After my good friend Alex, founder of Travel Fashion Girl passed the Blogger Relay Baton to me, I realized what a predicament I was in. Choosing my three favorite travel memories was a difficult exercise in elimination. With a memory that is saturated in rich colors, exotic flavors, and unforgettable moments spent all over this…
My first few days in Siem Reap,Cambodia knocked me off kilter. Poverty is in your face: children are at your feet, men without limbs are dragging themselves along the street, women are begging you to purchase their wares so they can feed their family, and babies are crying. The clothes are dirty, the words are…
Sitting in a small Siem Reap cafe, I overheard a conversation about a place called HAVEN. It sounded outstanding: a restaurant that trains local young adults and then places them in jobs where they can use their skills to create a life for themselves. Ideal. Braving the fear of rejection, I wrote to the owners…
It starts like any other addiction: a quick voyage into an unknown world. Maybe your friends are all doing it, and they’ve goaded you as well. Maybe you saw it on TV and it looked incredibly cool. I can’t tell you why we start, and I can’t tell you how to stop. My name is…
“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” – Thomas Jefferson In case you live under a rock or only through your television, yesterday was October 15th, 2011- Global (R)Evolution Day. Spurred on by the Arab Spring, Spanish Summer, and American Autumn the whole world…
It starts like any other addiction: a quick voyage into an unknown world. Maybe your friends are all doing it, and they’ve goaded you as well. Maybe you saw it on TV and it looked incredibly cool. I can’t tell you why we start, and I can’t tell you how to stop. My name is…
Nothing can explain the way I feel when I see the golden sun sweep over the heavy grape vines of October in California’s central coast. There aren’t words poetic enough to explain the tranquil beauty of the gorgeous Pacific waves crashing on our shores. No foreign place will ever make my heart sing the way…
You know who you are: the sweaty, dirty, often exhausted, sunburned and hungry ones. The ones who try to live in each country like it’s their own, who take a bite of culture so large it’s sometimes hard to swallow. Who feel the change inside themselves with every country they enter, and feel a small part of their heart break with each country they leave.
Preparing a salad in Portugal I was stopped mid-slice by a woman who put her hand on mine, and told me to stop wasting. I was shocked, hurt, and even offended. “Waste? I’m not wasting- I’m cutting an apple!”
In the city there was a man with no arms or legs. He obviously had no means of making money, so every day his neighbor would carry his stump of a body (there really is no other way to put it) to the main street where he would wait for passersby to give him a coin or two. I hid in an alleyway across from him and watched for 20 minutes. Nearly every Moroccan who passed tossed in money, some stopped to fan him because of the heat, some tilted his head back and poured their water into his parched mouth, some simply put their hand over their heart and smiled warmly at him.