When You Learn, Teach. When You Get, Give. – Maya Angelou
Since my first trip abroad to Vietnam when I was 20, I’ve been learning everything about traveling one flight at time. Tips, tricks, hacks, mistakes. They’re all a part of it. Most I learned from experiencing, some I learned from experts and those who came before me. And some from my fellow travelers. I learned how to travel for cheap. And then cheaper. I learned how to save time planning. Or not plan at all.
This is where I’m trying to do my part to give back and try to inspire a few of you to get out and plan that dream trip you’ve always wanted to do. You never stop learning. This is why I’m still in love with traveling after all these years. Everyday is a chance to encounter something new and experience something different. The world is just so big and it’s always changing. I’m doing my part to just ride this wave.
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So there’s this cooking experience tucked on the side of a hilly olive grove high above Riomaggiore in Cinque Terre. Once a day, a local Italian couple opens up their hidden stone cottage home and kitchen to a few people, where together you take part in a quintessential Italian past time of preparing a meal from scratch using only local ingredients and fresh herbs from their garden.
At 5:58 pm, I stood outside Cristina’s apartment entrance, just a few minutes walk from historic Piazza Maggiore, and pressed a buzzer to be let in.
For years, one particular food experience I’ve had on my bucket list for Italy is to “cook with someone’s nonna.” You know, a loud and lively kitchen, getting yelled at for adding too much salt or not enough salt, and of course getting a taste of the sauce before it hits the plate and being told that ‘that’s how you make the ragù.’
The 7th Edition of Chefs On Fire is back and it’s returning to Cascais from September 20 – 21, 2025. Hands down, this is easily the best food and music festival in Portugal and it’s been so well received that not only have they been bringing it back year after year, but they’ve started doing full pop-up events in other parts of Portugal.
Prague is one of the few cities that has never lost its magic for me, even after a couple of decades removed from my first visit.
For my recent trip to Kyushu, I had 5 days at the start of my trip to do a bit of onsen-hopping.
Beppu was the first stop on my back-to-back-to-back onsen hopping adventure in Kyushu, followed by Yufuin and Kurokawa. Technically, there would be 4th ‘back’
Yufuin was stop two of my back-to-back-to-back onsen escapade in Kyushu. After taking the overnight Sunflower Ferry from Osaka to Beppu, which technically would be a 4th ‘back‘
Which Area Of Yufuin To Stay In The main parts of Yufuin is quite compact and getting from one end to the other takes only about 20 minutes on foot.
To kick off my first trip to Kyushu, the southwestern most of Japan’s main islands, I did to do a back-to-back-to-back onsen-hopping trip stopping at Beppu, Yufuin, and Kurokawa –
Most first-time visitors to Japan build their itineraries around Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, with maybe an added stop to Hiroshima or Himeji to check off the famous castle.
Porto, compact as it is, has a surprising number of museums. I’ve been staying for months at a time for the last 3 years, and I still haven’t been to many of them.
