Travel inspiration for small budgets and big dreams
♥ ♥ Just got back from Sydney! This trip was special for a lot of reasons: it was only H’s second trip outside the Philippines, his and my mom’s first trip outside Southeast Asia, and it was my parents’ first ever hostel experience in their […]
♥ San Gimignano is an old, walled Italian hill town in Tuscany surrounded by numerous vineyards and cypresses. ♣ ♣ Centuries ago, during a period of conflict and intense rivalry, San Gimignano’s prominent families tried to outdo each other by building houses of ever increasing […]
♣ ♣ On the hills just above Florence lies the quiet comune of Fiesole. It is famous for its ruins, Roman and Etruscan; for Fra Angelico, who took his vows there as a friar of the Dominican Order; for Monte Ceceri, where Leonardo da Vinci […]
♥ ♥ The 18th of February marks the anniversary of the death of Anna Maria Luisa de Medici, the last of Florence’s ultra powerful Medici dynasty. She left the family’s entire art collection to Florence under the condition that none of it be ever taken out […]
Do you look down on people who take selfies? (Go on, be honest.) Do you think that people who take selfies are necessarily vain or silly or classless or brassy? Are all selfies automatically shameless? Like this girl in the photo — how do you feel about her? […]
As group projects do. ♥ ♥ As you probably know, the dome of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore — perhaps the most famous landmark in Florence — was built in the early 1400’s by Filippo Brunelleschi. What you may not know is that, […]
My first impression of Australia — Sydney in particular — was that it was inexplicably expensive. I was planning a weeklong trip for a family of 5 and it didn’t take long for the travel budget to reach six figures (in Philippine pesos). Sydney, for […]
Clean, colorful, close enough to the center, buffet breakfast plus free snacks practically 24/7, all for €22 a day. You can do much worse than Hostel Gallo d’Oro. One of my favorite things about my hostel: there's always some food in the kitchen. The room/bed rate comes […]
♥ Photography’s blessing and curse is that it can bend reality — a curse in that it creates unattainable ideals, a blessing in that you can choose to look back on imperfect times with a more forgiving filter. . . Clumps of mud can look like a cluster […]
♥ Cobblestone streets, cafes, trattorias… Trastevere sounded too Instagrammable to still be true. I almost skipped it, if not for the fact that I had no idea how to get back to my B&B from Campo de Fiori. I did know that if I could just get […]