I have a habit of disappearing from my blog every summer and it’s not necessarily because my schedule is jam packed. Or at least it usually isn’t. During the summer months, I like to hunker down, take a break, and besides the occasional beach trip, stay out of the sun. This summer was different. Our summer kicked off with a trip to Laos over Memorial Day and was followed by traveling around Mongolia for the majority of July. Continue Reading
We normally try to avoid tourist hotspots, but in Phuket it’s practically unavoidable. At some point, you’re sure to find yourself on a potentially crowded boat headed to either Phi Phi Island or to James Bond Island in Phang Nga Bay. Once you arrive, you’ll be dumped off on an over-crowded beach with a million other tourists taking millions of selfies of the exact same thing.
In other words, Phuket is in many ways a victim of its own beauty.
Like the boat loads of tourists before and after us, we set out on a day trip to explore the stunningly beautiful – and well-traveled – Phang Nga Bay.
I know I’ve mentioned it a million times on this blog, but we aren’t really resort people. Not that there’s anything wrong with resorts, I can certainly see their appeal. In general, we have very simple tastes. We don’t need massive breakfast buffets, porters, satellite TVs, or concierge services. And we especially don’t need a minibar that charges $13 for a can of cheap domestic beer.
But…
We found a really great last-minute deal on a pool suite at The Senses Resort in Phuket and since we were celebrating our anniversary, we thought it was as good a time as any to go crazy…
I’m *finally* getting around to blogging about our trip to Thailand! I can’t promise that these posts won’t be sporadic (they most likely will) or that they will include any useful information (they probably won’t), but sometimes the point is to just start, right?
So, excuse these upcoming grainy camera phone photos because sometimes a real camera is the last thing you want to carry around while roaming the busy, hot, sticky streets of Phuket.
Why would anyone sleep in a cargo container?
As budget travelers, we often find ourselves traveling off season, on off days, and at all hours of the night. Sometimes this means long airport layovers while connecting in international terminals. Sometimes it gives us the perfect opportunity to get a taste of a city IF we happen to be traveling during the day, IF there’s enough time between connections and IF the airport is reasonably close to the city. But most of all, it means we sleep in some pretty interesting places.
Like pay-by-the-hour airport container hotels.
Our main computer is currently under repair which has given me an excuse to fall behind with some of the blog posts that I had scheduled for this month, including this one.
At the end of March/start of April we traveled to the Philippines for a last minute getaway and to celebrate Sly’s birthday. I brought two books with me: one that I thought was going to be a thriller (His Bloody Project – reviewed last month) , and another end-of-the-world sort of guilty pleasure (The Last One), and read them over the course of several nights while laying in a dimly lit room under a tented mosquito net. When we returned from our trip, my sister came to visit for a couple weeks. In between all of our excursions, late nights watching crappy tv and eating buckets of Korean fried chicken, I managed to squeeze in time to read a few books. I didn’t read as much this April as I have in previous months, but I would say that this amount of books is more indicative of what I read on an average monthly basis, with or without visitors and travel plans.
This is my favorite time of year in Korea. It’s the season of cherry blossoms, beautiful weather, street food, and glowing lanterns. For the third year in a row, we walked to the Sincheon River park near our apartment and celebrated Buddha’s birthday at one of Daegu’s many lantern festivals.
I have always had this fear of being proposed to in a very public setting. I know a lot of people love this- find it more special – but as an introvert, the very thought of it makes me cringe. Thankfully, that never happened (the public part of the proposal, not the proposal) but I remember when I first let my boss know that I was engaged, the very first thing she asked was, “Did he propose at a baseball game on a jumbotron?”
Of all the ways in which to propose to someone, I have no clue why my boss automatically assumed that would be the one. Granted, I had to hide my introvert-ness at work, but still, there’s no way. I am a card carrying member of the puritanical guide to public displays of affection. I told my boss that if Sly had proposed to me that way I would have ignored him and walked off because it would have been a clear sign that he didn’t know me very well.
Fast forward to seven years later where we made our first (and last) appearance on kiss cam while attending a Samsung Lions baseball game…
This past weekend, we celebrated our 10 year Dateiversary! The anniversary of our first official date is not something we usually celebrate (or even really remember), but 10 years seemed like a pretty big deal. Plus, there was a new restaurant I had recently stumbled across and wanted to try, complete with sunset views, a rooftop deck, and a cafe doggy.
7pm gastro pub is a westward facing, multi-level cafe, coffee shop, and bar perched atop a hill in the Manchon-dong neighborhood of Suseong. It’s an area of town that, for whatever reason, we have barely explored and thus, were completely surprised upon arriving to find terraced buildings, tree-lined streets, and a somewhat Euro-Korean feel. In this little pocket of the city, multi-level residential homes tucked into their hilly surroundings, outnumbered the sort of (ugly) nondescript concrete city high-rise apartments that are so prevalent in modernized Korean cities. It felt different here. Different in a way that was both unexpected and extremely charming.