to Taiwan we will go

If you are my Facebook friend, you already know that we will be moving back to Taiwan in August of 2019. If you are my blogger friend, surprise! Earlier this month, my husband and I made the tough choice to move back to Taiwan. For those of you who know me well, you know how much I adore Taiwan. I mean, we did live there for six wonderful years. You may wonder, then, why this decision was a tough one.

Let me tell you-- we said goodbye, and we were ready to move on to something different. I think my expat friends will understand what I mean. We packed up our life (and dog and kid), had our going away parties and dinners, and said tearful goodbyes to friends-turned-family.

We really expected that to be the end.

Let me backtrack and explain how this came about because I really don't want to tell this story again and again. As many of you know, we are on a gap year. We moved back to the United States last July. My husband is finishing his M.Ed, and I am not working. We are traveling (hello Iceland), spending time with family, and recruiting for next year. I started our job hunt in August. I applied to more than 50 schools in that time. Twenty of those school flat out rejected us via email. We interviewed with four schools: one in Bangkok, one in Ankara, one in Taipei, and one in Santiago. In the end, all of the schools we really wanted to work at rejected us (most citing the lack of experience on the husband's end). The only schools that actively pursued us were in countries we did not want to live in: Myanmar and Kuwait. 

Before hiring new staff, our former school in Taiwan reached out to us to check if we wanted to return before hiring others. We essentially had one day to make up our minds before jobs were offered to other people, and the dangling carrot in front of us was the fact our school would hire Sean to teach middle school math instead of elementary school. In the end, we felt like we had to say yes. 

Sean has been working hard all year so that he can teach middle school mathematics. He aced his certification exam, and he has a 3.9/4.0 average in his graduate program. No school we interviewed with would even consider hiring him to teach middle school mathematics because he has only taught 3rd and 4th grade previously. We were also tired of job hunting, we were also tired of being rejected, and we were also tired of not knowing where we would live the following year. 

While Taiwan and our former school were not our original goals, we feel lucky that we can return to our former home so that Sean can get more experience teaching under his belt before job hunting again in two to three years-- and that is the plan. We will live in Taiwan for either two or three more years before trying our job hunt again. By that time, I will have 13 years of experience teaching and 3 certifications, and Sean will have 7 years of teaching and coveted mathematics teaching experience. Hopefully that will make our job hunt more fruitful. 

In the mean time, we are excited about the friends we will spend time with, the trips we will take all over the world (hello Australia and Norway and the Philippines), and the money we will save. We are also excited to job hunt in a few more years when hopefully many of those "no's" will turn into a few "yes's". 

So-- to Taiwan we will go.