Getting My Ears Picked in Taiwan

One of the pleasures of going to Asia, at least for me, is the massages.  Everywhere from Thailand to Vietnam to Cambodia, the massages are excellent, cheap, and widely available. From restorative foot massages after a long day of hiking, to full body deep tissue rubdown that leaves me in […]

Kaohsiung 高雄市: My kind of town

“Please just point to it on the map. Don’t try to pronounce it!” Julia pleaded with me as we approached a ticket counter at the Tainan train station to buy tickets to our next destination. The day before, she was chatting with her massage therapist and tried to tell him […]

Introductory Course: Taipei 101

All of a sudden, everyone knows what Taipei 101 is, after Alex Honnold scaled Taiwan’s tallest building with no ropes and no fear, live on Netflix. We were in Taipei a month before this death-defying stunt, and when Victor mentioned that we would visit Taipei 101, I had no idea […]

Hail Mary at Taoist Temple

“You enter on the right through the dragon door and exit on the left through the tiger door. And you never enter or exit through the middle door. That door is for gods.” We sat on a bench in front of a brightly colored Taoist temple with a rooftop looking […]

Taiwan: The First 24 Hours

The first 24 hours in Asia are crucial. This isn’t an easy 4-hour flight to Mexico City, where we get out of the airplane and hit the ground running, only occasionally stopping to marvel that just a few hours ago we were at home. It doesn’t have a mere 6-8 […]

San Diego. Finally.

By Julia / June 20, 2024

After twenty years of traveling, we have been to over forty countries, almost every U.S. state, most national parks, and basically every major U.S. city.  But there are still places out there to explore. “We have still, somehow, not been to San Diego,” Victor said. I vaguely remembered how.  We […]

King’s Day in Amsterdam

By Victor / June 13, 2024

Earlier this year, we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago and saw the city turn into one big green, drunken mass.  Despite having lived in Chicago for over 20 years, we rarely participate in St. Patrick’s Day festivities and normally avoid the downtown area during that weekend altogether. So, when […]

Tulip Paradise

By Victor / May 30, 2024

As we started to descend toward Schiphol Airport, I was peeking through the plane window and couldn’t contain my excitement: “Look! Tulips!” I shouted. Colorful strips of tulip fields started to appear out of nowhere and stretched to the horizon. On the train ride from the airport, we passed more […]

Stop and Smell the Flowers

By Victor / May 23, 2024

“Dead bushes,” I muttered. “We need to do something about it.” It had been more than a year since the pandemic started, and I was looking through the window of our condo at the lifeless branches dangling outside. “Why don’t we get rid of them and plant some flowers? We […]

The Prettiest Town in Mexico

By Julia / May 16, 2024

“We are going to the prettiest town in Mexico,” Victor said as we were packing our backpacks for the flight. “Says who?” I demanded, “Who decides what’s the ‘prettiest town”? What’s the prettiest town in the US? In Europe? In the world?  I’ve never even heard of Guanajuato before you […]

Rhode Island: Gilded Age of Our Travels

By Victor / May 2, 2024

How do you spell “Victor”? How do you spell “Julia”? I wasn’t sure what I expected before visiting Rhode Island, but learning a new language was certainly not what I planned for. But here we were, at the gift shop of the Sailing Museum in Newport, unexpectedly immersed in the […]

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