Working 2 Live, Living 2 Travel

As the old saying goes, “Americans live to work.” Well, we’re Americans and we want to break the mold.

Working 2 Live, Living 2 Travel is our personal philosophy. We respect the need for some to be settled in one place with a stable job and home life, and we admire our friends who have taken time away from work to travel the world. We even envy them sometimes. However, we are trying to find our balance in working and studying around the globe. For us, it’s the best fit.

A stroll down memory lane

We started dating right before I moved from Atlanta to Louisville, Ky., while Christopher continued to live in Georgia. For the next two years, we had a long-distance relationship where we met up in cities all across the U.S. for our “dates.” We were married in 2008 at a castle in Scotland with just us, the preacher, and a bagpipe player. Our honeymoon was a road trip around the southern half of Ireland.  We’ve never bought each other birthday or anniversary gifts, opting for trips instead.

The big decision

You could say our relationship is based on a mutual love of travelling and exploring – it definitely keeps our lives interesting. So, when Christopher came to me a year ago to say he wanted to take a job that required he move four times in two years, with three rotations overseas, I was excited and nervous. I won’t lie, I had my reservations. What would we do with our house in Virginia? How was I going to leave my job? Could we afford it? After some deep discussions and soul searching, though, we both decided this is what we had been dreaming. Always wanting to live abroad, we took our chances and dived in.

We rented our house, and I’m trying my hand at freelancing while also studying for my master’s degree. We are now in Christopher’s second rotation in São Paulo, Brazil after he completed his first in Dallas. He’s working as a business development manager for an engineering firm and studying Portuguese.

Blog it all

To let our family and friends know all about what it’s like to live and work abroad, we decided to start this blog about our day-to-day lives in Brazil and other places we go. We also want to help other travelers who may be curious about our temporary corner of the world, wherever we may be, and other destinations we’ve been. Our goal is to post once a week with alternating posts about typical life in Brazil or wherever we are and one destination post about a cool place we’ve visited.

We hope you’ll enjoy these tidbits of information and let us know if you’re ever in our area to meet-up for a coffee or beer. Do you want to know something specific about Brazil? Have a trip coming up? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll try to do a blog post about your specific request.

-Monica