Goodbye, 2020. Hello again, everyone.
Hey, everyone! I didn’t want to let this freaky year go by without writing something here. If you’re reading this…I guess we both made it. If you lost someone this year, I’m sorry. I lost an uncle, my mother’s eldest brother. He lived just a couple of meters away from us and our families were […]
Applying for a Korean Visa in Cebu (October 2019)
My family and I are hoping to travel to South Korea this winter so, last week, we applied for a visa at the Korean consulate in Cebu. Our passports are scheduled for release mid-November so we still don’t know if we’ve gotten approved for a visa — keep your fingers crossed for us, please! In […]
Bergamo
Bergamo is located in the northern part of Italy, in the Lombardy region which also includes Milan and Lake Como. It used to be a part of La Serenissima — the Most Serene Republic of Venice — and the wall built by the Venetians around the city to defend it from invasions now divides Bergamo […]
Taking the long way home: The Bernina Express
Well, it took me over three years but I did it… It was an almost spur-of-the-moment decision to buy round-trip tickets to Milan and spend Valentine’s Day moping about in Italy. At first we were going to stay in Milan the entire time but the plan eventually evolved into a completely different creature — as […]
A Goodbye to Dave
♠ The name Dave Stringer won’t mean much to many. His reach wasn’t quite Bourdain level; his death won’t trigger quite as many tributes. Nonetheless he was a great inspiration to me and to all who read his blog. Dave was a nonsmoker who, because life is unfair, got lung cancer anyway. His diagnosis being […]
Windmills, Wild Tulips and Wall Poems
Leiden may seem like Amsterdam Lite but it possesses an identity all its own. It’s the birthplace of Rembrandt. Einstein walked its streets. Wild tulips grow between the road and the water and poems fill the walls.