The Everywhereist

I love all the ways my education has failed me – particularly when it comes to issues of geography or international awareness. In some ways, it’s profoundly awesome. I can sing nearly the entire theme from “The Fall Guy”, but ask me to find any of these on a map, and I’m hopeless.

If you know of these countries, kudos to you. I can already hear an old acquaintance’s voice now, mocking me for not knowing where these places are (which is fine – I can mock her for not washing her hair and having a totally lame blog. So lame, I won’t even link to it in order to mock it). But the real issue, is that these aren’t exactly itsy-bitsy just formed states (that’s another list, entirely). Most of them are in the EU, and there’s no disputing their sovreignty. It’s just … well, I’m an idiot. Without further ado, 10 countries I’ve never heard of. (more…)

I was saving this post for the holiday season, when the joy of hanging out with crazed relatives combined with egg nog and the birth of the savior make a festive trifecta. But after a day spent teaching my relatives ”how to use internets”, I feel like some survival tips are in order. Whether it’s your well-meaning but totally bigoted second-cousin (“I love the gays!”), or the in-law who thinks that Titanic is a good movie, these should hopefully get you all they way through a family trip . Or at least  hold you over until you can get shit-faced. Either way. (more…)

If your parents loved you, you'd be able to read this.

So, common knowledge is that if you try learning a language after puberty, you’re hosed. This makes high school foreign language requirements even more diabollically evil than previously imagined (Did you know the word “embarazada” in Spanish actually means pregnant? Do you know how many kids in my 9th grade Spanish class said they were “a little pregnant” because they didn’t speak Spanish well? Can you imagine if proficiency in a foreign language was actually correlated to pregnancy rates? We’d all be screwed).  (more…)

I’m in San Diego for a week with my family – I’ll do a proper wrap-up when I get home, after I’m done eating my feelings and drinking away my pain. It is not that I don’t love my family. Really. I do … yeah. (more…)

I usually like to do “24 hours in … ” posts for the cities that I visit for only a day – but I want to abundantly clear on this point: We did not spend 24 hours in Bled. We didn’t even spend 12 hours in Bled. We spent, not counting the nearly 8 hours of driving, about 8 hours in Bled. We did this for two reasons:

1. My husband, as I have noted before, is absolutely insane and impractical when it comes to travel.
2. There are certain people in your life for whom you would travel ridiculous distances to see, if only for a few hours. You would do this, despite the fact that at home, they live 20 minutes away from you.

For the record, here they both are:

I ... yeah. I got nothing.

(more…)

Travel is awesome. Time travel is even awesomer. And, based on this email, is now possible through Gmail:

(Click for a larger image.) I am totally freaking out right now.

Last month’s Monterey also included a few days in San Francisco. Since it’s only a 1 1/2 hour flight, we go down to SF fairly often. As such, this is not a post about the things we’ve already done in San Francisco. There will be no mention of the Fisherman’s Wharf (which is like every other touristy wharf in the world) or Alcatraz (which is like every abandoned-prison-turned-park in the world – which is to say, AWESOME), or even the Golden Gate bridge in this post. (more…)