Travel to Live. Live to Travel

A great bit from a nice little post called, “How to Survive Living in a Foreign Country” on Thought Catalog. Plan on making friends that will stick. Living together in a strange place together binds you. The only problem with the friends you make is that they, like you, have caught a full dose of [...]

We’ve finally landed in Belize and I’m looking at a bottle water that says, “welcome to Belize: melting pot of cultures.” It’s actually this melting pot–not the beautiful beaches we flew over or the Mayan ruins that I am most intrigued by. Naturally, these sights are awesome and worthy of intrigue; however, I feel so [...]

I recently came across this fabulous entry, 3 Reasons to Travel While You’re Young by Jeff Goins. I love/hate those pieces of inspirational travel writing that make me want to get up, pack my bags, and set off on an adventure. I know it’s just a matter of time, though. Two things that stuck out to [...]

I am often asked how I can travel as much as I do. The answer is NOT, “I am rich.” We are able to travel so often primarily because travel is our main hobby and you’d be surprised how much money you have if you do not have a cable subscription, drink regularly, own a [...]

As they say, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. When I lived in Japan, I had many arguments with fellow Western women on this subject. The argument was usually, “well, I do this in America/UK/Australia…” or “whatever, no one’s ever said anything to me about it,” which was infuriating because just because no [...]

Okay, I’ll admit, we’ve been pretty terrible at blogging lately. I just uploaded photos from our trip to Puerto Rico last Christmas (over 6 months ago!) and I will definitely write something about it. I’ve also been contemplating posting back entries from my travels in Asia when I was in Japan. Is that worth doing, [...]

Today was our first day real day in Morocco–despite our best attempts, we missed breakfast on the terrace. The riad we’re staying at is even more lovely during the day, and the owners Alexandre and Yasmin have been fantastic so far. We decided to go for a bit of a wander around–a walk that couldn’t [...]

I’m a notorious packrat. Case in point, I’ve been racking up frequent flier miles since I was 16 years old, since then I’ve managed to hoard over 140,000 miles. The weird thing was that there wasn’t a specific trip or anything that I was saving for–I was just doing it for ONE DAY when I [...]

So in my research about traveling in Barcelona, I came across a somewhat funny article called Barcelona Clothes and Dress Code: Tips on How to Blend in With the Locals. The primary reason for this article is to keep tourists safe from scam-artists and pickpockets, but I would argue that those people would be targets [...]

After months of deliberation we finally narrowed down what we wanted to do on the honeymoon. Something exotic. Something with diving possibilities.  The beach. We added the stipulation “no Asia,” since we’d lived three years of our life there and already been to various countries multiple times (as much as we love Asia, there’s many [...]

I haven’t been writing here because it’s been a year since I’ve left the country (the U.S). At the risk of sounding like a total ass, the truth is that this one year is the longest I’ve stayed in one country in the past 10 years or so. Thinking about it, this may the longest stretch [...]

So I was standing on the corner of Avenue of the Americas and Washington, on the phone with a friend, trying to figure out where he was. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a woman in her mid-40s walking towards me. She gets about 2 inches away from my face and says, [...]

For my “welcome to New York” party, I decided what better way to bring my friends together than through drunken singing? It was a lot of fun, and friends from many different circles (high school friends, JET friends, Internet friends, etc.) all came together and sang their little hearts out. Two of my friends are [...]

I move to New York on Tuesday, which is very exciting, but even more exciting is the fact that I’ve got three interviews lined up, and very likely, a temporary job for a month. While it’s nothing special, I’m just happy that I could be working and earning some money (and making contacts as well [...]

I haven’t written in my blog in a really long time, so I thought this would be a good time to start. After a huge ordeal, we have things semi-sorted out with life and visas. Hugh is returning to Australia to wait out his K1 fiancee visa. My advice to you all: plan very far [...]

Something I’ve always wanted to do is learn how to scuba dive. Imagine my delight when I found out that not only does my cousin dive, but she was willing to take us out somewhere to go on an intro dive. We drove out to Anilao in Batangas to a small resort. When I arrived, [...]

Living in Japan, I often heard people ask me, “how can we Japanese learn English?” or “How come the Koreans/Chinese/Filipinos/Singaporeans speak English better than us?” It was kind of an odd question that I couldn’t really answer before, but coming back to the Philippines the answer seems so obvious: you learn English by using it. [...]

While in the Philippines, my cousins and uncles have been trying endlessly to gross out Hugh with “exotic” Filipino food. I think this is a pretty common practice around the world, where rather than be embarassed about some local delicacies, most people consider Americans (and its usually Americans who are so grossed out by foreign [...]

After the wedding, we went with my cousins to Baguio, a mountain-top city which serves as a summer retreat for Manilans. I was told that it was very rural and provincial, but I guess after backpacking through rural Laos I had a completely different idea of what that would be. While it was certainly quite [...]

We officially arrived in the Philippines on the 26th, worn-out and suffering from food poisoning (well, me at least.) However, after a few days of rest we were able to attend my cousin’s wedding. Although I’m ethnically Filipino, I was born and raised in the United States and had only attended one Filipino wedding prior [...]