Australia’s gigantic festival season is coming up, with Big Day Out preparing to suck in thousands of youngsters willing to pay $165 for a ticket and stand pressed elbow-to-sternum in 45 degree (Celsius) heat, while paying $8 for a bottle of water.  Sounds like fun, right?

If you still think so, and you don’t want to make your own, you can go to most music festivals pretty much everywhere for free by offering … Read more »

Have you ever been abroad during a significant moment in your home country’s history? I was living abroad at the time of the last US elections and, I have to admit, it was hard to be away from America at such a significant time. Sure, I was having a sit-in, glued to the news channel, with my friends in Europe much the same as I would have been doing with my American friends were I … Read more »

The biggest requirement for being an ESL teacher is, obviously, to be a native English speaker. However, having taught English in several parts of the world, I’ve found that sometimes certain schools or areas are looking for a specific type of English and you might just have to adjust to meet expectations.

When I began my job teaching in the North of France I soon found out that British English was the desired … Read more »

As you might guess from the title, Don’t Tell Mum I Work On The Rigs, She Thinks I’m The Piano Player In A Whorehouse, is a bit of a quirky exploration of the itinerant oil rigging lifestyle.

As vagabonders, we get pretty focused on how we can work and travel; can we write for travel magazines?  Program software from Bangalore?  Work in internet pornography anywhere with a steady internet connection and a webcam?  We get … Read more »

I’ve always been rather fond of STA Travel. My only experience with them was enormously positive. My travel consultant had an awesome personality, she didn’t mind talking at length about different areas of the world, and she sure did find me a few plane tickets that were hundreds of dollars cheaper than anything I’d found … Read more »

The rapid advances in communications technology are enabling people to work from anywhere. This can be a big relief for people who stress over choosing between traveling and their careers. Luckily, now you don’t have to give up either.

Six Revisions, a blog for web designers and developers, wrote a great article on How to set up an effective mobile office. It covers the hardware and web apps you’ll need to … Read more »

One of the most eye-opening moments when working abroad is finding about all the differences between your host culture and home culture. For example, a Japanese salaryman might accept unpaid overtime as business as usual. A French worker, on the other hand, might disagree with staying beyond normal business hours.

Salon.com did a detailed comparison of the work cultures Germany and the United States: Were you born on the wrong continent?

There is a … Read more »

Qadisha Valley, Lebanon

There are places in this world that urge you to pause, and Lebanon’s Qadisha Valley is one. As the day ends over this historic landscape, you look around and sense that the sun has set here for thousands of years, well before you were born, and will continue … Read more »

More and more it is becoming popular to forgo the pricy North American continuing education degree and opt for the cheaper alternative by enrolling directly in one of the public universities in Europe. Some students limp out of their 4-year degree, swearing to never undergo the same financial atrocity in graduate school and begin searching for cheaper options. Other students skip the traditional route all together and go abroad straight away.

There are … Read more »

“Travel is an education” is something many vagabonders would agree with. Who hasn’t come back from a trip filled with new knowledge, new friends, and great stories to tell?

The personal finance website Mint.com dedicated a blog post to the venerable gap year:

The Gap Year: why taking time off to travel is good

The article makes a strong case for students to do some traveling before going to college. Students sometimes switch majors … Read more »