THE NOT SO BLONDE TRAVEL

As a kid, you always hear your parents say: "don't trust strangers." Especially strangers offering candy or ice cream ...  Then you grow up, and sure enough, you will still hear that saying from time to time. But when you  travel solo around the world, who else are you supposed to trust? Who else are you supposed to ask to take a picture of you with the beautiful scenery or the colorful monument or the 15th century castle? STRANGERS. Had I known I was going to write this blog, I would have kept more of those epic shots where half my head was missing, or half the monument was missing or even sometimes the entire monument, and in some cases, where no photo was taken at all, even though I thoroughly explained to the stranger holding the camera where to press to take a photo. But thankfully given how much I travel, I found a recent fail from Ireland that I hadn't deleted yet. And my awesome virtual friends from Girls Love Travel  have sent me some as well. If yo...

In his latest blog post titled '2015: closing cycles,' Coelho wrote "Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away."  It is 2016 today so I guess everything in 2015 should be in the past at this point, but something has come back to haunt me. One of my closest friends, a girl I have been friends with since my teenage years, dropped a bomb on me. She said I had to choose between our friendship and my friendship with her ex-boyfriend. If you are a guy, you are probably rolling your eyes right now 'cause you don't even understand how this could be an issue. But if you are a girl, you might be thinking "OMG, of course you can't."  But this is not high school anymore and life is not black or white. There is a lot of gray. And I believe this is one of those situations. Let me explain.  Best friend and X dated for almost 5 years. There were a lot of up and downs, and a million breakups happened before the final br...

I Love my job, even though it is not at all what I excepted to be doing after graduating college. I graduated top of my journalism class April of 2010 and started freelancing a few weeks later, but I didn't like it. I wanted to write books and travel the world. Two years later, I proudly finished writing my first book in Hyde Park, London. Some of it was written in North Africa, some in Europe, some in Asia, and some even in Australia while sightseeing Sidney. (If you spend more time Twitting, Instagramming, and  Facetiming than talking to real people, you should probably follow this link and go buy it:  LIFE WITHOUT IT ) Today I am again in London, and I think I just finished writing my second book. Holland Park this time. I guess parks are becoming a ritual. It was draft number four, and hopefully the last. This was me at draft number 3: Yes I realize it is a boy and I am a girl but this is the closest I could find to describe my mental state at the time of d...

If you know me at all, you know I am the first to say flight attendants are sometimes kind of jerks, but mainly to each other, not to passengers. So I was a bit surprised to hear a friend of a friend complain that a flight attendant harassed her. Usually people complain about a delay, a reroute, uncomfortable  seats, older flight attendants, but never had I heard of any of my colleagues "harassing " passengers. Being curious, I had to ask what the story was. "Well I had my foot on the emergency equipment and she wouldn't stop telling me to take it off. I was sleeping and she kept on waking me up to take my foot down." As the words came out of her mouth, my smile was slowly widening. "But you are not allowed to put your foot ... " I started, but couldn't finish. "I know I was wrong, but I wasn't that wrong," she interrupted. What did that even mean? Wrong, but not that wrong ... "She was just doing her job. She do...