Episode 562: Moving to Rome—Sight Unseen, Part 2 (with Brie Ripley and Ryan Sparks)

The Bittersweet Life

Last year we met Brie Ripley, a young newly married Seattlite who had moved to Rome for a job without ever having visited the city, or even the country.

On this episode, we catch up with Brie and her husband 10 months later to see how they are adjusting to life in Rome and life as expats, now that the expat honeymoon phase is over and they are faced with the real challenges of living abroad.

We talk about their struggles to learn the language, their attempts to create a community, and how hard it can be to live in a foreign country when you don't particularly embrace trying new things.

They both weigh in on what it feels like to be the so-called "trailing spouse" vs. the (for lack of a better term) "leading spouse," how living in a foreign country has changed how they interact as a couple, and whether either of them would have moved to Rome if they had been single at the time (spoiler: their answers are very different from each other!)

Find Part One of this interview here: Episode 527 Moving to Rome—Sight Unseen (with Brie Ripley).

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