General plan for upcoming trip to the South Island :

An update was due on the visited countries map, once again using Douwe Osinga's excellent visited countries app. So I'm now at 41 Countries (18.2%) Create your own visited map of The World

This post was written in July 2013 and appeared on the original Hotel Paper blog. I was fortunate to spend some time this summer volunteering in Jinotega, Nicaragua with the solid folks at Outreach360, a nonprofit working on children's literacy in Central America. Jinotega is smack dab in Nicaragua's coffee growing region, and largely a community that … Continue reading What digital divide?

This post was written in July 2012 and appeared on the original Hotel Paper blog. We spent a week this summer volunteering as a family with a children's education nonprofit in the town of Monte Cristi, in the Dominican Republic. This is a summary of that trip. The non-profit we worked with was Outreach360, which we … Continue reading tl; DR

Downtown Athens (Syntagma Square) was rocked by a bomb blast on Monday. A group of us were walking home from dinner Monday night and happened to walk past the blast site. I took a picture, and here´s what the scene still looked like then. You can see the shattered glass strewn everywhere. The blast coincided … Continue reading Athens Blasts

There is a simple but effective app here that lets you check off which countries you've been to, and color codes them on a map of the world. It then tells you what % of the countries in the world you've been to. Here's my visited countries map : It says I've only been to … Continue reading Visited Countries

Samina, I and the kids had the pleasure of being in San Juan, Puerto Rico this past November while the US was on the eve of presidential elections. (We had sent in absentee ballots before leaving). Besides the wonderful Puerto Rican food, sights, and all other things boricua, we were also privy to a unique … Continue reading Election

If you want to see the swiss alps, the northern california coastline, the rainforests of south east asia, the golden beaches of florida, or the barren landscape of the moon, but don't really feel like traveling to all those places (or paying some russian aerospace agency to take you there), go to Hawaii, AKA the … Continue reading To Hawi and Hawi Not

"Have Nice girl. You want?" (Taxi driver outside the Shangri-La Hotel, Bangkok) The goal - I had an afternoon free, so I set off on a mission to Panthip plaza, mecca of all things electrical to Bangkok shoppers. The plan - I'll catch a cab, I figured ... And look, here's a nice taxi stand … Continue reading Bangkok By Blog