Gerry Abbey

I love travel and learning. Cheer, Beers, and Eastern Promise is my story about the best travel and learning I've ever found.

In the spring of 2004, I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach English as a foreign language in Taiwan. During that year, I taught in a rural town on the east coast, about two and a half hours south of Taipei. After many months of attempting to acclimate to this place I’d known nothing about, I found that I had hundreds of pages of journals. With this base produced by conflicted alienation in the midst life-shaping adventure, I began writing my first book. Slowly, I outlined my story by selecting favorite and, even more so, least favorite experiences to extrapolate a cohesive memoir about my life’s transition; little did I know at the time that this was a project that would span most of a decade.