Weekend in Bordeaux Every year, I get together with a fantastic group of girls to celebrate my cousin’s birthday. We choose a different destination every time but it is usually somewhere in Europe where 3/4 of us live. I think the funniest thing about our annual (sometimes more frequent) trips is when someone asks us where we are from. We are all from different continents, have different backgrounds relative to where we were born and we are all expats. So, it’s a pretty loaded question to ask us that will prompt a 20 minute conversation at least! This year, if you haven’t guessed it yet, we de ..read more

 Cinque Terre in the Year 1100 The first written documents referencing the Cinque Terre date back to the year 1100. They were completely isolated as they were only accessible by boat or by foot if you were willing to challenge the terrain. It wasn’t until 1860 that roads and railways were built to access the towns. The people that lived in the Cinque Terre worked extremely hard to make it livable: terraces had to be formed in order to cultivate the land and more than 8000 kilometers of dry stone walls were built. Before tourism was a source of income, locals depended heavily on agricultur ..read more

Lunch at Daycare If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that I started sending my baby to daycare just shy of his first birthday. Almost all of his teeth came in before he started and so his standard toddler meal was a good mix of finger foods and table foods. My daycare (and most daycares in Italy), can provide a healthy, balanced toddler meal for about five Euros. Whether or not you opt into this meal program, the daycare also takes care of providing baby biscuits and water to the kids. How much does your daycare charge you for a toddler meal? If your toddler goes to daycare five days a ..read more

Audio Walking Tour of Milan In December 2017, I launched my first walking audio tour of Milan with the VoiceMap app. I wrote about my experience creating it in a previous blog post and mentioned how I was eager to do more research about Milan and all it had to offer. In my audio tour, I start off in one of the most popular sites for tourists, Piazza Duomo, and then guide you to an area of Milan rich with art, history and fashion – Brera and the Quadrilateral of Fashion. While there is a lot of information and history about these neighbourhoods, they are places where you will find tourists. Thi ..read more

How I Stayed in Italy as a Foreignor I came to Italy in late 2009 on a six-month working-holiday visa. After three months, I found an employer that was looking to hire me and sponsor me for a full-time job. Once I got my work visa, I was able to stay in Italy as long as I stayed employed by the sponsor company. There was an inconvenience  – every year, I had to go back to Canada to renew my visa. That meant that I had to take three weeks off of work in February, a month before my visa expired – not the best time to go for holidays in Vancouver. Luckily, the first year I went back to Vanco ..read more

Are you Hot Mess? Mommy? Blogger? (Bullet Journal) All three? Chances are that if you are reading this, you are a multi-tasking mom trying to do it all: build a work-from-home business, side-hustle, keep up with social media, take care of the kids-your husband-your house-yourself, attend extra-curricular activities, sign up for online courses, teach dance, paint, do crafts, get involved in your kids’ schools and activities, juggle a full-time or a part-time job etcetera, etcetera. If you are managing to do all of this in a well-organized manner while maintaining zen at all times then you are a ..read more

Whenever my mom comes to visit me in Italy, she is always sure to bake and cook up a storm in my kitchen. This time, we tried out a new winter holiday recipe, Turkish Delight jelly candies. On the topic of trying new things out, I decided to jump on the instructional video recipe bandwagon. In retrospect, I probably could have chosen an easier recipe to make for my first instructional video, but my ambition got the best of me. Interesting Facts about Turkish Delight The exact origins of Turkish Delight candies are still not determined but we know that they were being produced in Turkey as earl ..read more

Indoor Skydiving at Aero Gravity Milan This Christmas, my husband surprised me with an awesome gift: a session with him at the biggest indoor skydiving facility in the world: Aero Gravity in Milan. I have been visiting Milan quite often and learning more about it as I was developing a walking audio tour for VoiceMaps, but I never knew Milan had indoor skydiving. And no wonder, it only opened last March. It started with four skydivers eager to share their love of skydiving. How? By letting people try it for themselves without having to actually jump out of a plane. They came up with this idea t ..read more

Pregnant on New Year’s Eve When I was pregnant on New Year’s Eve, I wore black leggings, a long sweater and a poncho – frumpy. I was visiting my cousins in the UK and both my cousin’s wife and I were expecting so we stayed in and celebrated in their house. I just didn’t feel like getting dressed up because it seemed like a hassle and I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable. Are you feeling like that? Maybe you aren’t. Maybe you are like the many pregnant women in Italy that I encounter: dressed up, hair done, make-up perfect, heels on, standing around with her friends having a great time. How do t ..read more

For the last few months, I’ve been working on an audio walking tour for the city of Milan. Anytime I mentioned I was attempting an audio tour, friends would ask me, “When do you have time to do that?” VoiceMap Audio Tour I didn’t come up with the idea myself. I was contacted by the company VoiceMap. They asked if I would be interested in helping them develop a tour for a town or city in Italy. With everything I have got going on (export sales, dance/aerobics classes, piano classes, mom, wife and house duties), I wasn’t sure where I was going to fit “audio tour guide” into the equation. However ..read more