Working overseas takes months of planning...or not!

by Jon Waldrep
(Sacramento, CA. USA)

For many people the idea of taking a year off (or more) and working overseas is incredibly appealing. And why not? Who wouldn’t like the opportunity to experience another culture up-close and personal? And what better way to do it than to live and work for an extended period in another country?

Most people who decide to take the plunge and work overseas will take months, even years, planning such an adventure. They want all of the messy details (i.e. where they are going to end up and what they are going to be doing!) finalized well before they wave goodbye to friends and family at the airport and head off into the sunset. There’s nothing wrong with that approach. It makes a lot of sense. It is, however, the polar opposite of what I did when I decided that I wanted to head to Europe to try and live and work for an extended time.

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that Ronald Reagan was still president when I made my move. But things haven’t changed that much.

My “game plan” to live and work abroad went something like this;

1. Save $1,000 in cash and sock it away
2. Get a passport
3. Save enough for a one way ticket to somewhere in Europe

Once I had what I though was enough for a ticket, I started checking the travel section of the paper trying to find a cheap, one-way flight and trying to decide where to go. My plan was to stay for a year assuming I could find some kind of work.

Most of my friends thought I had lost my mind. They would point out the obvious and remind me that a) I didn’t speak a language other than English b) $1,000 would be gone in the blink of an eye c) I had no way of knowing if I could find a job or not and d) that yes, oh by the way, I had in fact really lost my mind.

Remarkably none of that changed my game plan.

A few weeks later I bought a one-way ticket to Madrid, Spain. Why Spain? Frankly it could have been any number of countries. But I found a really cheap ticket there, I figured the weather would be good and it seemed that Spanish would be as easy a language to learn as any other.

So I was all set, right? Well, not quite. Here is what I did that turned out to be very smart.

I bought a couple of travel guides that catered to a younger, college age crowd (what I was at the time!). The best one I bought was a copy of “Let’s Go: Spain and Portugal”. There were three main reasons that I wanted a guide book. The first reason was that I wanted to make a reservation in a cheap hotel for a few nights so when I first got there I had a change to at least familiarize myself a bit with the city while I looked for longer term living arrangement.

The second reason was, obviously, I wanted at least some general knowledge of the city/country where I was going.

Now both of those are pretty compelling reasons to buy a travel guide. But the third reason was by far the most important. I figured if I bought a very popular guide book that I wouldn’t be the only American now in Spain who had purchased, used and was walking around Madrid with the very same book.

So, I reasoned, if I visited the places the book recommended (to live, to eat and to hang out at night) I was very likely to run into a bunch of Americans who were currently living and hopefully working in Madrid.

I was right! Using this plan I met dozens of Americans as well as other people from all around the world who were studying and/or working in Madrid. Nobody seemed to mind me asking a ton of questions and, in fact, I made some great friends. In a few days I was offered a place to stay for a few weeks until I eventually found a room in cheap place. In a few weeks I got a job teaching English in a little hole-in-the-wall language school.

Several months later I had a chance to work at a summer camp outside of Madrid. The next thing I knew I was flying down to the Canary Islands to take an English teaching job in a well known school there.

And my plan to hopefully stay for a year? Well, that turned into 10 years and a lifetime of new friends, new experiences, fluent Spanish and many unforgettable memories.

If you’re thinking about living and working overseas do you think that maybe, just maybe, you’re over thinking it?

(Jon Waldrep writes about a number of subjects including travel and work abroad. He contributes to www.overseasjobnow.com about working and studying abroad and to www.celtacourses.com with resources about becoming an EFL teacher overseas.)