People ask me this all the time. Friends, followers, strangers in hostel common rooms: where should I go first? And every time, I want to give them a real answer — not a list of the world's most Instagrammed places, not a roundup of "hidden gems" that are anything but...
When I was a little girl, I used to make dresses for my dolls. Not buy them — make them, from whatever fabric scraps I could find. I had strong opinions about what looked right and what didn't, even then. That instinct never left me, though it shifted somewhere along...
The short trip to Tallinn was made possible by a pandemic loophole. In 2020, while I was volunteering in Vilnius, Lithuania, the three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — formed a travel bubble. You could cross between them freely while the rest of Europe...
I have never driven a car. Not once. I've never sat in the driver's seat, never touched a steering wheel, never parallel parked or stalled in traffic. And yet I've stood in front of a Ferrari at Motorworld in Cologne with my heart doing something strange, and I've...
I almost didn't stop in Râșnov. We were in a taxi leaving Bran Castle — a bit underwhelmed, a bit touristy-fed-up — when the taxi driver said "there's another fortress on the way back to Brașov." It wasn't on my itinerary. I'd never really thought about it. But we...
Warsaw had always been my layover city. Every time I flew to Europe or the US, I'd pass through Chopin Airport, walk through the terminal, board the next flight, and think I should actually stop here one day. Then a canceled flight made the decision for me. I rebooked...
I first set foot in France in September 2019 — not through Paris, not through a package tour, but through a volunteering program in the tiny village of Laguépie. A group of us — young people from different countries — were living together in a big house and helping...
When we crossed the border from Zimbabwe into Mozambique at Juliasdale–Forbes, the border guard looked at my passport, paused, and said: "You are the fifth Armenian to cross this border." Not the fifth today. Not the fifth this week. The fifth. Ever. That is the kind...
There is something about Frida Kahlo that refuses to stay inside a museum. You encounter her on street murals in Mexico City, on hotel walls in Tbilisi, on the menus of cafes named after her in cities she never set foot in. More than 70 years after her death, the...