About the Author

My name is Matt Grager, and I hope you are enjoying my website, Northwest to Near East.  As the name implies, this website is a collection of dispatches, columns, grievances and discoveries related to my move from one end of Western civilization, Seattle, Washington, to the other in Istanbul, Turkey with my girlfriend Taylor.

After high school, I moved from Seattle, where I grew up, to Orange County, California to attend Chapman University, study journalism and play football. I got a job reporting on prep sports part-time for the Orange County Register as a freshman. At the time, I thought it would be a useful launching pad into the industry and an great opportunity to put my studies to work while still in school. Turns out, it was a front row seat to the crumbling of the industry I wanted to make a career in.

In the summer of 2008, I worked as a journalism intern traveling North America to document poverty and social injustice through writing, photo and video. I was sent to Tecate, Mexico in the midst of a drug cartel border war, to the Navajo Indian Reservation in the Arizona high desert, to the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s eye in Mississippi, to the poorest Mexican town in the poorest Mexican state, Ruiz, Nayarit, and finally to document homelessness in my hometown of Seattle. Through this journey, I became addicted to self-directed exploration of people, culture and circumstance and simultaneously grew appalled at my own and my fellow Americans lack of world knowledge.

As the last few months of my college years came to a close, I found my print journalism degree about as relevant as majoring in the telegraph. Fighting upstream for menial low-paying jobs soon got old, tiring and demoralizing. So in an attempt to continue traveling, learning and helping others, I decided to teach English as a foreign language abroad. I am lucky to have a girlfriend with an adventurous spirit, and it was not difficult to convince her to leave her customer service job to teach as well.

After teacher training and lengthy debate about where to teach and smoothing the decision over with the family, we decided to go to Istanbul, for the history, the culture and the people. We both applied, interviewed and accepted jobs on a one-year contract at an English school in the city and have since been obsessed, reading every word in magazines, newspapers and books available on Turkey.

Therefore, when I graduated from college in May 2009, like most of my classmates, I graduated into temporary unemployment. Putting my tail between my legs, I came back to Seattle until I leave for Istanbul in September.

And so begins the adventure of 22-year-old Matt and 23-year-old Taylor, from the Northwest to the Near East.