 Hi, and welcome to my course on how to move and live abroad. As I give the introduction to this course, you're going to see different photos and videos taken from my travels. All of these pictures and videos were taken by myself or by my wife. And these pictures and these videos will be divided up by different continents that we've traveled to. As you'll see, we've traveled to three different continents. We've lived in three different continents, I should say. We lived in Taiwan. We lived in Shanghai. We lived in Luka in Tuscany. We lived in Switzerland. And in the US, we lived in DC and in Atlanta for a bit. And now we live in Charlotte. Now, all of this was while I was married and my wife and I traveled together. Before getting married, I was also living in different cities and working remotely. I lived in Portland, Oregon. I lived in Seoul, Korea, and in Switzerland. Many travelers, many people you see living abroad are, say, 19 years old and probably have cash to spare and even if they lose all their money and get kicked out of the country, they figure they can just crash in their parents' basement or something like that. Many of us don't have that luxury. Many of us are married and we're building a life and we don't have a parents' basement to crash in if everything goes south. Having said that, I still do believe that everyone should be able to live somewhere else at some point in their life. Now, granted, maybe moving just to the other side of the river in your city would be easier, but if you're gonna live somewhere else, why not make it your dream location? If you wanna live in Bali or in Paris or in Peru or in Cape Town or in Sydney or wherever it might be, if it's your dream city, then it's something worth fighting for. So this course helps you with everything you have to go through and you can learn from what I've learned and you can also learn from my mistakes so you don't make them. Here's what you will learn briefly in this course. First of all, you're gonna get help picking which country to go to. You might already have a dream country or dream city or dream location in mind, but if you don't or if you're wondering between various different locations, we'll discuss the pros and cons of various different places compared to where you live currently. After that, we'll touch upon your life back home, presumably wherever you live now. You have some sort of life. Maybe you have friends, you have a job, you have furniture, you have possessions, you have a whole life, and so what do you do with this life back home? You can't just leave your possessions there, you can't just forget about it, but you have to do something with it and this is something that should be taken seriously. And then once you've picked where you're leaving, you've decided to leave, you decided to move somewhere, then you still need to prepare stuff before you go. You can't just pick up and go right away. And so we discuss what you need to prepare in terms of money, in terms of your life and your future location, in terms of your possessions, et cetera, et cetera. After that, we'll talk about what to do once you get there and the various things to take care of and to be careful about and to keep in mind. And after that, there are a list of tips and tricks that I've come up with or that I've encountered over the years that I thought I should share with you. Now, I should specify that I grew up in Switzerland, so this means I'm pretty Swiss in that I'm not some flashy salesman type person, as you can probably tell by the way I speak and as you will go along the course. I'm not flashy, I'm not in your face, I don't have weird cool gimmicks or anything along those lines, but what I do is I try to lay out all the rules and issues you will be dealing with in a logical manner. And that's what I try to do here. In fact, the list of topics we cover, if you notice, are pretty much chronological in the order that you'll encounter them as you confront this issue of moving abroad. So this means that you can use this course as a reference, whether you're just thinking now about starting out on your venture or preparing for it or if you're in the middle of it already or maybe if you've already moved abroad and you have questions or issues or something along those lines. Hopefully these lessons can always serve as reference. And at the same time, if you'd want to stop talking about this and actually make moving abroad a reality, then you can follow my step-by-step instructions in this course. Now you'll have to forgive me, I'm a translator and a linguist by profession and so I wanted to talk about travel per se and travel the word. Travel the word comes from, for those of you who speak Spanish, you'll know the word trabajo or travailler in French or travail even in English. And travel comes from the word travail, which means a job, which means work, which means trial and tribulation. And that's what travel originally was because let's face it, if you wanted to travel back in the day, it was work that you had to do. Now this is as opposed to tourism. Tourism comes from, well ultimately from the Latin dornare, which meant to turn. And this was literally because back in ancient Rome, people would take tours into what is ancient Greece and they would literally take a tour of going up and visiting all the main sites and then basically coming background in a circle to where they started. And this was tourism. And still today, if you think tourism buses, if you think tour guys, if you think tour groups, if you think things along those lines, tourism is pretty much that. It's very passive and you kind of do a tour or a turn of all the main sites and then you come back to your hotel or whatever it is. And this is as opposed to travel. Travel does take work, but that's because the reward is so much greater. With travel, you actually get to experience a new place, a new city, a new country, and you get to experience how it is to live there, what the locals are going through and you get to open your mind a bit more and experience a bit more of the mentality there. So it does take a bit more work but it's exponentially more rewarding. Now lastly, I should say that during this whole course I'm going to mention many websites, some apps, some companies and some brands, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'll mention it right now that I have absolutely no affiliation with any of them and none of them are paying me anything to say what I am saying. I'm just saying what I feel. If I like something, if I like a certain company, if I like a certain brand, then I'm going to share my experience with it and I'm going to tell you why I like it. By the same token, there are plenty of companies that I don't like and that I don't recommend and I'm going to be open about that as well. But all of these are just because I've been dealing with them or I've had experience with them and I want to share whatever I've experienced. This is the Willard Hotel Room and let me show you the view. Oh, there we go. That's the Washington Monument back there. And this is I think the oldest hotel in DC. So I'm not going to keep any names out but also the names that I mentioned weren't paying to be put in there and they're really ones that I do have experience with. Having said that, without any further ado, I will let you get on with the course. Happy travels and bon voyage.