A funny thing happened when the calendar flipped from 2014 to 2015: I realized that my time in Indonesia is finite. I have eight more months here. And while some days that feels like an eternity, I know time will fly by. For the first time, I started to panic that I haven’t made the most…
Is it bad that I almost forgot it was Christmas? I suppose that’s what happens when you live across the world from home. This is actually the second consecutive year I’ll be spending the holidays abroad, and being away from my family for a second year in a row is a little bit of a bummer….
For Aaron and I, one of the toughest parts of traveling is that we are vegetarian. We both stopped eating meat in high school (long before we ever met) and we’ve both stayed true to our herbivorous ways for the past 14 years. Neither of us eats meat or fish and we have to be wary…
I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit that my 24 hours in Singapore were mainly spent eating. But who knew there were so many amazing and cheap vegetarian Indian restaurants in Singapore? I honestly thought I would spend the entirety of my visit peering hungrily through restaurant windows. From what I’d heard, Singapore is so expensive…
The first time I went to Ubud, I spent less than an hour there before deciding that I needed to leave as soon as possible. I’m not sure if it was the Eat, Pray, Love mentality, the overpriced organic restaurants, or the plethora of yoga studios, but after spending only 24 hours in the city, I…
A responsible person probably would have found a job before they actually moved to Indonesia. That’s the proper order to do things. But, no one said that I was responsible. In all fairness to myself, I found out that I was moving to Jakarta only three weeks before I arrived. Suffice it to say, I didn’t have a…
When I tell people I live in Indonesia, they picture me living in a cute beachside bungalow in Bali, spending my carefree days working on my tan and sipping fruity cocktails. Guys, I hate to break it to you, but that’s most definitely not my life. Jakarta is a gray, sprawling, traffic-snarled metropolis. And though a…
There a lot of quirky things about living in Jakarta but the one thing that I cannot get used to is Indonesia’s trash problem. To be specific, the overuse of plastic bags is the number one thing that drives me crazy about living here. I’m from California and I am, admittedly, a bit of a hippie. But as…
As I wrote in a previous post I was a bundle of nerves about my first ever solo trip to Penang. As it turns out, solo travel is pretty fantastic. And I was ecstatic that my three-day jaunt to Malaysia went off without a hitch – well, it almost went off without a hitch. I…
As I waited for my plane to take me to Penang it struck me that I hadn’t boarded an international flight alone in exactly 10 years. It had been a full decade since that trip to Europe and even then I was meeting up with a friend. Some of my favorite blogs are all about…