What do you get when you have two American Expats and one German Expat talk about a book by a former American Expat living in 1990’s Former East Germany? This culturally windy episode dripping with heaps of blasted stereotypes, linguistic gems and lots of laughter. We are delighted to have Nicole Palazzo, Host of the Expat Cast Podcast on the show today. Her interview with me in February this year on the Expat Cast is a big reason why Bookish Expats exists so danke Nicole! More on the book that we talked about below, but first, let's pay some pod bills.

The Global Soul by Pico Iyer is a seminal geopat book. Stephanie and Summer (Steph’s Co-Host on the new podcast Creatively Complicated) dig into this book in a very big way. This is not a regular episode because Steph is not interviewing Summer about her reading story but instead they are discussing both of their reactions to this book. Summer read this book for the first time recently thanks (or no thanks, lol) to Steph’s persistent recommendation and Steph tried to reread it for the first time since she fell in love with it in 2002.    ​

Antonella Moretti is the Author of Parsley and Coriander, a fictional book about an Italian expat community in Suzhou, China. Antonella has lived in Suzhou for many years herself and draws upon her personal expat experience for this narrative. In this episode we asked Antonella about her two bookish hats: expat reader AND expat Writer. We discuss her love of reading books about China, what led her to write this book on an expat experience in China and about the publication and translation process. The book was initially written in Italian but now has an English version and will soon have a Mandarin Chinese version as well.  Special thanks go out to Tatjana , a bookish Germany expat living in India and to Russian expat living in Shanghai, Marina Kushch, ShanghaiDailyChic on Instagram, for contributing questions to this interview. 

In the podcast episode we chat with Tatjana, in her words “a German married to an Indian-Chinese - or Chinese-Indian depending on the mood of the day”. Tatjana grew up wanting to live in different countries, so she went into Hospitality in order to do so. Of course, at the same time she read voraciously. In fact, while living in Dubai, one of the six cities she has called home thus far, she met her husband. Just before she moved to India to be with him she started reading the works of Indian Author Chetan Bhagat. And thus began her bookjucation of India and Indian culture. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Tatjana in my home in Shanghai and chat about some of Chetan’s books that had an impact on her life in India. We also dig into her bookology, her favorite books and places to read them and so much more. 

​In the podcast episode we chat with Evo Terra . Some of you might remember him from season 2 of the Bangkok Podcast with Co-Host Greg Jorgensen, However, Evo’s podcast history goes back much farther than this. In fact, one of his podcasts was the 40th podcast of all time (there are rumored to be about 700,000ish podcasts listed in Apple Podcasts right now) and he wrote the first Podcasting for Dummies books. We recorded this interview about the time of his one year reverse culture shock anniversary (exexpatsary?) returning to the U.S. after living in Bangkok, Thailand for a few years. He selected the book, Working With The Thais to talk about.​