May 30, 2011
Thanks to Trop50 for sponsoring my writing about fabulous bloggers. This year Trop50 is granting 50 Fabulous Wishes. Click here to enter for a chance to win $1,000 to celebrate a friend with a refreshing attitude about looking and feeling fabulous!
Fabulous: Someone who makes people smile. Someone who tries to change the world. Someone who loves. Someone who does their own thing.
These are five of my favorite bloggers. They are all hilarious/intelligent/witty/kind and so much more.
1. To a T: Nashy was one of my good friends in high school. We now live a million miles apart and our lives couldn’t be more different, but so often she posts things about the way she feels or the way she views life and I find myself nodding and thinking, “Yeah! That’s so true!” We still have a common ground in spite of all the differences. She’s the mother of two beautiful little boys and loves taking pictures of them. Her photography has grown in leaps and bounds! See exhibit A:
Warning: Do not read her blog if you want to feel like an underachieving parent. She is SUPER mom. But she has an unfair advantage, she used to be an elementary school teacher 
Another online friend who writes in the same vein and is also super artsy and crafty and has adorable kids on her blog is Vivian at A Dance for 5. Very worth checking out!
2. Decoy Betty: Deidre is HILARIOUS. I mean hilarious as in, some of her posts will literally make you laugh out loud. Like the time she interviewed for a job as a poop and recycled water specialist. I love her for not holding back and showing all sides of herself on blog. And plus, somehow, even if she’s complaining, she still comes across as upbeat and cheery. Funny people can do pull that off!
3. Se Habla Spanglish: I met Cata through Andi (who I did not add to this list because by now if you didn’t realize that we were friends and I love her blog, you’ve clearly missed the boat on that one). She is a beautiful and brave soul, Colombian, living in the U.S., world traveler and about to get married! I love that she has visited so many exotic and cool places, yet always returns to Colombia and speaks of her hometown with passion. Oh, and did I mention she loves Shakira as much as I do? Bonus!
4. Stories of Conflict and Love: Roxanne is an amazing writer. AMAZING, I tell you. She paints pictures with her words. You feel like you are breathing the very air she was breathing in the stories she tells. She will have a book published one day. You heard it here first. She’s a sweet Greek girl who works and lives in conflicts zones. In her words, she specializes “in the effects of war and conflict on women.” When I said that the definition of fabulous was someone who is changing the world, I was thinking about Roxanne.
5. Oneika The Traveller: This girl has a serious case of the travel bug. It cannot be cured. She currently lives in Hong Kong where she blogs not only about her cultural experiences there, but uses the city as a jumping off point to visit many other awesome destinations. And, I’m not going to lie, not only do I love her travel stories, but I also like seeing what she wears when she posts pictures of herself. This girl has some serious style.
6. Not In The Pink: Ceri is another funny woman blogger! She has an adventurous, up for anything kind of attitude, which she’ll be bringing to Latin America at the end of this year and I cannot wait. Just from reading her posts, I can tell she’s the kind of person I want to be friends with!
If we’re blog friends and I didn’t pick you, don’t worry — that doesn’t mean I don’t love you! These are just some of my favorites that I personally think are underrated!
Don’t forget to enter the 50 Fabulous Wishes contest for a chance to win $1,000 to celebrate a friend with a refreshing attitude about looking and feeling fabulous. I was selected for this Tropicana Trop50 sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do. I received compensation to use and facilitate my post.
May 29, 2011
Notice how I titled this post GIANT Internet Nerds, not just regular Internet Nerds.
I have so many friends in real life, that are from my online world. I maintain close relationships with people I’ve never even met. I’m currently en route (lies, I’m here now, but I wrote this on the plane to London!) to a different continent to go stay with a friend I consider to be like a soul sister — and we’ve only hung out a total of like 4 times before.
Andi’s wedding was basically the culmination of my internet nerdiness! Except the wedding was so beautiful and glamorous that it made me feel like significantly less of a geek.
After meeting for the first time last year, Andi and I instantly hit it off. When we talked, we skipped all the meaningless chit chat and went straight to the good stuff — relationships, difficulties of running a business, etc. Via countless emails, plus following each other’s blog posts, we already knew each other.
So when she announced that she was getting married in Buenos Aires, I was not shocked at all that people from around the travel blog community were invited. I was, however, shocked at the amount of people that went. There are few people in this world that know that many people willing to fly that far to attend their nuptials.
Some of the people who attended had never even met Andi in real life before! And many of us were also meeting each other for the first time. Of course, Emily went. I mean, she’d also only hung out with Andi for a few days that one time back in September of last year but after that short weekend together we had already formed a plan to kidnap Andi and force her to live in Chile forever, so it’s only natural that Emily would hop on a plane over the Andes for this girl she’d met once previously.
At the wedding, I couldn’t help but thinking, this is the future, whether people like it or not. I’ve heard so much talk about how face to face social interaction is replaced by social media online. But I don’t think of it that way. To me, social media interaction is like an added bonus in addition to face to face interaction. If it weren’t for these girls’ blogs, I would have went to that wedding knowing nothing about them. I would’ve met them there, chatted and had a great time with them…and then that would’ve been it. It’s not like I would’ve started a pen-pal relationship with someone I’d only met one time.
But because of social media — twitter interactions, facebook and following their blogs — by the time I got to the wedding, I already knew a little bit about all of them, so our conversations over the course of the evening went a little bit deeper. Afterward, the connection was maintained by adding them on facebook, if we weren’t already fb friends, and continuing to keep up with their lives via their social media feeds. Because of this, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if we all saw each other again somewhere in real life.
From left to right, the online travel mavens at the wedding: Julie, NuevaAmericana. Emily, Don’t Call Me Gringa. Andi, My Beautiful Adventures. Me, not a maven. Link is WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW. Kirsten, Kirsten Alana. Laura, Travel For Love. Abby, The Jungle Princess. Andrea, Inspiring Travelers.
Please forgive my disgusting hair. I asked the hairdresser if he could give me a spray to tame the frizz because Rodrigo hooks me up before all my weddings, and this guy put something on my head that made me greasy. Ew.
So yes, kids on facebook all of the time does pose a problem — if they truly never see each other face to face. But in a lot of cases, I think that social media genuinely helps people forge more connections — and if you use it right, they’re not just connections, they’re real connections.
Do you believe that social media is destroying our society?
May 27, 2011
So I’m kind of jumping around a little here. Yesterday we were in London, today we’re in Philadelphia. Except we’re not actually still there. But I really liked the City of Brotherly Love so I didn’t want to just skip it and then end up never posting about it because we’ll have moved on to more glam European locations. There are a lot of cool places to travel to within the U.S. and cities like Philly don’t get enough credit!
As you already know, the Liberty Bell was one of our Biggest Travel Disappointments EVER. However, we loved all the rest of the rich history that the city of Philadelphia has to offer!
We were only in Philadelphia in passing. Because all the cheapest tickets to Europe from Santiago go through the U.S. and sometimes have you with nine hour layovers in U.S. airports, I decided we should just get a hotel and stay the night instead.
Wind.
We arrived around 3pm in the afternoon from Dallas — we had flown SCL-DFW-PHL. It took us about an hour to get showered and then head out! We didn’t have much time to explore since we had to be at the airport early the next day to leave for our next round of flights — PHL-CHI-LON.
The minute we stepped out of the metro, into the historic district of Philadelphia, we were pretty amazed by what a gorgeous city it was.
I liked the mix of modern and very old. Well, not very old compared to Europe, but this is probably the oldest, in terms of architecture, that the U.S. has to offer.
The tilt shift distortion made me look really fat in the first picture of this post, so I figured it was only fair to post one where it distorted me to really skinny
Such a happy friendly face
CLAIRE! This one’s for you! Look, one of your relatives invented Mother’s Day. That’s a pretty awesome claim to fame if you ask me.
There is this AWESOME market in Philly. I believe it’s called the Reading Something Something Market. I have a great memory for these kinds of things, if you can’t tell.
Anyways, it’s full of places selling all kinds of unique cuisines, from fudge, to cold cuts, to sandwiches, to gourmet, even to cool kitchen apparatuses. Unfortunately we arrived as most places were shutting down for the day (they close at 6pm) so we didn’t eat there, but we walked around enough to get a feel for the place. I thought it was really cool!
Piggy bank!
Yummy Yummy. If I had a restaurant, I would use that name if it weren’t already taken. Why not just be literal about things?
Philadelphia does have a Chinatown area, but we just walked by. By that time we were on a mission to go eat in a neighborhood that the hotel concierge had recommended to us. He really talked it up, so we were all excited.
Tiiiiny little Liberty Bell.
I liked that the city was super green!
Rita’s Happiness. Awww, hi Mom!
Notice the photo that I put right below Rita’s Happiness. Yeah, that’s me Please excuse the tired face and lack of makeup. See above reference to many, many flights in a short, short amount of time.
We ate at a place called Bridget Foy’s and it was DELISH. We sat outside and enjoyed a nice low-key meal before walking back to the metro and calling it a night. It was a good end to our five hours in Philly — though sadly we never tried a cheesesteak. I don’t like cheese anyway though, so no loss on my part.
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