After a 10-year Pacific Northwest hiatus, it was finally time to be reunited with the city where it all began...where Greg spent seven years of his life as a professor at Charles University before meeting Mandy in 2007, who had recently moved there to be an English teacher. See that story. We were more than ready to return...to be wrapped…
Our favorite thing to do when we lived in Prague was leave the city behind, often via the wonder paths of the Czech trail system. Trails weave through cities, villages, pastureland, valleys and hills, natural attractions, and historic sites. All with easy-to-understand color coded trail markers that even the most navigationally challenged can follow. Geography fun fact: the Czech Republic…
There is so much more to Czechia than Prague. In fact, when we were teaching English in the mid-2000’s, it was a well-worn joke that all of our students had “a house...in the nature” and they would tell us stories about weekending in the Czech countryside, amongst emerald deciduous forests, sweeping rock formations and tinker toy villages. The nature of…
We had officially entered Moravian Czech wine country, a magical place that seems to be plucked out of the Mediterranean, and dropped into southeastern Czechia. Moravia, a lesser visited region of the country has a distinctly more Croatian/Italian feel, lightness, and warmth about it than its sister region, Bohemia. Not to mention, with a four-hour train journey between them ($10/ticket)…
It was in Prague that we began our story… noses buried in our guide books, hurriedly walking down a cobblestone street and not paying attention until, suddenly crashing into each other. Knocking each other flat to the ground whilst locking eyes, and suddenly the song “That’s Amore” begins playing. A majestic castle looms in the background, overlooking the Seine –correction,…
Growing up inside a snow globe… in Leavenworth, Washington At the age of 6, my mom moved me to a new home. A magical and otherworldly wonderland home. The welcome sign at the entrance road to this unfamiliar land proclaimed that you were entering Leavenworth, Washington, the “Bavarian Village.” The sign included a new, unfamiliar, and strange looking group of…
It’s not everyday you decide to pack all your Forever (not-so) 21 and Charlotte Russe apparel in boxes, alongside your 10 seasons of Friends DVDs, and get on the plane to move to another country. Being a planner, one might think this was a long deliberated decision, in which I stewed upon for months, contemplating alternatives on when, where, how,…
My now husband and I were tucked between two lumberjack (err, gentlemen’s) clubs and an empanada food truck on SE 82nd Avenue when he realized without a doubt he wanted to marry me in 2012. We had found our way to a Vietnamese travel agency in East Portland thanks to our building handyman, Binh Nguyen’s recommendation to seek out “Tim”…
