Friends and loved ones, I recently celebrated a personal milestone of sorts that I wanted to share with each of you. A couple of months ago I passed the ten year mark living and working overseas. It's an achievement I'm proud of, but it does leave me in a somewhat contemplative and reflective mood. When I, Read More
Back in June of this year, Bain gave me the fantastic opportunity to apply for a transfer to the Madrid office. It was an opportunity I couldn't say no to – to get myself back to Europe, to get to know Spain as a resident and not a tourist, to continue to improve my, Read More
With everyone at work during the weekdays I decided to pull the boots on and go for a day hike. I originally planned to do a bunch of overnight hikes while I’m here but the weather has been absolutely shite. Appears I missed summer by a day and it’s been cool, cloudy and rainy, Read More
Back in Switzerland, I raced around Zurich and the capital city Bern (a 1.5 hour train journey away) for a couple of days to try and gather a few of the many visas I’ll need for my next "Silk Road" leg of the Grand Tour. While in Bern I decided to rattle off a, Read More
My last destination in Eastern Europe! I’m here in Veliko Tarnovo, the old medieval capital of Bulgaria (before it moved to Sofia in the 19th Century). It’s in the green, forested mountains of the central north part of the country, and its setting is quite dramatic (and not dissimilar to Luxembourg City). The pretty, Read More
Crap name, cool city. Plovdiv is the city that Sofia isn’t – a manageable size, clean, green, and generally "nice". It’s a few hours east of the capital and I desperately needed to get out of Sofia so I made a beeline stright for it. I checked into a hostel and then went for, Read More
While Sofia can definitely be missed, Rila Monastery should not be! It would have to be one of my highlights of the trip thus far. Rila Monastery is a functioning Orthodox monastery tucked deep in the lush, green mountains a few hours south of Sofia (built there so that the Ottomans wouldn’t find it, Read More
I finally made it to Sofia after a fairly horrendous journey from Sarajevo. After a full day of bus travel through the mountains of Bosnia and Serbia I made it to the town of Nis (pron. “Nish”) in south-east Serbia by 6pm. I was hoping for a quick connection to Sofia (which I thought, Read More
Sarajevo was yet another must-see on my Balkans tour. I wanted to learn more about the four-year siege that the city withstood from 1992-1995, and I also wanted to see how the situation was today. The bus ride from Mostar to Sarajevo was a good one along turquoise rivers and lakes, through narrow valleys, Read More
If you think back to the Balkans Wars of the 1990’s, you’ll probably recall the story of Mostar as a shining example of its futility… The town is to this day split down the middle into Croatian (Catholic) and Bosnian (Muslim) halves, which fought each other during the war – real neighbour vs. neighbour, Read More