Your Weekly Travel Inspiration is a day late because I’m still settling in at Hana Farms — the organic farm in Hawaii where E and I will be living and working for the next month or two. We found this opportunity through E’s older sister, but she, and most of the other people working here, found it through the WWOOF website. That’s why this week, I want to highlight WWOOF, as well as some other websites that offer alternative opportunities for travel and living. WWOOF — World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms WWOOFing is an organization of work-trade opportunities on various organic farms the world over. Farms that are interested…
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Tea Tuesday: My Flight is Tomorrow!
As evidenced by the title of this post, I’m leaving for Hawaii tomorrow! So instead of devising a complex blog post for you, I’ve spent the evening furiously packing, and wondering what I’m forgetting. Therefore, this Tea Tuesday is going to be a bit brief… Have some tea porn everybody! My friend, Katie, moved into a new apartment last week, and inherited this coffee table, which she proceeded to turn into a shrine to her tea. I can only hope that when I finally get a big kid apartment, I will have as much beautiful loose leaf tea as her.
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Statues of Copenhagen: A Photo Essay
The Little Mermaid is Copenhagen’s most famous statue. It has become an iconic symbol of the city and a major tourist attraction. Sculpted by Edvard Eriksen and unveiled in 1913, the statue is based on the fairytale The Little Mermaid, which was originally written by the Danish author and poet, Hans Christian Andersen. It’s a lovely statue of a wistful mermaid, but it’s hard to say why it became so famous. It’s certainly not because of its size — the mermaid is just over 4 ft tall (1.25 meters). And it’s not as if it’s the only statue in Copenhagen. In fact, as I wandered the city, I was struck…
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Weekly Travel Inspiration: Where to Go in 2013
I’ve seen a lot of articles lately about where to go in 2013 and it got me thinking about two things: 1. All the places I want to go in the world and how that list isn’t getting much shorter. 2. The way that pretty much every aspect of life is subject to trends. When I first realized — probably sometime in high school — that trends exist in categories beyond clothing I was astounded. People regularly talk about clothing trends or fads, but we don’t talk as often about trends in television shows or food or styles of teaching. In the end though, what is popular ebbs and flows…
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Blog Updates for 2013 and Where I’m Going Next
I made a few changes to the blog today. The most important is that I decided to buy my URL so, for the rest of the year, I am the proud owner of “anopportunemoment.com.” I also came up with a concrete update schedule. For now, I’m updating four times a week. On Sundays and Thursdays, I’ll be blogging about places I’ve been while on Tuesday and Friday I’ll be continuing my weekly features (Tea Tuesday and Weekly Travel Inspiration). Although I got home from Europe a month ago, I still need to write about the majority of The Great European Adventure. For that reason, my Sunday blog posts will continue…
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Tea Tuesday: Tealuxe
Tomorrow I will have been home from Europe for four weeks. I’ve mostly been spending the time with friends and family as well as sleeping in and organizing my closet. Today, however, I spent some time exploring my home state. I was meeting a friend in Providence (Rhode Island’s capital) this afternoon for coffee, but first I decided to stop by a local teahouse called Tealuxe. Yes, I got tea before going to my coffee date. What of it? Anyway, Tealuxe is a local chain with locations in Boston and Providence, and I always feel good supporting small(er) businesses. (Afterwards, my friend and I got coffee at Blue State Coffee–another…
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Copenhagen: First Impressions
I left Amsterdam at 11:00pm on an overnight bus bound for Copenhagen. The ride took 15 hours with a transfer in Hamburg. It was to be the first of many such travel experiences in Europe–in total, I rode two overnight buses and 4 overnight trains over the course of my trip. When I arrived in Copenhagen at 2:00 in the afternoon, it was sunny and I was exhausted. The bus dropped us on a random side street around the corner from the train station and it was some consolation that my fellow travelers looked as weary and confused as me. I hefted my backpack onto my back and started walking…
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Weekly Travel Inspiration: The Fault in Our Stars
“It happened all at once: We exited the highway and there were the row houses of my imagination leaning precariously toward canals, ubiquitous bicycles, and coffeeshops advertising LARGE SMOKING ROOM. We drove over a canal and from atop the bridge I could see dozens of houseboats moored along the water. It looked nothing like America. It looked like an old painting, but real–everything achingly idyllic in the morning light” —The Fault in Our Stars, page 156 The Fault in Our Stars is a bestselling novel by the author John Green, which was published on January 10, 2012, and celebrated its one year anniversary yesterday. It is a heartbreaking and humorous…
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Amsterdam: Last Look
Amsterdam and I had our ups and downs, but as soon as I bought a bus ticket to Copenhagen, I felt a pang of sadness at having to leave such a lovely city that I was really just beginning to get a feel for. Regardless, here are a few final photos from my trip to Amsterdam. Perhaps I’ve been a bit redundant in my posts about this city, but I’ll say one more time that the architecture and the canals were just stunning. When Amsterdam wasn’t wowing me with its beauty, it was making me laugh. The next photo encompasses beautiful architecture and questionable water sports. Plus, sometimes a city…
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Tea Tuesday: Christmas Presents
I’m the avid tea drinker in most of my friends’ and family’s lives, so tea and tea accoutrements have become people’s go-to Christmas presents for me. I have no problem with this trend. My best friend visited Rhode Island this past weekend and, because I hadn’t seen her since I got back from Europe, she gave me my Christmas present then. You guys, it was so exciting. This is no ordinary tea tumbler (which is really just a fancy way of saying thermos that has a tea strainer in it). It’s lined with Yixing clay. Yixing clay is especially porous clay that retains the flavor of the tea you brew…
