Thursday, October 29, 2009

The Neverending Story - One family's adventure around the world

http://www.soultravelers3.com/

Every once in a while, something will trigger my wanderlust.  A few years ago, I watched "Under the Tuscan Sun" with my girlfriends, and we decided we were going to move to Italy and live happily ever after.  (I'm in California, because life happened and two out of three of us got married.)  I travel to Germany and Austria often, to ski, and when I board the plane to leave, tears stream down my windburned cheeks.  (I usually declare I am going to brush up on my German and that I'll be back within the year, but it usually takes two.) I've been looking at jobs at the UN lately, and dreaming of getting a phone call asking when I'm available to come work in Geneva.  (I would say, "I'll take it!" no matter what the job was, and promptly faint.)  This last UN-inspired episode coincides with Christiane Amanpour's new show on CNN, and I dream of being her assistant and carrying her bags, like a journalist's caddy.

In the midst of this UN & Amanpour wanderlust attack, I found Soultravelers3 through links other travelers have posted on Twitter.  I wondered what it would take to finally make the leap into a lifestyle of travel.  I thought it was a quaint idea at first, but nothing that would compare to a Tuscan villa or Austrian chateau.  But the more I delve into their story, the more adamant I become about living a life like this.

My hat goes off to you, DaVinci, Jeanne D'Arc, and Mozart!  Keep us posted, you have more followers than you imagine.  You're an inspiration.

Best wishes on your journeys, Soultravelers3.

Follow them here: http://www.soultravelers3.com/

Thursday, October 22, 2009

You know you're a TCK when...

This is a twist on the "You know your'e from (insert location here) when..."

This totally applies to me (and my sister)!

- “Where are you from?” has more than one reasonable answer.
- You’ve said that you’re from foreign country X, and your audience has asked you which US state X is in.
- You flew before you could walk.
- You speak two languages, but can’t spell in either.
- You feel odd being in the ethnic majority.
- You have three passports.
- You have a passport but no driver’s license.
- You go into culture shock upon returning to your “home” country.- Your life story uses the phrase “Then we moved to…” three (or four, or five…) times.
- You wince when people mispronounce foreign words.
- You don’t know whether to write the date as day/month/year, month/day/year, or some variation thereof.
- The best word for something is the word you learned first, regardless of the language.
- You get confused because US money isn’t colour-coded.
- You think VISA is a document that’s stamped in your passport, not a plastic card you carry in your wallet.
- You own personal appliances with 3 types of plugs, know the difference between 110 and 220 volts, 50 and 60 cycle current, and realize that a trasnsformer isn’t always enough to make your appliances work.
- You fried a number of appliances during the learning process.
- You think the Pledge of Allegiance might possibly begin with “Four-score and seven years ago….”- Half of your phone calls are unintelligible to those around you.
- You believe vehemently that football is played with a round, spotted ball.
- You consider a city 500 miles away “very close.”
- You get homesick reading National Geographic.
- You cruise the Internet looking for fonts that can support foreign alphabets.
- You think in the metric system and Celsius.
- You may have learned to think in feet and miles as well, after a few years of living (and driving) in the US. (But not Fahrenheit. You will *never* learn to think in Fahrenheit).
- You haggle with the checkout clerk for a lower price.
- Your minor is a foreign language you already speak.- When asked a question in a certain language, you’ve absentmindedly respond in a different one.
- You miss the subtitles when you see the latest movie.
- You’ve gotten out of school because of monsoons, bomb threats, and/or popular demonstrations.
- You speak with authority on the subject of airline travel.
- You have frequent flyer accounts on multiple airlines.
- You constantly want to use said frequent flyer accounts to travel to new places.
- You know how to pack.
- You have the urge to move to a new country every couple of years.
- The thought of sending your (hypothetical) kids to public school scares you, while the thought of letting them fly alone doesn’t at all.
- You think that high school reunions are all but impossible.
- You have friends from 29 different countries.
- You sort your friends by continent.
- You have a time zone map next to your telephone.
- You realize what a small world it is, after all.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Back issues of Budget Travel, Travel+Leisure, and National Geographic Traveler

I just listed back issues of travel magazines on eBay. These magazines have so much information in them! They are where I get most of my travel ideas.


If you are going on a trip to Paris, for instance, you can pick up a couple of magazines like the National Geographic Traveler March 2008 issue (Pure Paris) and the Budget Travel April 2009 issue (Eat Your Heart Out in Paris). They'll give you tons of ideas!


My eBay username is roaming.gnomette (of course).  Click here to go straight to the magazines.