I moved to Bangkok. Forgive me for the blunt delivery, but when I came to write this post I wasn’t sure what I want to say about it. I didn’t want to say, “Look at me and my jet-set lifestyle – I just casually moved to Bangkok!” because there’s been a complex backstory to get me here. I didn’t want
I think… I think I’m ready to talk about my mental health. I think it feels like time. I think it’s important that you know what’s been going on and it’s especially important because I guarantee that someone you know is struggling with their mental health right now. That someone you know might even be yourself.
Hey guys. So, I recently participated in the World Nomads Travel Writer Scholarship programme, where I wrote a piece on the theme ‘a place that is unfamiliar to me’. Devastatingly, I didn’t win the scholarship (next year, perhaps?), so here is my entry published here instead, entitled Chasing Home:
I’ve been back in the UK now for four months. I’m still reluctant to say ‘back home’, but I’ll admit that it’s slipped off my tongue more than once. Like travel writer Pico Iyer says in his TED talk, ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘Where is home?’ are more complex questions now than they once were.
Yep, I’ve turned into that girl who starts all her sentences with, ‘When I lived in Hong Kong…’ My room is filled with knick-knacks from places I can’t pronounce. I can give advice on jet lag, fear of flying, travelling with only a carry-on and finding cheap flights online. I can speak in different tongues. If you know me, you’re
We now interrupt this scheduled programme of backpacking-related blog posts to bring you something completely different. Time travel. I thought that moving back to the UK this Christmas would just feel like my annual Yuletide visit, and that the fact that I don’t have a return flight wouldn’t hit me until well into the new year. Turns out, I really misjudged
This summer I worked with an eighteen-year-old Etonian. He spoke of ‘bumping into’ David Cameron at chapel, meeting Elton John, as well as hobnobbing with Damian Lewis and Tom Hiddleston at alumna events. He wore the uniform of penguin tailcoats to school every day. Dubbed as one of the best young musicians in the country, he was a cellist. A
‘Europe should be a dream.’ He was a professor at the University of Padua. He had lived all over the world. He brewed his own prosecco, and it tasted delicious. He was Italian. He had the words ‘Will you marry me?’ tattooed onto his chest. That was how he proposed to his now-fiancé.
What am I doing? It was a question that had fluttered into my mind on the bus on the way to the airport, then on the plane to Doha, then on the second plane to Milan, upon landing at 6AM Italian time, and finally when I was ripped off at a currency conversion bureau at Milan Malpensa that left me
So the question is… “Why now?” It danced around my brain as I literally googled, “How to start a blog,” elected a domain name and navigated my way around WordPress. It repeated itself like a catchy jingle as I opened a new Word document to draft the first post and – for once – didn’t just stare at the blank