San Miniato al Monte
♥ ♥ The Abbazia di San Miniato al Monte stands on top of a hill overlooking Florence, just a short walk above the Piazzale Michelangelo. Both are popular points from which to catch panoramic views of the city, but while the latter is sometimes described with affectionate derision (or derisive affection) as little more than […]
Just Dance
♥ ♥ Dance like no one’s watching, they say. But of course that’s kind of difficult if you’re in front of one of the most famous churches in the world, in the middle of one of the most visited cities of the world, and you know for a fact that despite it being low season, […]
Where We All Go
♥ ♥ Four weeks ago, as I was walking towards the Tuileries Garden, I fell in step and into conversation with a retired French schoolteacher. It actually started with him asking me if I was Japanese and when I said I was from the Philippines, he exclaimed that he had been. Christian — that was […]
Work from Home (or Hostel)
♥ ♥ If you’d happened to peek through the second floor window of a hostel in Via Cavour (Florence) one Saturday evening last February, you’d have seen a girl hunched over a laptop on her lower bunk bed, sifting through Pubmed abstracts and typing furiously, hoping her boss wouldn’t decide that, actually, come to think […]
From “Why” to “Why Not”
© Gaya | It’s a few minutes before midnight. I’m sitting here at an airport lounge: munching on nuts, coffee already gone cold, laptop open, no immediate plans to sleep despite the lateness of the hour, having already taken a 30-minute nap in sitting position earlier while people around me were having dinner. And I’m […]
How to Save $400 on Philippine Airlines Flights to London
SGMT — Four words: fly through Hong Kong. Yep. Because of…reasons…a Manila-London-Manila ticket will actually be cheaper — and not just cheaper but cheaper by 400 US dollars — if you tack on a Hong Kong-Manila leg and a Manila-Hong Kong leg. –