Valencia, Bilbao & Mallorca

The case for traveling for one thing and one thing only An old lady and a dog, a businessman with a briefcase around his chest, and a mother with her son walk into a bar. This is not the set-up to an epic joke, just some observations I made while in the Café Bar Bilbao […]

Bruges

Eight reasons to travel to Brugge this fall. Best of Bruges 2017. Why you can’t miss this Venice of Belgium. You can’t visit Belgium without a stop in Brugge. Don’t be Brugge-y. And all the other catchy travel article titles about Brugge… By the time I reached Belgium this October, my twelfth country to […]

Peru

It’s been 3 months since I’ve returned from my summer in Peru and I’m just now able to process the experience. Not that it was so heavy or deep or that I drank too much coca tea but it was a lot. Friends and family continue to ask me why I went, what I […]

Miami

Remember when we used to pass notes in grade school? We sketched our best friend’s name or I love so and so or acronyms for every new and made up phrase (lylas, ttyl, bffe) all over sheets of blue-lined notebook paper, folded it into some indistinct shape and passed it from desk to desk […]

Prague

Prague wasn’t my idea. It was Veronica who first suggested the Eastern European city when we agreed on a trip to Amsterdam after I raved about my first visit in the fall of 2016. We had a bunch of recommendations from friends, family, and our Airbnb host, but the ultimate plans lay in the hands of […]

Why I Quit My Day Job for 2 Months in Peru

Before you roll your eyes and say “yet another story about a millennial who was over her well-paying job and quit to backpack around the world and blog all about it and convince everyone else to do the same,” just hear me out. I was sitting in a team meeting at my job, a job […]

Cartagena

I almost didn’t make it to Cartagena. Missed my flight from Peru to Colombia and spent an extra night in Cusco wondering if the trip was really meant to be. If the universe was conspiring against me. If the expectation of a good time in Colombia was destined to be unmet and the reality of […]

Planning A Trip To Machu Picchu? Consider These 9 Things

I had the amazing privilege of visiting Machu Picchu during my long-term stay in Peru this summer. The “Lost City of the Incas” was a said to be an estate for the Incan emperor Pachacuti and was later discovered by Hiram Bingham in 1911. Today, it stands as a UNESCO World Heritage site, New Seven Wonder […]

Learning A Second Language Is Easier Than You Think

Have you ever tried learning a new language? I set out to learn Spanish after a week of fumbling my words during a trip to Madrid and Barcelona back in 2015. I’m embarrassed to admit that I studied Spanish in junior high, high school, and college for a total of 8 years prior to going […]

Morocco

I’ll be completely honest, I was afraid to travel to Morocco. Call it irrational, call it ignorance, call it “American media syndrome”, etc. I didn’t know how an Islamic country (even in Africa) would receive me – an African-American, Christian, Female. I had a very uncomfortable experience on a crowded train in Istanbul and was […]