Susan Spano is a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer who teaches English at Proshyan School in Ashtarak. Before moving to Armenia last year she was a travel writer who launched the still-running “Frugal Traveler“ column for the New York Times, then joined the staff of The Los Angeles Times which sent her to the City of Light from 2003 to 2006 to start the popular travel section blog “Postcards from Paris.” After that she spent six months in Beijing studying Mandarin and researching stories in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics and then moved to Rome--her favorite foreign posting--where she wrote on everything Italian, from Caravaggio to mozzarella. Her articles have also appeared in the Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler and Redbook. She is the author of French Ghosts, Russian Nights & American Outlaws: Souvenirs of a Professional Vagabond, came out in May, 2015, from Roaring Forties Press.