Hi friends!

What a time it is!

Well, let’s see. Here are some life updates that have happened or started to happen when this whole thing started:

We are still in Hawaii. When things started taking a turn for the worse in the West Coast, we decided to cancel our spring break trip to Oregon. Between that, and now working from home, we are starting our 5th week at home today. I’m on my second week of distance learning, Cam is on his third.

Everybody in our family circle – and ourselves – is healthy and in their own homes.

Right now we are playing it day by day regarding summer plans. We would love to go to Oregon but have to assess whether we can go and abide by quarantines and everything else, depending on how long the pandemic goes on. We are hoping we can leave the islands soon and spend some time in the mainland closer to family and friends.

I applied for US citizenship back in February. Luckily, I managed to get my biometrics taken in early March, just before USCIS shut down in-person services. As part of this process, I’m doing exactly what I should be doing in the time between fingerprints and interview date: waiting. Originally, I had hoped to take the Oath of Allegiance by the end of the summer. Now, I’m not sure when that will happen.

Fortunately, Hawaii is a small field office, so my hope is that once things begin to open up, interviews and oaths start to become scheduled. My geeky history self wanted to naturalize before the general election in November – voting in the US for the first time on the year of the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment is a dream when you love history and Girl Power. Hawaii is also moving towards all mail-in votes this year, so no risk in voting like in other places where mail-in ballots are not quite a given. I do hope to be naturalized by the end of the calendar year. We’ll see. I do have a lovely white blazer I got at Christmas I plan on wearing for the occasion.

We spent Christmas in the Dominican this past December. The goal: be with family. I read three books in less than a week to my mom and held her hand for some long stretches. I got destroyed at chess in less than 3 minutes in the only game I accepted to play with my nephew Christopher. We visited my oldest niece Lyan in her new place. We spent some time in our old favorites in the North. I drank multiple cups of coffee a day with my big sister. I joked around with my niece Paola and was pleasantly surprised to discover she loves Brooklyn Nine-Nine – which is hilarious in the best kind of way. I felt tiny but proud when my very tall nephew Luis Andres hugged me. We didn’t do anything fancy or special, but it was one of my favorite Christmases in a while.

As far as quarantine projects go, we’ve started watching all 92 winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture. We’ve watched many of them over the years, but as part of this project, we’ve watched (not in order):

• • Parasite (2019 winner) – the latest winner. Weird but good-weird. We rented it on XBox Live. I think Amazon might have it for rental now too.
  • The King’s Speech (2011 winner) – superb acting. And I always enjoy movies about real characters. Not sure where we watched it.
  • Gladiator (2001 winner) – a great movie overall with an incredible main character and great music. Also those expansive, classic Ridley Scott shots. This one I think we had an old copy.
  • A Beautiful Mind (2002 winner) – more great characters in the two protagonists, lots of good acting overall. Ron Howard is very skilled at making movies that move people. Not sure where we watched it. Maybe also an old copy.
  • Driving Miss Daisy (1990 winner). Acting is good but the story wasn’t our favorite. Could be a Lifetime movie if I didn’t know any better. This one I think is on Netflix.
  • Moonlight (2017 winner) – sad but gets better; like Parasite, it’s different. Took two viewings – it’s a sad movie! Available on Prime video I think.
  • Wings (1927 winner) – the very first winner. Gets better by the end but as you can imagine from a 1927 silent movie, very, very slow. Took 2 viewings to finish. Or three? I dozed off for some stretches of it. If you’re curious, we rented it on Amazon.
  • The Sound of Music (1966 winner) – Cam had never seen it, but knew some of the songs. The songs, and specifically, the songs in the voice of Julie Andrews, are what makes the movie what it is. This one you can see on Disney+ if you have it.

Next, I think we’ll try to watch West Side Story because neither of us has seen it but we don’t care much for musicals. We like the songs in musicals though.

Initially, I wanted to make a different dessert each week but have realized how dangerous that is. On that note, let me go eat the last two chocolate chip cookies we have left.

What have you been up to during this time at home? How are things where you’re reading from?

I’ll come back when we’ve watched more movies! There are definitely some movies on that list we are NOT looking forward to watching, but are hoping for the best. If you want to see the complete list, you can find it here.

Stay healthy and safe,

Ana

…2018 is (almost) gone.

The past 6 months have been largely focused on transitioning to living in the US again: teaching in the US for the first time, understanding the differences in mentalities, dealing with reverse culture shock (that’ll probably not go away), paying taxes again (YUCK) and not needing to hoard or stock up on anything because Amazon is readily available and Costco is a 10 minute drive from home. We are once again in a place where a car is a must (sigh). And with moving back to the US, the nature of the things we would be able to share in this blog has changed. Nomadicgregors has always been intended as a travel chronicle of the adventures we’ve had abroad, and some of the wonderful things we get to see. As we moved back to the US, our income changed (less disposable income for travel) and we are in a more isolated place (getting to and from Hawaii is far from everywhere). Hawaii is also ridiculously expensive, and so as we’ve settled in we’ve realized opportunities to travel will be far and few in between during our stint here. There are still strikingly beautiful places to be seen in the island of O’ahu, but the reality is, it’s a little over 400 feet, so not exactly vast like, say, the Asian continent.

For a long time, the belief that we have “nothing to share anymore” was part of the reason why this blog was silent. That, combined with the demands of teaching a content area I’m not trained for (again), took its toll. For a little while, I thought about closing the blog altogether, which would probably not be that big of a deal (I can literally name two people that read this, and that’s about it – lol).

In the end, I’ve decided Nomadicgregors will mostly focus on finding ways to feed our wanderlust by exploring Oahu, writing about our favorite places, and how we stay happy in a season of our lives where there will be a significant travel “lull”. In 2019, we will attempt to complete as many hikes in Oahu as possible, starting with this list: To-Hike List 2019 Part 1

Other than a solo trip to the Dominican Republic to take care of some business, read to and hug my mother, we haven’t traveled since we moved to Hawaii. We are tentatively going to Northern California during spring break, but in the meantime, we will direct the energy of this blog to reviewing the places in Honolulu that are keeping us happy, and our favorite nature in Oahu.

To keep up with the more frequent shenanigans, you can follow me on Twitter: @cookingforcalm, and on Instagram: @anamcgregor

Up next: a photo gallery of our favorite Oahu experiences in these 6 months.

Have the best 2019, full of realized dreams, unending kindness, love and light.

Ana

In the past couple of days, we’ve been revisiting some of the magnificent work the BBC has done on their Earth documentaries: Planet Earth II, Blue Planet, and others. If you can’t travel, it’s a beautiful way to see the world. The people behind these shows have made an incredible job at capturing the beauty of our planet as undisturbed as possible. They’ve also done a pretty spectacular job at getting to hard-to-reach places and showing us things that maybe we wouldn’t see, even as experienced travelers (example: snow leopards in the Himalayas).

This week, we’ve discovered a new little gem among these programs: South Pacific. It focuses on the Pacific Ocean itself as a source of life, and very particularly in the animals and people that have managed to make it to the islands that are scattered among the Pacific, some of which are among the most remote places on the planet. Our soon-to-be home, the Hawaiian Islands, are of course featured, as they are smack in the middle of the Pacific and have pretty unique flora and fauna.

It is just breathtaking to see animals and people adapting to some of the harshest conditions on Earth. Seeing animals living in places where it’s technically impossible for them to live (penguins in the Galapagos islands!) – all because the Pacific provides the conditions to sustain all kinds of different needs that different species might have.

We haven’t gotten too far in it (we’re in the middle of ep. 2) but we are loving it! If you want to see beautiful places, I highly recommend it.

On another note, this show is not narrated by David Attenborough – it’s narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, who does a pretty good job narrating! It was an interesting surprise and would be nice if he would narrate more.

If you have Netflix, I recommend looking into the other documentaries the BBC Earth people have done. It’s just spectacular filming and a wonderful way to see the world, so to speak!

Very excited for our visit to Oregon on spring break (is it here yet?)

Go watch South Pacific!

The Team

Cameron’s first trip abroad was eleven years ago, 2006. He went to Hong Kong, Cambodia and Thailand. That trip started Cameron on a journey that would take him to the teaching profession, his loving mistress Russia, and eventually, the establishment of this Team. When we planned our Christmas break, we didn’t really intend it to be some sort of retracing of steps, but with a week in Bangkok in early January for a recruitment fair, it kind of naturally happened.

We like trying to make room in our trips for going to new places together. This time, it was Singapore for both of us, Cambodia for me. One of the most interesting parts of doing this trip was for Cameron to see the differences between what these places were like eleven years ago, when he first visited, and now. We are definitely different people, but the places we go, even years apart, only become more familiar to us and strangely, we feel very “at home”, or close to home, in many, many places.

We are somewhat sad to bring our time abroad to a temporary stop in June when we leave Korea and go back to the United States so I can take care of some unfinished business: namely, getting USCIS off my back once and for all, and teaching what I really want to teach. We will be moving to Hawaii (Oahu specifically) sometime in July. So it’ll be like going back to the US but not really, as continental US and insular US are very different. Tourism and the military also mean that there is lots of transient people in Hawaii, so that helps. People are used to others coming and going. We fully expect some reverse culture shock (we’ve heard numbers around the 8-9 month mark to start feeling like you can actually feel the ground under your feet) but will do our best to invest in being in Hawaii and not have our heads wrapped around the bad parts for too long.

Our return to the US is open ended for now. Right now we intend to go back out and teach abroad sometime in the future. We don’t know when. For now, we are looking forward to our time in the US, the comforts of home, no language barriers, and to living in an island with more “island-y” weather.

We are excited for:

• Tropical weather! Much as we love four seasons, we are very much looking forward to sun, beaches, and shorts-and-flip-flops weather all year long.
• Island living: we’re all for a slower paced lifestyle where it’s not go-go-go all the time. We miss that about the Dominican Republic.
• Legit grocery stores! – the availability of foodstuffs is key to my happiness. I spend a lot of time cooking, and love to feed people! Having options for food is exciting.
• Affordable options for harder to find items – certain foodstuffs, like cheese, are expensive in this part of the world, because they’re not part of the staple diet of countries like Korea. We are very excited to live in a place again where we can afford things like cheese and cereal and fresh berries in reasonable quantities considering what you pay for them!
• Efficient services – banking (although banking in Korea has been a breeze – I have no complains!), healthcare, roads where people know the right of way…
• Real bars – no fuss places where you can sit down and have a drink without too much going into it…relaxed dress codes, that kind of thing.

We are feeling a bit of trepidation about:

a)   Teaching in the US – neither of us has actually taught in the US so we’re not familiar with how things are done…we’re just wondering how it will go with standardized testing and unions negotiating contracts and parents who may or may not be involved and what kind of home environments our future students will live in and all of that. And then there’s of course, the issue of guns…inevitably, we have to think that by going back to the US, and working as teachers there, we’re moving to a place with A LOT more guns than where we live now, and that means one of us could be in danger at our place of work. School shootings are a reality regardless of the grade level. That’s incredibly scary.

b) Paying taxes again! State AND federal…oh brother.

c) Possible work commutes – it’s still early to know whether we will find a place that is a middle ground between our jobs. We’d love to, because we’d like to only need one car, or maybe one of us being able to take the bus to work.

d) Not traveling as much – yes, we’ll be in Hawaii and there won’t be a need to take a beach vacation for example, but our travel potential will be significantly reduced. How to feed the travel bug in the years to come will be something we’ll need to figure out and it will take some time. It’s also going to be pretty expensive to travel to most places, because Hawaii is really not close to ANYTHING.

e) Not connecting with anyone/having trouble making friends/meeting people – living abroad changes your perspectives, and we’ve found that sometimes people who haven’t lived abroad simply don’t get it, through no fault of their own.

There’s definitely more we want to tell you about our Christmas holiday in Cambodia and Singapore (and pictures to show you!). Those will come at a later time. Maybe our next blog rename should be The Insular Gregors…we do have a thing for islands – Oahu will be the third island we live on!

More on the move when it starts to take more shape…for now, we have a very busy school year to finish!

Cheers to our third island (with a Mai Tai, of course – haha!)

Ana

Hello fellow nomads (and dwellers, we love you too!)

This is Ana reporting from Jeju – I guess a sick day is as good a day as any to give the good old blog some love 🙂 Maybe I need to download the WordPress app on my phone so I can update the blog more frequently. If you can’t wait around for blog posts, because let’s be honest, we are TERRIBLE at this, you can always follow me on Instagram and Snapchat (@analinmcgregor) for more frequent updates (but not daily).

In the time between our last update, we went back to Waldport for Christmas (and it was lovely), spent the laziest, most relaxing Lunar New Year at home, survived the very windy Jeju winter (people are NOT joking when they say bring winter gear), found out THREE of our former Shanghai colleagues are coming to teach in Jeju next year (YAY!!!!!), and had a wonderful spring break in NY and the Dominican (there may be separate posts for some of these later). In between Lunar New Year and spring break, things were insanely busy at school, and now after spring break they show no sign of slowing down. We have a long stretch ahead of us (one week down, now in the middle of the second week of 11 before the end of the school year) and are very grateful for nice weather (finally!!!) and blossoming trees to make it more bearable.

The life of a teacher is definitely an interesting routine. One would imagine that routine is bad in most professions, but in teaching, it’s nice to nail routine down. If you’re at a point of the year where there are no curveballs coming your way, that’s great, you can probably go on about your job and enjoy some normalcy. Right now, we are in a bit of a slow-ish place at school (although this past week, the first back did feel quite busy and that “lull” will be over next week) but that won’t last. It’s a good thing, because time goes by fast, but it’s also not good because there is not a lot of time to catch your breath before you must move on to the next thing.

The winter also involved going back and forth between actively looking for jobs (for myself) and deciding to do another year in my current position (for a number of reasons I’m not going to go into). It definitely made me realize how competitive teaching is, both back home and abroad, and so I will be spending some time during next school year making sure I can get some relevant professional development that can help me get a better job the year after next.

The next couple of posts will be some galleries of some of the sights we’ve seen in the past few months. There’s been oceans and tall cliffs, glaciers from airplane windows, clouds of delicate blossoms, architectural gems, peace and quiet in the form of blue skies and palm trees, laughs with family and friends, but most importantly, we’ve done all of this together. Stay tuned!

With love and treasured memories,

Ana