Discovering new cultures

Leisure and work, side by side

Every relocation was also an education.

A career spent moving between service desks and service management functions in France, Ireland, Luxembourg and Singapore — and, more recently, leading teams based in India, Malaysia and Colombia — turned out to be as much a cultural education as a professional one. Different countries run meetings differently, disagree differently, and celebrate differently, and none of that shows up in a job description.

The same curiosity carries over off the clock: travelling further afield for its own sake, for the food, the language mistakes, and the small everyday differences that a guidebook never quite captures.

A scratch map of where I’ve been

A real, geographically accurate world map, colour-coded for lived there, visited for work, and visited for leisure — a country can be more than one at once, shown as a stripe of colours. What’s below is a snapshot of my own working copy, which I keep private and update myself as new places get added; this page refreshes from time to time to match it.

World map with countries shaded garnet, gold, or dark maroon to show places visited for leisure, for work, or lived in, with a legend and three lists of countries

Base map: simple-world-map by Al MacDonald, edited by Fritz Lekschas — CC BY-SA 3.0.

A passport and a compass laid over a paper world map, evoking travel planning and a curiosity for new places.
Photo: Nataliya Vaitkevich / Pexels