The Adventure Years

I got back from Croatia last week. My friend Emily and I went to Croatia because we were already planning to be in Italy and, in looking at maps to explore where we could go after that, Croatia was right there . (I did not know this; this souvenir pictured here from the Zagreb airport would suggest that others also do not know this.)  And, upon seeing it on the map, I jumped on this opportunity literally because of some Instagram pictures another friend had posted from July. Turns out Croatia is ridiculously beautiful, with tons of small and medium-sized cities along the coast and some very cool geography inland as well. So, all this to say, Croatia's a great place to go if you're looking to extend a trip from Italy or somewhere else nearby. Or just go to Croatia on its own; we filled 7 days there and definitely felt like we had plenty more to do. Here's the TLDR: A ferry from Venice to Croatia takes a little over 4 hours and is quite pleasant. Rent a car for getting b...

After "Why Turkey?", this is the question I get second most often. I have gone through phases of answers and it largely depends on my audience; "I dunno; chilling" is not always acceptable. Sometimes I'll mention I'll be doing some part-time contracting work for AltSchool, which will start next month; my other standard answer is "traveling, learning Turkish, writing..." "Writing" sometimes gets a follow-up question. "Oh, are you a writer?" No, no I am not. Though I used to be pretty into LiveJournal  (may that article stay live on the internet forever), and my best friend in Junior High and I would spend many lunch breaks writing short stories in the library (she is now a professional journalist; I'm just a very fast typist). But! But. The right answer to this question right now is, I think, "Not yet," or perhaps, "I aspire to be." I've got two novels and one self-help book I want to write, the p...

Author's Note: still figuring out Blogger formatting. Yikes. Here in Izmir, “everyone” (for some limited expat definition of everyone, I imagine) gets water delivered to them. The water from the tap, while fine to consume, tastes a bit chlorinated. I drink a lot of water (#singerlife) and so on Day 3 here, when we were almost out, a nice delivery man showed up with more water. Here are the things that went wrong from there: Who is at the door?! We live on the 3rd story of an apartment building with a couple big doors on the ground floor. The doorbell rang while I was home alone. Fortunately we have a video system (!) to show me a picture of who was at the outside door, and it happened to be a man carrying a large jug of water on his shoulder. So, that clears that up. Earle must have ordered some more water for us to address my extreme thirst. Security system button mashing . How do I unlock the door from here? Literally, no idea. I’m sure it’s possible. But which...

“Why Turkey?” This is the question I’ve gotten most often over the past few months. My favorite answer is, “Why not?” but that gets pretty annoying fast. So I'll go through the story that got us to Turkey instead, and then try to backwards-rationalize the why: Years ago, I resolved (via a Life OKR; more on this later) to live abroad at some point for at least 3 months. When Earle and I started thinking a year and some ago about what might be next for us, we tossed around the idea of moving abroad. Earle’s a pretty good person to move abroad with, having done it twice for various advanced degrees (#earlelyfe). I, on the other hand, have never spent more than 3 weeks in another country (shoutout to choir tour 2008 to China), and probably not more than a week or so in a single city outside the US. Thus a plan began to take shape. That fall, we started looking at places we could move based on who would be interested in having Earle teach there, figuring I could so some sor...