Tag: friends

My 10,000th day alive is a reminder to make excuses for elaborate festivities

You have to take every opportunity to celebrate that you can.

In June, I crossed the 10,000th day of my life — June 10th to be exact. In August, after two years of living together, my good friend Patrick, who also crossed a similar mark, was moving out of my home.

To celebrate, he and I had a weekend of celebration. We joked it was our roommate bucket list.

On Friday night, we had a trashy liquor party, where we had more than 20 people over to drink the leftover booze we’ve had in our home for years.

On Saturday, after brunch, chess in the park, basketball, pizza and the Phillies at the Piazza, a mini bar crawl, ending with city-wide specials at the Handle Bar and gambling at Sugarhouse Casino, all while wearing suits of course.

Then, on Sunday, we played paintball.

Check out our full itinerary here.

What became clear was that this was an act of merrymaking by way of any excuse to actually do the thing.

My guest post on studying in Ghana and other personal travel blogs of interest

dateline-accra

I was asked to guest post on Dateline Accra, the small, personal travel blog of Stephen Zook, a young journalist whose spirit I adored when I was editing his copy a few years ago at The Temple News, the college newspaper I once worked and this year he’ll lead. He is studying in Accra, the capital city of Ghana in West Africa, this summer.

This was my contribution:

Don’t be afraid of the satchel water.

Pretty quickly on in the urbanized sprawl of greater Accra in coastal Ghana, you just might notice that the kids buy plastic bags of water, a corner of which they bite off to chug the contents. If no one convinces you otherwise, you just might stick to the bottled variety.

Don’t be afraid of the satchel water — that much I learned.

I spent a portion of summer 2005 studying at the University of Ghana in East Legon outside of the capital city of Accra. It wasn’t long enough to fully familiarize myself with even the university, set aside the city, the country or the region and Hell if I have even a taste of the continent, as one of the great lessons from travel should be that cultural learning comes from decades not days in a place. I did, however, pick up that the satchel water was refreshing, cheap and unique. Read the rest here.

Before he left, I promised him a beer when he returned. Now, I think he owes me one.

I hope he has a transcendent summer, explores and shares everything he can on that site. I also hope he builds traffic to share his story. He’s using Twitter, though he has some ground he can certainly make, as he’ll have plenty of compelling stories to tell.

Of course, this made me realize I follow a handful of low-traffic, personal travel blogs of friends or acquaintances who offer interesting reading. After the jump, peep seven such blogs that might be worth your time, whether you know the writers and their locations or not.

Continue reading My guest post on studying in Ghana and other personal travel blogs of interest