Welcome to Two Can Travel!
(Short Version)
Hi, we’re Jen and Stevo!
We’re Americans who left the US in 2011 and we’ve been traveling the world together ever since.
We started our travels teaching English in China. What was meant to be one year turned into three.
Then we moved to Cambodia and spent three years there teaching at International Schools.
We were tired of having to ask a boss for time off. We wanted to travel more and to live life on our own schedule. So we decided to start Digital Nomad life…with really no concrete plan of how we would make it work.
It’s been a crazy journey, and we’re still working to figure it out. But that’s part of the joy in it, and there’s nothing else we’d rather be doing.
We are SO grateful we’re living this lifestyle. We make money working as Online Teachers, Bloggers, Youtubers, house sitters, as a Freelance Virtual Assistant (Jen), and a Stand-up Comedian (Stevo).
We travel all over the world and we get to meet incredible and interesting people, and experience different ways of living.
We started Two Can Travel to inspire people who want to travel, live abroad, or become Digital Nomads. We want to show you that it is possible to live the life YOU want.
We believe in the power of travel to change your outlook on the world and help you and your partner grow both individually and as a couple.
We have plenty of free resources to help you travel better, for cheaper, and longer.
We also have a Youtube channel where we make videos about travel and digital nomad life. We put out New Videos Every Saturday.
If you want to know more about us, read on. Otherwise, check out amazing Travel Destinations or learn How You Can Become a Digital Nomad in six months or less.
(Long Version)
Hi, we’re Jen and Stevo, a couple in our 30’s from southern California.
We’ve been living outside of the USA since 2011, traveling, working, and living around the world. Now we’ve made it our mission to help others (like YOU!) who want to pursue their travel dreams make it happen!
How have we been traveling for so long?!
We left the USA in 2011 to teach English in China. Our plan was to be gone for a year, but we ended up loving life abroad.
Every day living in Asia felt like a new adventure. We were constantly meeting new people, learning new things, and gaining skills that propelled us toward opportunities we never expected. We were traveling, working, and living in Asia for 10 years!
In June of 2021, we flew to Bucharest, Romania for the start of our European travels. We spent 22 months traveling and house sitting around Europe in France, the UK, Albania, Spain, and Italy.
In June 2023 we flew to Lima, Peru to begin more house sitting adventures in Oxapampa, Costa Rica, and Panama.
Follow us on Instagram for regular travel updates!
Why did we start this blog?
We started Two Can Travel to inspire people like you who want to travel or live abroad and to show you that it is possible to live the life YOU want.
We believe in the power of travel to change your outlook on the world and help you and your partner grow both individually and as a couple.
We also have a Youtube channel where we make videos about travel and digital nomad life.
How can we afford to travel so much?
When we left the United States in 2011 we knew we wanted to travel long-term, but we definitely didn’t have the money to do it. Instead of staying in the US and saving for a year or two, we decided to move abroad and teach English. That way we’d be living in a foreign country, but could still earn and save money.
So we took a TEFL course in California and got certificates qualifying us to teach English abroad. Within a month of completing the course, we found jobs teaching English in China.
We ended up working in three different cities in China for about three years, living in bigger cities each time. Our pay increased each year as we gained more experience.
Teaching English in China provides an adequate salary. In our experience, jobs included medical benefits, flights, and sometimes even housing.
From 2015-2018 we lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Jen worked all three years at an international primary and early years school teaching grade one. Stevo worked at several different international schools as a consultant, a manager, an IT specialist, and a 3rd Grade homeroom teacher.
When we got to Cambodia we didn’t have any work lined up, but we were able to find teaching jobs within a couple of months.
If you want to teach English abroad we highly recommend that you get a TEFL certificate. Nowadays it’s much cheaper and easier to do a TEFL course online compared to when we did our certification in person back in 2011 (we paid WAY too much!).
We recommend doing a 120-hour TEFL course with the company MyTEFL. Not only are their courses easy to follow at your own pace, but they also provide free job placement services. If you use our code: TWOCAN35 you’ll get 35% off your online TEFL course with MyTEFL.
Most schools in Asia require teachers to have a Bachelor’s Degree in any subject and a 120-hour TEFL certification. It is preferable if you have teaching experience, but it’s still possible to find a teaching job in Asia if you don’t have any teaching experience.
Interested in teaching abroad? Use our discount code TWOCAN35 for 35% off MyTEFL courses! They also offer free job placement services.
After about six years of teaching abroad in international schools in China and Cambodia, we were ready for something new.
We loved traveling during school breaks, but we really craved the freedom to travel whenever we wanted.
After finishing up the school year in 2018, we left our teaching jobs and decided to pursue digital nomad life! We’ve been working to make our dream of full-time travel a reality ever since.
We’re proud to say that we’re making it happen and are still going! We are so grateful for this work from anywhere lifestyle!
How we Earn Money as Digital Nomads
In 2019 we started teaching English online with the company VIPKID. Unfortunately, in 2021 the laws in China changed and foreign teachers were no longer able to teach children in China, so our jobs went away practically overnight.
In 2022 we started teaching English online to professionals in Europe, Asia, and South America, which we are still doing now.
Aside from teaching, we spend our time doing other things we love.
Stevo is pursuing his stand-up comedy career. He has also taken on some very cool comedy writing projects. He’s been headlining at comedy clubs around Asia and Europe, and also gigs in California when we go home for visits. He’s performed in 20 countries so far and was also on a Romanian TV show!
Jen does some freelance writing and also offers virtual assistant services like editing, copywriting, email marketing, and social media to small businesses. She’s taken on some great clients and enjoys working in the travel industry in this way. She also works with clients in the wellness industry including a nutritionist, a voice coach, and a trauma care specialist.
We’ve both been working on this blog more, focusing on writing high-quality articles designed to help people, like you, who want to travel or pursue a digital nomad lifestyle.
In 2021 we started working on our Youtube channel. We put up new videos on Saturdays. We’d love it if you’d check out our channel and subscribe!
We’re always working to build up our income, but another way we’ve been able to travel so much is by house sitting and getting free accommodation. We use the platform Trusted Housesitters to find house sits all over the world. Since we started house sitting in 2019 we’ve already had over 25 months of fee accommodation in 10 countries. And we have more house sits lined up in the future!
Watch our full review of using Trusted Housesitters.
We love this full-time lifestyle we’re designing and while it isn’t always perfect, we’re happy to share our victories and mistakes along the way so we can help you.
Housesitting and Petsitting
Housesitting has been such a game-changer for us in our travels. We find house and pet sits through a website called Trusted Housesitters. There are many housesitting websites out there, but we have had a lot of success with this one!
So far we’ve done 15 house sits through Trusted Housesitters for a total of 25 months. That’s 25 months of rent-free living while we travel!
House and pet sitting with Trusted Housesitters works as an exchange.
Homeowners love the peace of mind knowing their animals can stay in their home and be looked after, and also save money not having to board them. House sitters get free accommodation while they travel and get to stay in a comfortable home with sweet pets. It’s a win-win-win for everyone!
We can’t recommend Trusted Housesitters enough if you like animals and want to travel. Learn more about Trusted House Sitters and get 25% off your membership.
Online Teaching
In May 2019 we started teaching English online with VIPKID. We loved it more than we expected! We could create our own schedules and the pay was pretty great too. VIPKID only hires Americans (not in CA, WA, or NY) and Canadians with Bachelor’s Degrees.
The cool thing is that you don’t necessarily have to have any teaching experience, just any experience at all working with kids. You can read more about working with VIPKID in this article.
Unfortunately due to new laws in China as well as laws in CA and NY, we were no longer be able to work for VIPKID as of April 2022. We’re bummed, but it’s also been a good push for us to move on to new things.
If you’re interested in online teaching, there are many other companies out there that hire English teachers from different countries.
Both Trusted Housesitters and teaching online make it possible for us to continue our nomadic lifestyle. We are so grateful to be living in a time where opportunities like this exist!
Why Asia for so long? #1 Reason=Quality of Life
We mentioned that we lived, worked, and traveled in Asia for 10 years. Why did we choose to stay there for so long?
One big part of it was the cost of living.
Compared to what we were able to afford back in California, our quality of life in Asia was much more comfortable. We didn’t have the stress of car payments, insurance, high rent or food prices, or the feeling that we were working for the weekend.
Check out this article to see what it cost us to live in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
While teaching and living in Asia we were been able to save money, completely pay off credit card debt, and pay down student loans too.
We choose to make saving for travel a priority, which is the #1 way to make it happen. We traveled throughout Asia during breaks and between teaching contracts every year.
By teaching English and saving while living in China and Cambodia, and employing some budget travel strategies on the road, we were able to travel (aka be on vacation) for 27 months from 2011-2018!
And now we travel full-time!
However, even when we aren’t traveling, every day abroad is an adventure. Just doing mundane things like grocery shopping is a fun challenge because we’re doing it in different environments and communicating in new languages.
Learn more about both of us below.
More about Stevo
Born in California, USA, Stevo has been a world traveler since a young age. After moving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Orlando, Florida, when he was eight his family moved to Istanbul, Turkey for his father’s job.
After three years in Istanbul and some bombs exploding too close to home, they headed back stateside to California. His family is extremely loving and close, undoubtedly from these traveling experiences.
Before we moved to Asia, Stevo worked in California as a lifeguard and swimming instructor and was the finest water aerobics teacher in all the land. He has a freakishly enviable reading ability and an insatiable desire to learn.
Stevo graduated from the University of Santa Barbara with a degree in Political Science in 2011. He has since worked as a Deputy Director helping to set up a primary school, homeroom teacher for grade three, as a School Manager and IT Specialist for a small international school, and taught English and swimming.
He also works as a stand-up comedian and an event emcee. He brings an element of fun and laughter to any working environment.
Stevo’s passion is making people laugh. Back in America in 2011, he did stand-up comedy in the Belly Room at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles and at a local bar in our hometown where he won a few competitions. He has also performed at the Brea Improv in California. Once he was roasted by Jeff Ross at The Hollywood Improv in LA, which was ridiculous more than impressive.
Although Stevo’s comedy career was on hiatus when we were living in smaller cities in China, he reignited his love for stand-up comedy in Shanghai at the Kung Fu Komedy Club in 2013 where he was quickly embraced by the city’s growing comedy scene and performed 3-5 nights per week.
During our travels, he has made connections through local comedy scenes and has now performed in 20 countries: USA, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, India, Taiwan, Laos, Hong Kong, Romania, France, the UK, Albania, Spain, and Bulgaria.
He helped to found Cambodia’s comedy scene during our time there and ran several shows a month at venues around the city.
He was a part of Bangkok’s comedy scene where he was on stage several nights per week at comedy clubs all around the city.
He became a regular in Kuala Lumpur’s stand-up scene when we lived there for 13 months when we were “stuck” there by choice during Covid from 2020-2021.
Stevo has performed at several comedy festivals including Magners International Comedy Festival Thailand (2017, 2018, 2019), Hong Kong International Comedy Festival (2018), Orange Country Comedy Festival (2019).
Follow Stevo on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
More about Jen
Jen was born in California, USA. She lived there through high school when she decided that beautiful weather year-round was for suckers and went on to study at the University of Pittsburgh.
Jen discovered her love of traveling around the world while at Pitt when she embarked on the Semester at Sea program during her sophomore year where she visited 11 countries across 4 continents and was duly bitten by the travel bug.
Over the past 15 years, Jen has fallen in love with yoga. She loves the energy and clarity of mind her practice brings and finds it has emotional benefits as well. She takes classes as much as possible when we’re in one spot and practices on her own on the road.
Jen is passionate about helping people. During her time at the University of Pittsburgh, she helped found the Pitt chapter of Feelgood, an organization that works with The Hunger Project to sustainably end world hunger, one grilled cheese at a time.
After graduating from college she went to Cambodia to teach English at a rural center for children from low-income families or without parents known as Assistance to Poor Children’s Agency (APCA). Her dream was to bring Stevo back there one day to meet the kids, and we’ve been back to volunteer together as teachers.
While volunteering was an amazing experience, we recommend it with caution. When we moved to Cambodia we learned more about the industry of voluntourism and the negative effects of taking children out of their families to live in centers such as the one where we volunteered. We now realize that supporting the whole family so kids can stay at home and still go to school is a better way to help vulnerable children for their long-term development. Learn more about the ethics of volunteering in Cambodia on the Friends International website.
Jen works as an online English teacher. She is also a freelance writer and photographer telling stories about sustainability, culture, food, and more. She also offers SEO, PR, and marketing services to clients in the travel, sustainability, and wellness industries.
Our Love Story
We met in Spanish class during our junior year of high school in southern California. We had many mutual friends in school, which brought us closer, and by senior year we were hanging out all the time.
We started dating while in university, keeping it a secret from our friend circle for quite a while (or so we thought). However, we were going to schools across the country from each other and the long distance was terrible.
We each broke up with the other once during university at pivotal transitions in our lives. Jen broke up with Stevo before embarking on a journey around the world on Semester at Sea, and Stevo broke up with Jen before transferring to the University of California Santa Barbara from a school in Illinois.
This time apart was crucial to our growth as individuals and showed us what life without one another was like. Turns out it’s not as good! Though we dated other people while we were apart, we remained friends.
In 2010 we both found ourselves single and back in California and we started dating again. A year later we moved to China together. In 2013 we got married!
Here’s where we’ve been and lived so far:
September 2011-September 2012
We taught English at a children’s language school in Mudanjiang. China, close to Russia and North Korea. We also traveled throughout Northeastern China to Beijing, Shenyang, Harbin, Dalian, Dandong, and Sui Fen He. We went home for two weeks in June for a good friend’s wedding and while we were there we got engaged!
October 2012-December 2012
After our one-year teaching contracts were complete we traveled in Thailand and Cambodia. We spent seven weeks volunteering as English teachers at a center in the Cambodian countryside. Jen had previously taught there for five months in 2009, and this was the first time for Stevo to go back with her.
December 2012-June 2013
We moved to Yangzhou, China, the birthplace of fried rice, to teach English at an IELTS training school. This time we were teaching high school and college students who were preparing to take the IELTS and TOEFL exams to study abroad in English speaking countries. This is what we specialized in when we took our TOEFL course, which is how we got that job.
Over those six months we had a decent amount of free time during office hours, so we decided to learn Chinese. We dedicated ourselves to it, mainly studying with Pimsleur and Memrise, and right before the exam with a private tutor. At the end of our six-month contracts, we went to Shanghai to take the HSK level 2 test, which we both passed!
During that time we also traveled to Hong Kong, Wuxi, Suzhou, Nanjing, Xi’an, and several more times to Shanghai. We absolutely loved Shanghai and decided that was where we wanted to move next. During that time we were also planning our wedding.
June 2013-August 2013
After our teaching contracts in Yangzhou were complete we went back to Cambodia for a one-week pre-wedding honeymoon. Then we flew to New York and drove to Connecticut for Jen’s grandma’s 80th birthday. We spent a day in NYC before flying to our hometown in California to get ready for our wedding.
Our wedding was amazing and we felt so loved surrounded by our families and friends from near and far. We went on a short honeymoon in Big Bear, California where we jet skied on the lake, went on a sunset helicopter ride and enjoyed some R&R and delicious California wines.
We spent a couple of weeks with our families and friends in our hometown before heading to Shanghai.
September 2013-May 2014
We moved to Shanghai to teach at an international school about an hour outside of the city. Stevo was a homeroom teacher in grade three and Jen taught homeroom in grade one.
Shanghai is awesome! There is so much to do and see there. Stevo performed stand up comedy several nights a week at Kung Fu Komedy and was improving rapidly, getting more time on bigger shows. We made wonderful friends, and our social calendars were packed, a welcome change compared with the quieter cities we’d lived in before.
Unfortunately, even with all of our teaching experience, the school we were working at turned out to be a sham and was the most horrible working environment we could have imagined. While our social lives were fantastic, the 12 hours we spent every day commuting and working were emotionally and physically draining. We were in the exact scenario we wanted to avoid by living abroad: hating our jobs and working for the weekend.
We believe life is too short to spend it being unhappy. So we left Shanghai and hit the road!
May 2014-November 2014
After leaving Shanghai we traveled slowly for six months throughout Asia. We went to Cambodia for two months, then Thailand for three weeks, Myanmar for four weeks, Malaysia for a few days, and India for ten weeks.
Stevo performed stand-up comedy in every country we visited. Though we by no means had the savings or initial intention to travel for that long, we made it work. Where there’s a will there’s always a way.
November 2014-April 2015
We went home to attend our good friends’ wedding events and to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas with our families in America for the first time in four years. The best surprise was when my sister and her boyfriend from India simultaneously proposed to each other in front of our relatives and friends on Christmas day. It felt so great to be home for those priceless experiences.
Our biggest mistake was not having a plan beyond the holidays. We both took on part-time jobs but meandered aimlessly, for a while without direction. Being back at home for longer than a visit was hard, and we weren’t happy with the lifestyle there.
We both had different ideas for what we’d do next. We started putting the wheels in motions to move to LA, then Taiwan, before deciding that our hearts were pulling us back to Cambodia. We have visited Cambodia together every year since 2012 and had lots of friends there already, so we figured we’d give it a shot!
April 2015-July 2018
After five months in America, it was tough saying goodbye to our families and friends, but we were excited to get on the road again. We spent a wonderful couple of weeks in Thailand, Couchsurfing in Bangkok, celebrating Songkran in Chiang Mai, and a week in Chiang Rai, visiting the very interesting mountain town Mae Salong on the Myanmar border where 80% of the population spoke Chinese. It was fun to practice our Chinese again!
At the end of April 2015, we moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. We settled into life in a country we’ve loved for years. Cambodia is a great base for travel both in and out of the country. While we were there we traveled to Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Laos, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and all around Cambodia.
Over the three years, we worked several different jobs including in a Montessori school, helping to set up a new primary school, teaching English, teaching swimming lessons, transcription, editing, and tutoring.
For the 2016-2017 school year, Stevo worked as a Manager/IT specialist for an international school, and Jen as a 1st-grade teacher, her favorite grade to teach!
In the 2017-2018 school year, Jen taught 1st grade at the same school again, and Stevo is taught 3rd grade at another International school nearby.
July 2018-Present
After our teaching contracts were up in Cambodia we went home to the US for five weeks to visit family and friends. It was a busy trip, bringing us to California, Massachusettes, New York City and Nashville. Stevo’s family moved to Nashville while we were home, and he and his brother loaded up the car and took the family dog on a cross-country road trip from California to Nashville in just four days.
In August of 2018 we flew to Bangkok, Thailand to begin our attempt at becoming digital nomads. We have taken a big leap into full-time travel and trying to sustain our lifestyle while on the road. This blog was our side hustle for the time we were in Cambodia, but we are now using it as a platform to earn money through freelance writing, editing, SEO, marketing services, and through our affiliate partners.
So far it’s going well! If you or anyone you know needs any of these services, feel free to put them in touch with us. Contact Jen (at) twocantravel (dot) com.
Stevo is now headlining at comedy shows around Asia. Jen has been to several travel conferences including the Mekong Tourism Forum and getting to know amazing people in the travel sector all across Asia.
We are pursuing goals we’ve been working towards for the past few years, and as scary as it is, we are so glad we are taking this leap.
We hope you’ll follow along with us!
If there are any topics you’d like us to cover on the blog or if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Stevo@twocantravel.com
Jen@twocantravel.com
If you’ve made it this far, thanks so much for reading! Here’s a picture of us in Bangkok after a very special Couchsurfing experience as your reward. Read more…
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