Jessica Duff & Alison Ozawa Saunders

I am very excited about our next Coffee and Conversation session coming up after the Chinese New Year break. Alison Ozawa Saunders and Jessica Duff have agreed to come and talk about their recently published book: The Expats’ Guide to Singapore: Finding Your Feet on the Little Red Dot.

This new guide for expats in Singapore with everything the newbie needs to know, but at the same time provides the seasoned expat with a fresh view of the island on which they live!

In The Expats’ Guide to Singapore: Finding Your Feet on the Little Red Dot, expats Jessica Duff and Alison Ozawa Sanders walk the “newbie expat” through getting to know - and love - expat life in Singapore. The pair behind the popular “ Wives” blog and Facebook page, Jess and Ali reveal inside information and share their own hard-earned experiences (and many, many mishaps) which will leave the reader snorting with laughter. They cover choosing the right car, neighborhood, or condo, navigating the city, and (perhaps most pressingly) how to deal with the disaster which is expat hair in tropical humidity.

Why did they write the book? “Very simply - because no one else has. Because all those other guidebooks are boring, and being an expat in Singapore is anything but. Because we got tired of having to turn to the internet every single time we needed to know something about life here . . . Because we remember what it was like to be a newbie, searching in vain for a fun, informative, helpful, real-life resource to help us along. We couldn’t find one. So we wrote it.”

“Hilarious and spot-on. This is the book I wish I’d had when I was a new expat in Singapore.” -Lisa Beazley, author of Keep Me Posted.

“…a genuinely helpful and comprehensive tome about [expat] life in Singapore…” - Sassy Mama Magazine, sassymamasg.com.

Jessica and Alison are both expats, living and raising their children in Singapore. Jess was born and raised in Ireland and moved to Singapore from London, and Ali is from California. In previous lives (i.e., back in their home countries, pre-expat adventure) they were both lawyers, but today they are trailing spouses, harried parents, and resigned to being fairly constant hot messes. They like to drink coffee (and gin, depending on the time of day), explore Singapore, and look for solutions to their constant-sweat and hair-frizz issues. They have both also worked as freelance writers, although lately the bulk of their writing comprises exasperated, all-caps text messages to each other which now make up the Textpat Wives blog.

Alison and Jessica are the duo behind the popular blog and Facebook page, Wives. Both are expats, living and raising their families in Singapore. Ali is from California, and Jess was born and raised in Ireland and moved to Singapore from London. Both are former lawyers, current harried parents, and fairly constant hot messes. They like to drink coffee (and gin, depending on the time of day), explore Singapore, and look for solutions to their constant sweat and hair-frizz issues. They’ve both done some freelance writing in the past, but these days the bulk of their writing comprises exasperated, all-caps text messages to one another. They met in a playground in 2014—newbie expat strangers bringing their respective 1-year-olds on a blind (play)date—and have never looked back.

Click here to read an excerpt from the book - and make sure you mark this event in your calendar as something to look forward to after the break!