Today’s Travel Tip: Don’t take good air quality for granted.
My current approach to traveling hasn’t allowed much time to think about the next destination, as I have tried to soak up as much as possible where I am actually living. This led me to land in Hanoi, Vietnam, rather unprepared for the air that hit me. An app that I quickly befriended is called AirVisual. Here are a few notes about my experience with it.
Continue reading Something in the AirIn most tourist cities, I see the double decker red bus driving by, with the yellow bubble letters encouraging Hop On! Hop Off! I’m not sure I can count how many of these I have been on – always on the upper level whether it is sunny (Milan!) or drizzling (Dublin?!) At least looking at the route(s) of the bus, and the various stops, helps me get oriented in a new city and gives me ideas for exploring. Usually simply staying on for the whole loop is a fun ride with some interesting facts, trivia, and musical interludes. But sometimes, you get a whole lot more – like in Cape Town. I highly, highly recommend riding the Hop On Hop Off bus in Cape Town, and here are my Top Ten reasons why!
Continue reading Hop On! and On and On!I really enjoy traveling by train. I can snooze whenever I want. I can gaze at an endless display of scenery. I can visit a restroom without delaying the trip. I don’t have to pack my liquids into tiny containers and put them in a plastic bag. I can stand up and walk a bit…like to the café car.
One element of train travel though can be a hassle – getting the ticket.
Continue reading Buying on RenfeYou find out about a great webinar and decide you want to register for it. But you are traveling. So you’re wondering, “Will I have to get up in the middle of the night to do this?”
Then you start to figure out the math with whatever tricks you’ve developed. “I know that friends in San Francisco were 9 hours later when I was in Croatia. But now I’m in Portugal, where my family in New Brunswick is only a 4 hour difference. But I’ll be in Cape Town when the webinar happens, so that’s the posted New York time, minus 3, plus 9, minus 1, plus 2…”
Admittedly, it’s not physics or even trigonometry. But getting a time adjustment wrong can be frustrating, and can also cause miscommunications and lost opportunities. So it’s worth asking for help….from your phone of course.
Here are a couple ways that I have relied on my phone for assistance:
Continue reading What Time Will It Be Then?Have you enjoyed wandering around a city, only to suddenly realize that your phone is running out of juice? Did you let it roam continuously looking for WiFi or seeking to pair with anything via Bluetooth? Were you inspired to take a hundred photos? Did you forget your portable charger, or forget to charge the portable charger? No matter the reason, once the battery icon has turned red your heart seems to race a little as you wonder if you have enough to use a ride share app to get back to home base.
I’m here to say – just relax! Go sit on a bench.
Continue reading Sit Down, Power UpI have cooked in foreign countries before, but trying to create the feel of a Canadian Thanksgiving outside of North America was a new challenge. I’m labeling this as a Travel Tip, because I definitely recommend trying something similar. It is a fantastic way to “dig deeper” as you explore a new city.
The basic image of Thanksgiving for me is a spread of turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, mashed potatoes, fiddleheads*, and pumpkin pie, surrounded by family on a quiet day with no shopping, no school, no parades, no football, but with card games and board games and walks in the crisp fall air. We would usually call our direct relatives for a quick check-in. This was well before video conferencing, and some years were even before the speaker phone feature. Perhaps some of you remember developing the choreography of when to pass the phone and when to recite messages, while keeping an ear for the oven timer. I loosely recall family friends joining us once, with the ulterior motive of having two of us play a clarinet duet as entertainment – not sure what they expected but everyone seemed to be thankful when (or that?) we finished.
Thanksgiving this year was Monday, October 14, 2019, and in our second week in our new city, here was the plan:
Continue reading Canadian Thanksgiving in CroatiaIt is day 4 of 33 in Split, Croatia, and I’ve so far managed to sputter Hvala for Thank You. Croatian is definitely ‘one of those languages’ that has various words with no vowels and/or lots of consonants jammed together. But a farmers market here is like everywhere else – pick out which zucchini, onions, tomatoes, and cucumbers you want, hand them money, and trust that they give you back some change. (Warning: if you are there mid afternoon, the older woman will try to send you home with all of her remaining spinach!)
Continue reading Angry Sauce
