Posted on December 7, 2016
Our Favorite Restaurants Around the World
In no particular order. And you should realize, context is everything. Pancakes at home might be nothing special. Pancakes in the middle of Shan State, Myanmar are a whole different story.
Posted on November 27, 2016
What to Do When You No Longer Recognize Home
Three months back into our old lives and the trip feels like an eternity ago. There was no shortage of challenges during the course of our travels. But the hardest, hands-down, has been re-entry.
We returned to a home, which we now see, no longer quite resembles the home we remembered. A country we don’t quite recognize. So, as media narratives focus on walls and divisive vitriol, we’ve been willing ourselves to remember that there is something larger and greater out there. There are the people who touched us and whom–we hope–we touched; spectacular places we were fortunate enough to experience; the grinding on of daily lives so different from, and similar to, our own. And then there’s kindness. If there’s one thing we learned from this trip, it’s this: everywhere in the world there is kindness.
Nearly every day we feel restless, wanting to be moving again, to be back on the road. For now, in an effort to provide some closure on this chapter and to rekindle our own memories, we’ll be posting some lists from this trip. Highlights and lowlights. Mistakes made and lessons learned. From all four of us, during eight months around the world.
Updated on August 20, 2016
Getting Real (Quiet) at Le Village des Pruniers
Some of the greatest experiences of this trip have been the unplanned, the ones that snuck up on us and spontaneously presented themselves, as if fated. That’s how we wound up living for a week at Plum Village, the monastery founded by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh in southern France.
Updated on July 30, 2016
Seeking Peace in Jerusalem
To visit Jerusalem is to visit the whole world in a single step: it seems, during our three weeks in Israel, that we have studied all of history as it has played out on this tiny patch of land. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Old City of Jerusalem. Standing on the city ramparts, time telescopes inwards; the stories of the past are vibrantly alive. So too are the signs of the present – a city that exists like an uneasily held breath, the heart of a two-thousand-year-old conflict that appears to have no possible solution. We have been travelling at this point for over six months. I have never imagined anywhere like Jerusalem.
Updated on July 13, 2016
Following the Footsteps of Odysseus
After the Pyramids of Giza and the Valley of the Kings, in June we travelled forward about a thousand years in time, to visit ancient sites in Greece. During this time, I was reading The Odyssey for school, and so we spent time imagining how the places we visited would have appeared in the time of Odysseus.
Updated on July 8, 2016
Eight in the World
For this blog post, we’re trying something different to commemorate the week we spent with our dear friends, the Bankiers. This post is written by four people: Jonah, Miles, Oliver, and Julian. We found our two guest authors, Oliver and Julian, on Mars. No, that’s a joke. We actually found them on Crete, where we stayed together for one week. We all lived together in one big stone house and we had a lot of adventures. We wanted to write together about our experience and we thought the easiest way would be to share some lists about things we noticed on the amazing Greek island of Crete.
To get started, here are ten of the best things about Crete, according to Oliver and Jonah, age 8, and in no particular order:
Updated on July 2, 2016
Alone on the Nile
These days, Egypt’s reputation precedes it. When we first mentioned Cairo and Luxor as key destinations in our itinerary, friends and family had raised concerned eyebrows. But everyone we’d met who’d visited Egypt in the past six months told us we shouldn’t miss it. There would be no tourists, no lines at the great sites, prices were down, we’d have the country to ourselves. And when we’d planned the trip, Egypt was the boys’ number one destination, hands-down. We weren’t going to let fear keep us away.
Still, when we left Kathmandu for Cairo, it was with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I’d been to Egypt before, but never with my whole family, lugging bluegrass instruments through the capital, never with a blonde-haired eight-year-old, who’d already attracted unfathomable levels of attention across the Asian continent. We were the opposite of inconspicuous.
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