I started Premiere English a few years after having returned to the US from teaching English in South Korea for almost five years, an experience that transformed both my life and my views on the world forever.  I loved the strangeness of being in a foreign country having to adapt to speaking a foreign language and navigating a world that in every way was alien to me, despite my own mother being from here.  At that time, arriving to Korea felt like traveling to another planet and I found it to be equal parts overwhelming and stimulating at the same time.  I felt the sense of a massive awakening being in an environment that constantly challenged me to pay attention and reconsider all of my assumptions about how to move in the world.  The smallest acts that I took for granted growing up in rural Texas proved to be very uncomfortable challenges initially--like going down to the local store to shop not knowing what the names of the various denominations of bills and coins were in Hangul when I sheepishly went to pay at the checkout.  Outside of my fellow English speaking expat teaching colleagues, I could go for long stretches without encountering another American.  For many of the Koreans I encountered on a daily basis, I was the first American they had ever encountered and it was funny to randomly hear a voice in passing crowds blurting out random English phrases like, "Thank you!"  I often felt like a zoo animal riding the public bus.  I lost the sense of anonymity I enjoyed and took for granted growing up in Texas.  In Korea at that time, going out in public caused a bit of a scene, in particular because at 6'4", I towered over Koreans.  But as time went on, I started learning how to speak and read Korean and I distinctly remember one moment standing on a corner somewhere in the middle of Daegu, South Korea and suddenly realizing that being on the other side of the world felt completely normal now.  Living in Korea for those five years lit a fire in me to travel extensively and that flame has led me to undertake personal pilgrimages to all sorts of far away places like Thailand, China, Malaysia, Borneo, Ireland, England, Spain, France, Germany, and Greece over the years with a few years spent once again living abroad across our northern border in Canada with stays in Vancouver, Montreal and Nova Scotia.