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The eXpat Files Ep. 41 - Welcome Back...To Hell (Patreon)

Published:
2026-07-27 04:41:59
Imported:
2026-07
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Content

The eXpat Files is a series of podcast episodes that chronicle David and @joyofnapping's conversations as they consider how to adjust to life in another country.

In this episode, David and @joy discuss:

The shooting at Bite of Seattle

Joy's earthquake preparedness session

The Really Big One

Our PNW Road Trip

Haystack Rock

Camp 18 Restaurant

Seeing The Odyssey in LA

DChen's reel about Gig Harbor IMAX

PATRONS: You can get this audio in your podcast app by going to patreon.com/davechen, going to the "My Members

Files

Comments

Suren DeSilva

I’ve lived in Portland my whole life and I feel like every 5 years or so an article comes out about “the big earthquake”. I remember being most scared hearing about it in high school (1998-2002) and trying to have an emergency kit ready in my car. With each passing year, whenever it comes up, the kit and my level of fear has gotten smaller and smaller. I realize that the longer nothing happens only makes the threat worse but I’ve just become a person that’s like, if it happens, I’ll figure it out.

Suren DeSilva

*Not trying to minimize your fears. Just expressing how [as with most things, these days] I’ve become numb to it.

Joy o Napping

I actually think the training showed me the same thing, that we can’t pre-plan for what will specifically happen… so ‘we will figure it out’ is actually the ethos, but with the addition of a strong emphasis on community (enabled by communication)

Suren DeSilva

Totally. I love that! My friends and family have been discussing community building more and more in this current political hellscape. There is no doubt this current regime will have zero interest in sending help to the PNW.

Amy Reyes

What was the emergency training class called? I am curious whether there is a metal box near me. (Although I live in Oregon)

Curtis

My girlfriend and partner and I have listened to the expat files cover to cover now, not continuously but in 3-4 binges. So we often get the time warp of covering multiple months of expat time in just a day or two. We happen to be from Victoria and have visited Madeira together. At an earlier point we considered “could we live in Portugal?” (With a Madeira focus), so the PNW to Porto pipeline has a mirror resonance for us. Thus, our interest in the podcast. There are many similarities, including the appeal of “learning Portugues well”, a long-running thread that started in Brazil for me on a different trip in a different part of my life, but remains an unfinished painting. There’s also the seemingly mild but actually important dynamic that I like to catch films in theatres - something most of our millennial peers simply don’t do as much any more. So we can relate to so much of what is going on with “voces dois” the two protagonist of the expat files. We kept a running list of questions and now that the journey has come home I finally thought it might be worth sharing them in the comments, (1) because we are curious but (2) because there might be future episodes where the expat part is not actually currently happening, so fodder for commentary might be a good source of episode material. We say this humbly with no expectation of a listener mailbag response. With that, I’ll add them below: -Was there ever talk of “life in Spain” or “comparing Portugal to Spain” or “comparing if you had gone to Spain instead”? (We have a sense that Spain is marginally better for deliveries/ecommerce/goods, but nowhere near America, and of course there are some shared similarities between the two Iberian countries. -Was there ever a consideration for tackling “expat life” in East Asia? In particular, from my time as a digital nomad and speaking with them, there is a strong sense that many locations absolutely have the “life is convenient and I can get what I need” box ticked. Japan, South Korea, perhaps Thailand, Singapore — in fact, many people even consider some of these places better run and more efficient than North America even. Given Mediterranean Europe’s reputation for “things not working/bureaucracy/Kafkaesque nightmares” we wondered if a part of the world known (in specific urban environments, not everywhere) for convenience of food, electronic goods and services and a well-ordered, less “siesta-esque” society was ever on the list? I can’t count the number of people who said they liked Bangkok or Seoul or a mid-sized town in East Asia because they can “just get stuff quickly”. -Did any aspect of living in Portugal make you want to visit Brazil to see the antipodean, down-under, “Portugal in America but much much bigger” -Having lived in Porto and visited Lisbon, did you feel you would have had an overwhelmingly different experience living in Lisbon or Cascais vs Porto? Or would it have been just a slightly different flavor. -Did you get the feeling (which many of my peers talk about as a huge theoretical aspirational possibly too optimistic plus) that “if we permanently lived here we could just take Ryanair flights every second weekend for cheap and see and sample practically all of Europe over the course of a decade.” People talk like this about this in theory. Does that actually feel like something that would be attractive or is it too naive about the inconvenience of flights and power of inertia? -Did being an expat make you think about typical vacations differently - as in - any epiphanies that visiting a place for just a week is almost silly or the opposite feeling? Any sense of “maybe we will remain in Seattle, but we now see the deep satisfaction of going somewhere for four months in winter for “medium-term remote worklife”, or even a sense that all short term travel pales in comparison to expat life’s deeper connection with a place over an amount of time that allows to feel “I am living here”. Almost like 2 minutes of meditation is actually just useless, you need to meditate until you are actually meditating…. Leading the question a bit, tldr do you think about why and how often you might do short-term travel differently now that have an epic long-term travel experience to compare future “jaunts” to