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I highly recommend Alexis Grant’s How to Take a Career Break to Travel. Her message is YES!! You can leave your job to travel the world AND move towards a more satisfying career!
Lexi worked as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle for three years before quitting to travel solo through Africa. She spent six months in Africa, and wrote a memoir about the experience, which her agent is preparing to pitch to publishers. She has an excellent blog that shares positive, useful stories from her journey from employee to traveler to employee to side-hustler to solopreneur and she has been very supportive of my international entrepreneurship schemes.
Her guide is super-practical. She starts out with a pep talk about why you should take a Leap. Then she debunks the four big BUTS that keep people from pursuing their travel dreams (Money, House, Family, and Career.)
I especially like her advice to travel with a Mission. Her Mission was to freelance for newspapers and magazines. This gave her a concrete reason to meet interesting people, such as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, who she profiled for her university’s alumni magazine, and a polygamous family in Cameroon. Traveling with a Mission gives purpose to your Big Trip, and gives you something concrete to talk about when you return to the “real world” and need to update your resume and all that fun stuff…
She also gives specific suggestions for using social media efficiently from the road. Lexi describes which applications work best from Internet cafes with questionable bandwidth (Skype, WordPress, and Hootsuite. I’d add Gmail, Google Docs, and Dropbox to her list.)
Lexi weaves in the stories about regular people who have taken Career Breaks, as well as honest details about their budgets, Missions, and experiences with re-entry culture shock.
Your career break could bring you to the gorgeous coast north of La Serena, Chile...
... or to Mongolia! Or to anywhere else you've dreamed of going. Oh, the possibilities!
She only devotes one page of the 94-page guide to working overseas (getting a job at a restaurant/vineyard/bookstore, teaching English, etc) which I was slightly disappointed to see. But I recognize that detailed advice on working overseas would go against her general message about how to take a break from your career that boosts your professional potential. Maybe this means I should write my own guide to launching your career overseas! Or point you towards another resource. Hmmm… stay tuned.
If you’re reading this from your cubicle, as you dream about babes, baboons, Babylon, baseball, batik, beaches, or whatever you envision as your Career Break fantasy, How to Take a Career Break to Travel is your ideal starting point. Lexi’s guide will show you how to start scheming for your big Leap.
I’ve signed up as an affiliate for Lexi’s guide, which means that if you buy it by clicking directly from my blog (from a link like this one) I earn a commission on the sale. This is my first step towards turning my blog into a revenue-generating tool, and I think referring good tools by good people is a much better option than clogging up my site with auto-generated ads.
The guide is just $39 $29, and will be delivered to your screen right away. A reasonable price for a world of inspiration! Yay!
Today is All Soul’s Day, and I feel that it’s the ideal time to share photos from the most breathtakingly beautiful cemetery I’ve ever seen. During our trip to Easter Island, we stayed at a modest guesthouse close to this cemetery.
The morning clouds made the place feel even more dramatic and intense.
One of the most beautiful places I've ever seen! I loved this headstone, carved in harmony with the natural shape of the wood.
Many of the gravesites had solar-powered lights. Every time we passed by at night, I wished I had the appropriate tools and photography skills to capture the beauty of this lantern-lit cemetery within earshot of the sea.
A few weeks before our trip to Easter Island, I'd seen these solar-powered garden lights for sale at HomeCenter (like Chile's Home Depot, a home-improvement megastore.) A cemetery by the sea seems like the ideal place to use these lights.
May all the souls in this special place rest in peace!
I feel a bit weird posting photos of a cemetery, but this place is so gorgeous I really wanted to share it with all of you. What do you think of cemeteries as tourist attractions? Do you have any special traditions for All Soul’s Day?
I had the great fortune to visit Easter Island with my parents. It’s called Isla de Pascua in Spanish and Rapa Nui in the local language.
These 7 moai face the sea. Our guide said that they represent the European explorers.
So photogenic!
Sunset as seen from a seaside bar
I know someone who has a truck just like this one. Las aventuras de la rojita! 
These rock carvings represent a traditional competition, in which the men from each clan would compete to swim to that little island you can see, pick up a special egg, and bring it back intact. The winner got to marry a virgin. And later that woman would give birth in the water. A fascinating story from a gorgeous site!
I snapped this shot of my feet by the pool at the Explora, a deluxe all-inclusive resort where we did not stay. I love visiting top hotels, just to check out the gardens and such! Living large on a budget!
The stairs up to the Explora
The "moai factory" - the place where the statues were carved. We happened to meet an archeologist who was giving a private tour to a Norwegian couple. He told us his theories about how the moai were moved from this spot all over the island. It's a hotly contested academic debate.
The archeologist told us that this moai was in the middle of stratigraphy. I remember this term from the archeology class I took at Cal. Stratigraphy is the measurement of all the exact positions of artifacts and other markers. Very cool.
Archeologist at work
This line of moai was knocked over by a tidal wave about 10 years ago. The Japanese government contributed to support its restoration. Here I met a group of 8 Chinese businessmen from Jiaxing, the "small town" of a million people that was my first home in China. The world is very, very small!
Anakena, the famous beach on the north shore of Easter Island. So breathtakingly beautiful.
Of course we couldn't resist posing for photos with the moai!
Thanks Mom and Dad for bringing me to such a special place!!
My dad took this awesome photo of a castle nestled into a city block, in Barrio Lastarria here in Santiago. The castle is called Casa Alberta and there is a Canadian flag on the door. I love the contrast between the castle and the pink and green houses next door.
I spoke with Jaclyn Schiff from Brazen Careerist, and she recorded parts of our conversation as a podcast called How to Work Abroad After College. Not only did Jacci ask excellent questions, but Skype cooperated for our entire chat! Awesome.
Here’s the link to the full interview: How to Work Abroad After College.
If you’re new here at Beyond China’s Chile’s Single Story, welcome! This is my personal blog about Chile, China, entrepreneurship, inspiration, energy, translation, and so much more.
In our conversation, Jacci referred to this post, My Hypothetical Certificate in Applied Modern Chinese Studies, as an interesting example of framing diverse job experiences into a coherent and compelling story.
Here are some posts in which I’ve discussed career choices and offered ideas for fellow adventurous professionals:
- How do Chilean and Chinese business customs differ? My interview with Global Young Women
- “Sometimes, I find myself set in a puzzlement about meanings of life and jobs.”
- How “Fire Chicken” is Good for Business
- Foreign Young Professionals in China Mini Series #3: “Why China? Because I could.”
- Adventure + Failure + Grit = Success?
Why launch your career overseas? Along with the many, many reasons I mention in the podcast, you can work from places like…
Bahia Inglesa, Chile's III Region. I took this photo on my most recent business trip!
I'm Leslie and I connect entrepreneurs in Chile, China, California, and beyond — especially through translation, training, and trade. More about me.
