You work hard, all year round. Life is busy with work, study, family, and other obligations. Between busy schedules and budget, it is not easy to plan a getaway. Getting away, even for a short period, does wonders for your well-being, mentally and physically.

Weaving in and out of traffic, residents are scurrying to their next destination. Even at 7 AM, the streets are becoming louder as the city slowly begins to rise. The market is loud with sounds of cooking, bartering, and the traffic surrounding it. Tourist walk down the street looking for breakfast, quite unsure of their steps. Observing the tourist, it’s interesting that I no longer lump myself in that category. No longer identifying as a visitor, a stranger to the land.

White noise: the scientific phenomenon that occurs when you hear a specific sound such that your brain starts to block it out to the point that your ear still registers but your brain relegates it to the background. You hear it yet you don’t hear it. White noise is a sure and accepted concept in science that concerns auditory affairs of the ear and sound. I’ve come to the conclusion that the concept can be applied to people.

Jem loved to travel, and she also loved to adopt a different persona in each different place she traveled to. She was good at spinning different backstory webs and making both friends and enemies. Either kind was made intentionally and for a specific purpose.

I’m not superstitious. I don’t believe in signs and omens. As though the future can be seen somehow in steaming entrails or the filth at the bottom of a cup. Nonsense. The universe is not a novelist, and it doesn’t foreshadow. Making stories is a human concern, not a cosmic one.

It was 101 degrees Fahrenheit outside. I spent my final day walking around Athens alone, visiting the Byzantine and Christian Museum and various ruins such as Aristotle’s Lyceum (where the Peripatetic School was founded in 335 BC).

I spent three years in New Zealand and took a number of Maori history classes from members of the Maori community. Here are some of the facts that I think people get wrong most of the time or don't understand about Maori society as a whole.

Have you ever had the feeling that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Usually when we feel this sort of feeling it is because of a bad situation happening to us or maybe not even bad but just awkward. Now imagine for a moment that the wrong place was your entire teen and adult life thus far. Imagine that you feel as if your entire life was playing out in a time period that didn’t seem to quite fit with your values or wants and desires. I, unfortunately, don’t have to imagine such a scenario because this is how I feel 24/7.

Hello readers, this past weekend I decided to leave my house and to go the Water Lantern Festival held in Mount Trashmore Park down in Virginia Beach. I originally saw the advertisement for it on Instagram and I was hooked from the very beginning.

Traveling has made me who I am. There is no way around it; no sugarcoating it. The greatest and hardest lessons I’ve learned are all from my time spent abroad. I have a wanderlust soul, and in this, I have been given a different view on life. Upon reflection, I have decided to narrow down everything I have learned into the top 10 rules of life only gained through traveling.

Everything on the mountain was wet that morning except for me and my gear. I was set up between two close growing juniper trees, in a tent and under two tarps. I had a fire pit at the edge of the outer tarp where I'd been able to sit warm and dry by the fire during the rain the night before. I woke to live coals and blew my fire to life. The coals in the sky were lit too, and I let the sun dry the outer side of my tarps while I dunked ginger cookies in hot coffee.

There are so many things I love about Belize. The wide ranging shades and depths of blue; the sunrise on an open horizon of sea; the ingredients and food; but what secures Belize firmly in my heart are the people. They are—as many people in the world are who are left to make good with the resources at hand—so ingeniously industrious and creative in finding solutions.