You could approach the powers that be at your paper and ask for a steady gig as a foreign correspondent. True, these days most papers aren't likely to fork over the funds to relocate you, your loved ones, your sectional couch and your baby grand piano to a luxury flat in Paris. But they might agree to a straightforward freelance contract that pledges to pay you $300 to $400 per news story for, say, five or six stories a month. You'd be living in fat city in many parts of the world with that kind of money, and your newspaper may agree to it because such an arrangement gets you off the payroll and doesn't involve health insurance or any other benefits.

I actually spent my first year in Prague freelancing. It was harder - and lonelier - than I thought it would be, but I certainly have no regrets about doing it. I was able to pull it off because my husband and I moved overseas with decent savings and because I had an arrangement to sell my stuff to the St. Petersburg Times on a regular basis. I also worked as the Prague correspondent for dpa (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, or German Press Agency) for a time, filing stories for dpa's wire each day - but it took a while to find such a blissfully dependable freelance job.

If the idea of winging it on your own doesn't appeal to you, you might consider living like a true local and working for an English-language newspaper in a country you find fascinating. Unless you land a job with the International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal Europe, Wall Street Journal Asia, Reuters, AP or another major wire service, you'll be living like a local because most English-language papers have thin budgets and pay ghastly salaries by U.S. standards.

Before you accept a job at an English-language paper, though, you should take the following steps to make sure you don't burden yourself with a nasty resume stain:

CONSIDER YOUR OPTIONS. You can find comprehensive lists of overseas newspapers organized by country at the following Web sites: ThePaperboy.com (see link above), and Editor & Publisher's online media directory (see link above). Take the time to visit the Web sites of lots of newspapers, and read the staff-written stories carefully.

It will give you a clue about the caliber of the newspapers you're considering, and the Web sites will alert you to any job openings that exist.

ASK ABOUT CREDENTIALS. Find out about the backgrounds and experience levels of the newspaper's reporters and editors.

ASK ABOUT STAFF SIZE. How many reporters are there? Two, including the editor? That can be fun if you're in your 20s, but utterly irritating if you're used to working for a paper with more resources.

ASK ABOUT LANGUAGE REQUIREMENTS. Some papers, like The Moscow Times, require journalists to speak the local language fluently, while others, like The Prague Post, do not.

If the paper you're considering does not require you to be fluent in a foreign language, find out what kind of support you'll be able to receive from translators and interpreters.