An Xpat Looking at the World from Afar

This is Ron's introductory post from my current location, Malang (city), East Java (province), Indonesia. I love traveling but when I stop I tend to spend a few years. I am always home because where I am is home. For me, that is why I mention Indonesia (currently). I have been in Malang for five years.

Previous stops have led to short term residencies in Vietnam (7 years), Cambodia (7 years) and Thailand (15 years). I previously considered Thailand my (go to) country for long term living. I used Thailand as a place to rest between several years in lesser developed countries.

On several of my profiles I describe myself as a professional expatriate. I have no idea what that means. I don’t try to define it but the basic idea is that I am a German-born US passport holder who does not live in the US.

I have spent almost thirty years teaching functional English as well as teaching subjects in English. One of my favorite classes is Literary Criticism. I currently teach at university level to students who come from a society that does not value reading. Kindle is a foreign word in Indonesia because Amazon sees little value in promoting books in a country in which reading is avoided. For that reason, I started a blog almost two years ago on which I post book, novel, and short story reviews. For the first year, I posted daily.

My reviews concentrate on positive feedback. In approximately six hundred published reviews, in only four have I felt I had to be negative. In two of those, the authors and I had interesting dialogues. For a few months after the first year I posted often, but not daily, because I got busy with horribly complex legal stuff that haunts expats. For the past several months I have returned to posting daily. The purpose of the short (600 to 1000 word) reviews is to motivate students in my classes. Although I purchase downloaded books from Amazon on my Kindle and to my PC app, there are sites I like to promote such as Instafreebies. The name of the site describes the cost of books offered.

I do not intend to cut and paste my blog entries to my Steem blog but I do want to use elements and segments from my blog with expanded comments that I might not want to direct to my students. I will have to make sure I do not run afoul of plagiarism detectors by reposting my own work.

I am currently reading the helpful Steem help articles. It is an exhausting enterprise. I intend to jump in and risk mistakes.

Steem looks like fun. I am here to play. I look forward to contributing to this rapidly expanding community.