About Chloe’

If you’re new to the blog, introduce yourself on Facebook! I love meeting new people from all over the world, and I’d love to hear why you’re reading.

Performing spoken word at Mike Geffner’s Inspired Word Wednesday night open mic at COFFEED, Long Island City. Photo credit to MIKE GEFFNER.

I love traveling. I believe this is the only way we can get to know other cultures, the world, and ourselves. Thanks to Fulbright, I came to Czech Republic in 2014 and have been living and teaching English here ever since.

I try to be cooler than most Americans by learning other languages. I have conversational levels of Czech and Hebrew.

I had a pretty sheltered childhood in a homogenous hometown. And I used to be really shy.

At CUNY Queens College, I discovered a vibrant community of people of many races, ethnicities, nationalities, religions and belief systems. I spent 4 years tutoring Writing to a large number of international, non-natively English-speaking students. They had to learn English to travel and study – that inspired me! 

Attending Queens College as a Macaulay Honors student allowed me to study abroad in Greece (2011) and Israel (2012, after first visiting Israel in 2010 through Birthright). My semester in Be’er Sheva, Israel changed my life. (I blogged briefly about it at Shai for the Semester – Shai is my Hebrew name.) The more I traveled, the more I wanted to travel. I wanted to experience new cultures and learn new languages.

In 2014-2015, I was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) in a small town outside of Brno, Czech Republic. (Here’s a link to a Macaulay article about me.) History was made, and  I loved my ballroom-dancing, mountain-skiing, liver-eating experience so much that I stayed, and am now in my fourth year teaching English.

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Disclaimer: In this blog, I aim to give people insight into the way one American expat thinks about American life, travel, and culture clashes. The opinions expressed are mine alone, and I try my best to back up my opinions with research (always linked).