move to Australia for a girl.

That said, the idea of moving to a new country for romance is an intriguing one. Falling in love while traveling has such a storybook element to it, it’s easy to see how one can go against the advice of their friends and society and move to a new place on the promise of romance.

Of course, that’s not what happened to me. I moved to Australia for so much more. I came to Australia for the chance to get away, the chance to see a new country, the chance to experience summertime in December. I came to Australia to connect with all those people I met this summer in Europe. I came to Australia to see kangaroos and koalas; to hear people greet me with “G’Day, mate” and to learn the difference between a pint, a pot and a schooner. And maybe just a little bit, I came to Australia hopeful that I could peruse a bit of a romance that started with an Aussie girl I met last May. We stayed in touch after going our separate ways and I was finding myself thinking about her more and more.

But you must know that I did not move for an Aussie girl. That would be ridiculous.

Last November after I returned to Minnesota, I had to decide what I would do with myself after Christmas. I had six months before I was needed back for work at my tour guide job in Europe. Working at my old high school job and living with my parents wasn’t my idea of a fun or productive six months. I thought back to the advice a fellow tour guide gave me: “If you’re not spending all the money you made during your season on traveling during the off-season, you’re doing it wrong.” I thought of all the people I knew in Australia. I thought of the extremely cheap plane ticket my friend had offered me using his frequent flyer miles. And yes, I thought of The Aussie Girl — but only for a second.

As I sat in front of the computer staring down the “purchase” button on the airline’s website, not much thought went through my head about it. There wasn’t much to think about. I didn’t have anything keeping me in Minnesota, so why not give Australia a try?

Before I knew it, I was checking into the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, passport and Australian visa in hand.

The Aussie girl for whom I most definitely did not move to Australia was the first person to get the news of my move. Upon arrival, on my first full day in Australia I met up with her. Before long we were hanging out quite a bit. A few weeks later we laid in the grass in a park near my house, overlooking a beautiful view of Melbourne’s skyline and I told her I was thinking of not returning to my tour guide job this summer. I wanted to give my Australian experience more than a mere few months, I told her. I said I wanted to live here for a year, at least. I wanted to settle and in become a resident of Melbourne, not just a tourist passing through. I had found two promising opportunities with an ad agency and a film producer. I had a job at a cafe that was flexible on hours to support me traveling and finding extra work. I called my boss in London and told her I wouldn’t be returning to Europe to work this summer.

One thing I need to make crystal clear though: I did not decide to stay in Australia for a girl.

Weeks passed, and things started to go south with The Aussie Girl. There’s more to this story than belongs on a public blog, but suffice it to say some circumstances changed. I was seeing less and less of her and thinking more and more of the job opportunity I had passed up.

Now we’re driving home after a weekend getaway together. I asked one of those questions that in a relationship, if you need to ask it, you probably already have your answer. “Is this going to go anywhere?”

A long pause.

“No.”

Now I’m back on the phone with my boss in London. “Will you take me back?”

“Yes.”

Now once more I’m staring down the “purchase” button on an airline website. Circumstances are a bit different this time. This time the flight is from Melbourne to London. This time I have a lot more reasons to think about staying versus going. This time I have no money to afford the ticket. What seems like just as rash a decision as the one I made six months ago, I click “purchase” and quickly deplete my credit line. One month from today I will be making my way to London for another season of tour guiding through Europe with my employer from last summer. I’m very excited for the season, but before going any further I need to make one thing absolutely clear.

I am not leaving Australia because of a girl.