I literally moved to South East Asia

for three months anyways...

So if you’ve spoken to me or met me while traveling in the past few months, this should’nt come as too much of a surprise to you. I think since about April of this year Jordan and I have had a plan to move to Cambodia to become English teachers.

It’s part of the reason that we volunteered at a language school in Istanbul, and it’s why both Jordan and I got our TEFL certification this year. So yes, the truth is out. We went through with the plan and now I’ve landed in Cambodia for the next few months.

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The Plan

The plan was simple: land in Phnom Penh, find an apartment, and then quickly start looking for teaching jobs. That plan changed before we even arrived to Cambodia.

A month or so before coming to Cambodia, I had the opportunity to travel to Zambia with my mom’s travel agency. That trip changed things for me: I realized I eventually wanted to take over the family business. Conveniently, around the same time, I also got a promotion which meant taking on a lot more responsibility in the marketing department and quite a few more hours.

So while Jordan would still pursue teaching, I decided not to. Instead, I would use this time in Cambodia to settle into my new role, learn the ropes, and get faster at the work so I could continue managing it when I start traveling again in a few months.

When we landed in Phnom Penh, the plan was still to look at apartments. Jordan had spent hours scrolling through Facebook Marketplace and Khmer24, speaking with real estate agents, and curating a list of places to tour.

But when we started visiting apartments, none of them wowed us. We had a long talk afterwards about whether it was the apartments themselves… or the city.

Phnom Penh is massive. And unlike other big cities that we are used to, it doesn’t have a public transport system which makes it feel that much bigger. The roads are near impossible to cross, with no crosswalks or lights. And the sidewalks double as parking lots and food stalls. For two people who prefer walking where they need to go, it was hard to imagine living there.

Never trust a “what if”

Out of the blue, Jordan said, “What if we don’t stay in Phnom Penh? What if we look at Siem Reap (another city in Cambodia) instead?”

We made a pros and cons list of the two cities. And if I’m being totally honest, on paper, Phnom Penh was looking like the right choice: Better opportunities for jobs, bigger city, more stuff to do, larger community. But the pros for Siem Reap: smaller city, calmer (and cuter), were really hard to ignore. And I don’t know about Jordan, but to me the more and more I looked at Siem Reap, the more I knew that we were going to live there.

Because the thing is, when you change plans that you’ve had for months so quickly. They don’t fully change. They’re just kind of in a weird limbo. We were going to go to Siem Reap and look at apartments. But we told ourselves we weren’t really making a decision, both options were still wide open and we could easily resume the original plan. But I think deep down, I already knew. And when we arrived, I knew immediately: we weren’t going back to Phnom Penh.

Our New Home

We toured a bunch of apartments that day (with Jordan and I both having mild food poisoning). And the very last apartment we saw. One that wasn’t even on our list, the real estate agent just took us because he was free for another hour became our home for the next three months. It’s a two-bedroom apartment near the center for $400 a month. We set up our own Wi-Fi so I could work remotely, and now we shop at the local markets for fruit and veggies to cook at home.

Someone said that Siem Reap is like “a city pretending to be a small town.” And that captures it pretty much perfectly. Online people said you get island fever if you stay here for too long because it’s boring. But I disagree. There’s plenty of stuff to do. Especially if you yourself are good at entertaining yourself. The city is walkable, with a river, markets, street food, restaurants, and just enough buzz to keep life interesting.

Even though Siem Reap was definitely the right fit for Jordan and I, there was a tradeoff. There are far fewer teaching opportunities here. Jordan really wanted to work in a language center, and it would have been difficult in Phnom Penh, but at least possible. But here, there are only a handful of language centers and the competition is steep.

So, he’s figuring things out. He might explore online teaching, or maybe something entirely different. It’s still unfolding, but that’s the nature of travel: plans bend and change, and we adapt.

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So, that’s where we’ve landed: not in Phnom Penh as planned, but in Siem Reap, in a cozy apartment, building a different kind of life than the one we first imagined.

Things will look a little different for me in the next few months. I won’t be parading around as much, since I’ll be working more and settling into this new routine. But I’d love your input: what do you want to see more of here on the blog? Let me know in the comments below, or take the quick survey I’ve linked.