The Liebster Award and a Cringe Worthy Expat Faux Pas

The Luxpats nominated me for a Liebster award a while back (winners answer a series of questions about travel) and I took the challenge! I think this may be a first for me – I’m terrible about getting tagged in these types of things – but I loved the questions for this. Plus mining through travel photos and memories was fun and now I have the travel itch.

1. What was your first travel experience and what did you take away from it? 

Probably my first big travel experience was a college recruiting trip to the Northeastern US when I was 16. My sister and I visited three universities on our own with multiple connecting flights. I still can’t believe everyone was comfortable sending us on our own – we’d only been on one flight before that and it was less than an hour to Seattle for another recruiting trip. It was quite an adventure with travel snafus and sleeping on dorm floors. I loved that feeling of independence and not knowing what to expect or what was next. This was pre-Internet so we were really going in blind to the visits and what the colleges would look like.

2. What is the best food item / dish you have tried, and where was it?

My husband and I had an incredible meal on Capri at a beachfront restaurant back in 2009. The meal was so good, pasta with pumpkin, but the story of getting there and the ‘pinch me is this real’ view really elevated the experience. We decided to go to Capri from Sorrento with no real plan. On arrival I was nonplussed with the heavy throngs of tourists and didn’t see what the fuss was about. We hiked the hillside and then hiked down the other side and stumbled upon this gorgeous restaurant on the water.
While I enjoy researching for trips there is something special about happening upon something with no guidance from Yelp reviews or TripAdvisor’s top ten list.

3. What is the best advice you’ve received?

One of my sisters told me years ago that she highly recommended paying for walking tours. She had just returned from a European vacation where she hit up some big cities and she said having someone guide her through a city really allowed her to soak it in and appreciate it instead of staring at a map or guide book on repeat. So we always sign up for a tour of a new city on the first day there to get a feel of where things are and to learn more about the city. Once we’ve had a tour we pick a few things that we want to see more of and head to them on our own.

4. What is your ideal setting for travel/vacationing and for work?

Right now we are partial to all-inclusives that offer childcare though we haven’t really been on a big vacation in quite a while. Depressing, right? But I’ve found over the years that for us travel with younger children in the mobile baby to 2.5 year old age is exhausting. Particularly now that we have three kids. First rule of making travel and vacationing enjoyable: know what you like! Luckily our youngest should be a bit easier to travel with in the next year or so and that should open things up for where we can go.

My husband and I both loathe driving for ‘regular’ life but love road trips. We did a road trip through Italy pre-kids and it was fantastic. Many people told us we were making a mistake driving, that we should do it all by train, but even with a broken GPS and getting lost multiple times, I would do it all again. I would love to be able to do a road trip through Scandinavia when the kids are a bit older. Like most families we are partial to renting apartments and homes through websites like AirBnBs rather than staying in a hotel. It just makes sense for us financially and I don’t like spending my evenings reading with a flashlight while the kids sleep!

As far as work setting, anywhere? I work from home, cafes and sometimes an office space. The nice thing about my job is how portable it has been. I remember working on something while on vacation in the Dominican Republic and thinking, this is the best! I know other people would be unhappy to have to do a bit of work on vacation but I was thrilled.  Flexible and portable work is ideal for my family right now as we have young kids and we seem to move every few years.

5. What is your least favorite place you have been/visited/lived?

Morocco. We really did not have a good experience there. I blame some of it on me being pregnant at the time but we also got lost in the Medina and were in the non-tourist side and people spat at us. I’m also not a great haggler and so the swarms of people trying to get your taxi fare was stressful. That said, I would love to go back some day. I know quite a few people that loved Morocco so I know my experience was just one experience.

6.  What is the weirdest job you’ve ever taken on?

This could get long. I got up super early and got in line at the passport office and sold my spot for a few weeks. This was when I was really low on money. I was a full-time athlete from 2001-2004. I demonstrated digital cameras, photo printers and vacuums in stores. After my freshman year at university I painted school classrooms for a summer.

7. What made you want to start a blog?

So much clutter. I was really frustrated with all of our stuff and got excited about the minimalist movement. I started a blog to keep myself accountable as I decluttered. I could never have imagined that six years later it would still be going, I would publish a second book and that the blog would spawn a big online community of people trying to live with less stuff.

8. Name a book that changed the way you see the world.

These questions are so hard! But off the top of my head: Bonfire of the Vanities. I read it in high school, living in an ethnically diverse and fairly affluent (but we were not) suburb. Every character in the book was described by their race and religion and I was floored at that. Most of the families where I lived were first generation Canadians – including mine – and kids never really talked about our differences. I never thought of my parents immigration to Canada as noteworthy because most of my friend’s parents had also moved to Vancouver from Iran, South Africa, the Czech Republic, England, etc.

9. What has been the biggest professional challenge and how did you overcome it? 

Making a full-time income as a self-employed writer. Still working on that!
I kind of fell into being a nonfiction writer after having my first baby in 2009. Prior to that I worked in sponsorship and marketing for a bank. I’ve always wanted to be a writer but being a blogger and author wasn’t on my radar. I did my undergrad in English Literature and creative writing and later did a year of film school for screenwriting. Having a successful blog and writing books has been a happy accident.

10. What mark do you hope to leave on the world? 

What a big question. I hope that I helped people – be they my children, partner, family, blog readers – live more freely and with less stress.

11. Do you have any funny/awkward cultural faux pas to share? 

It took me a long time to understand that in the UK if you invite a person over to your house or they drop by, you MUST offer them tea. And if they are Irish they will say “I don’t want to bother you” which actually means “yes, of course I want a cuppa” so you keep asking until they say yes or insist that you were going to make tea for yourself anyways.

Also, pants are underpants in the United Kingdom. That’s an important one in my experience.

So much fun Luxpats! Thanks for nominating me.