Category > Europe

Jul 13, 2025
Italy, Switzerland
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Close to heart

Trieste to Aosta, Italy /
Thun, Switzerland

On a trip of this length, energy and enthusiasm are bound to dip. It’s been great to have a few chances to recharge, but at times in the moment, this final stage felt like killing time between seeing more friends. Haphazardly chosen on the fly as convenient places to break long journeys, some of these last few stops were not places I had any familiarity, and as I realised towards the end, it was a unique opportunity not just to see more sides of Italy than the ones I know, but to see and experience places special to people I care about.
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Jul 3, 2025
Slovenia
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Breather

Ljubljana and Piran, Slovenia

After weeks of consecutive heat waves in Sicily, Malta, Tunisia, and even in northern Italy, I was dying for a change. Upon suggestion by multiple friends and a simple glance at the map — mountains! — I made a short detour to Slovenia with no planning beyond simple knowledge of a capital and a lake.

While not much, I did get a few modest degrees of relief from the thermometer. Taking the bus up from coastal Trieste, I also didn’t realise how much I missed seeing green fields, trees, and mountains! And while I actively choose not to seek cultural immersion, having been overwhelmed by a firehose of different histories, languages, and information already from three other countries and only having a few days here, Slovenia made a lovely and distinct impression.
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Jun 29, 2025
Italy, San Marino
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Backdrop

San Marino /
Bologna to Venice, Italy

Even if I haven’t visited most of northern Italy before, you could say that it’s a known quantity. Everyone knows someone who’s visited or wants to visit. Everyone knows how good the food is. Everyone’s probably learned at least some of the history in school — whether it be about artistic figures, religion, war, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance… Much has been said, and there’s not much for me to add.

I won’t lie, my main interests don’t exactly lie in these things, even if I can enjoy or have appreciation for them. What brings me to this area, and what’s kept me going in spite of peak season crowds and extreme heat, are friends: one who moved back to Italy from Canada, one who happens to be in town, Italian friends from Canada getting married and all our mutual friends in town for that wedding, and one guiding me through her hometown in absentia. Same goes for Switzerland, a detour tacked onto the end to visit some more friends again. That made for a grand but overwhelming time of reunions and highlight after highlight threatening to blur into each other.

Most of those highlights are ones that I think best remain in our memories. But in between, there was some exploring too!
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Jun 16, 2025
Malta
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All of the above

Valletta to Victoria, Malta

I’m not sure what I expected landing in Malta. It’s just a short half hour flight from Catania in Sicily, or a half-day ferry ride. Sicily has tiny islands to its south, even further south than Malta — wouldn’t it make sense if Malta were similarly Italian in character? But it’s also a stone’s throw away from North Africa, and the Maltese language is closely related to Arabic. Wouldn’t it make sense if Malta were an Arabic-speaking Muslim country?

That’s the logic brain talking. Ignoramus brain only knew of Malta as a hedonistic destination for nightlife party-seeking Brits and festival-goers, and a microstate playground for the rich akin to Monaco.

So imagine my surprise that my logic brain wasn’t right at all. Not only that, but my ignoramus knowledge was but a footnote in a stay that provided the kind of genuine surprises that I find increasingly uncommon after so much travel.
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Jun 11, 2025
Italy
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Romanticise

Sicily, Italy

It’s my third day in Palermo (of 11 in Sicily) and I’m puzzled. The sights are famous. The pictures are beautiful. The food is everything you hear about from Sicily. The evening brings the city to life and the crowds come out.

I’ve made my way down the pedestrianized Maqueda, checked out the famous cathedral, the Palatine Chapel with its golden mosaic art, and even made my way up to nearby Monreale for even more mosaics. I’ve walked through the markets. I’ve gotten real-time advice from friends on what food to try — arancini, pasta alla norma, cannoli, granita, brioche col gelato, pani ca meusa (spleen sandwich)… I’ve taken the train to Cefalù and climbed all the way up to the top of La Rocca, then all the way back down again to dive into the azure water sandwiching the town to said rock.

So yeah, I’ve done all the stuff. But something feels…off. The heat is stifling. The jet lag lingers, I’m disengaged, and anxiety keeps me awake even longer at night. The food recommendations may be solid, but the places I’m getting them at aren’t hitting the spot. The crowds are everywhere. All of that can be managed. As I sipped on an overpriced limoncello spritz by the shore, trying to cool off while watching the world go by, seeing neighbourhood residents chatting it up, I suddenly felt an odd sense of enjoyment. It finally dawned on me: as pretty as the pictures were, I was focusing on the wrong stuff.

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Jun 3, 2024
France, Réunion
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Hopla

Salazie to Cilaos, Réunion

There’s one word that initially comes to mind for all of…this: why?

Why does this place exist? Why is this actually France? Why are all the roads so twisty? Why do people live so isolated?

Also, why did I choose to rent a car and have my first drive in three years be one after a marathon overnight flight to Paris, a 9 hour airport change carrying all my things in the city centre, a second overnight flight to La Réunion, and a couple hours up an incredibly twisty and narrow mountain road all the while trying to function entirely in French? Hey, at least I’m still here to tell the tale.
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Oct 21, 2022
Portugal
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Subsume

 Porto to Lisbon, Portugal

10 years ago, despite spending five weeks in Spain, I had so much going on with all of Silvia and Óscar’s recommendations, and so many friends to visit elsewhere, that I never had a chance to get to Portugal. Six years ago, the original idea of my Silk Road trip was to go from one ocean to the other, from Hong Kong’s Pacific to Portugal’s Atlantic, by land. I had so much fun in the middle that I ran out of time by Austria. So there’s some motivation to address some unfinished business!

But let’s just cut to the chase here: this portion of the trip was completely overshadowed by the Azores. I had a fine enough time in mainland Portugal, but having experienced so many emotional reunions and seen everything I already wanted to, my head was already elsewhere. Unseasonably frequent rain also didn’t help. But there had to have been something more to explain the general sense of disconnect I felt despite being in an objectively compelling place.
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Oct 12, 2022
Portugal
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Sidetracks

 São Miguel, Azores, Portugal

After all these years and after becoming conversational in Portuguese, somehow I’ve never been to Portugal, a pretty popular place in its own right. It’s right next to Spain, too. So… Let me just skip right over it (insert meme song here) and fly to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean instead. Sounds logical, right?

Well, the Azores are still Portugal. Maybe not the first thing that comes to mind though, since they’re an autonomous region. Even some of the mainland Portuguese visitors I encountered slipped up and called it “going abroad.”

I’ve been fascinated by these little dots on the map ever since I saw the largest city, Ponta Delgada, had relatively short direct flights from Boston, home to a large Azorean diaspora. Though I never took the opportunity to go while I lived in Boston, they’ve stuck in my mind ever since. Why are these little isolated islands so inhabited? How’d they become part of Portugal?
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Oct 4, 2022
Spain
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Abundance

 Empordà / Girona, Catalonia, Spain

It’s funny how fast and intense travel friendships can be. Usually it ends with people extending an open invitation to visit their homes: hey, I’ve been on both ends of that. As genuine as they are, more often than not, these invitations are aspirational, seldom followed up.

It’s thus all the more surprising which friendships endure. I spent barely a day and a half with Gemma and Ramon in Sri Lanka seven years ago! We pulled a memorably freezing all-nighter, hiking up those 5500 steps, before parting ways in opposite directions with each other’s recommendations. Occasional messages over the years gave way an increasingly serious desire on my part to act on their open invitation to visit. And so here I am!
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Sep 25, 2022
Spain
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Euphoria

Festes de la Mercè
 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

It’s rare for me to visit a place twice. Even when it comes to visiting friends, it takes me ages. Without friends though, it practically never happens. There’s one big thing different this time that brings me here.

En route to visit my friends Gemma and Ramon deeper in Catalonia, timing led me to make an impromptu weeklong stay in Barcelona, just in time for the biggest cultural festival of the year. (Shoutout to Rob for telling me about it, and sorry the timing didn’t work out for Valencia!) They set me up with their friends in Barcelona, Mar and Ignasi, who could not be more welcoming and hosted me despite a week where were all too busy to actually hang out beyond a dinner or two. It’s still enough to form another fast friendship, and I hope we find an opportunity to pick things up again just as I’ve been doing with others on this trip.

While waiting for the main attraction on the weekend, before and after my weekday remote work hours, I spent a whole lot of time aimlessly walking around Barcelona. It’s nice for once to not have any pressure to see the sights or do touristy things, to relax at home whenever I felt like without feeling a loss of time, and to have a mix of old and new.
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