I’ve always fancied being a tour guide for a time. Sure, it would get old pretty soon, but for 3-6 months it’d be awesome wearing the brightly coloured jacket, holding the umbrella, and taking groups of tourists around my hometown (or adopted city), providing snippets of history and local lore. The other day we put on a travel-themed digital event for some of our supporters … Continue reading I’m an anti-slavery tour guide. Sort of.
I don’t have any bones to pick with public transport, but sometimes it can really screw you over. This is a shout out to the kind stranger who helped me out a few days ago. I was up in Brisbane for work and needed to get a bus from Central to my meeting out west. Wanting to check that I was in the right place, I turned to a … Continue reading Not-so-random acts of kindness
It’s been pop culture season on my blog lately! First it was Married At First Sight, then it was Dev Patel, followed by Jeff Daniels.
This week, I’m talking celebrities – the red carpet sort, and also the everyday sort … And I’m looking at why I get so shy and unfriendly around them. Continue reading Anti-celebrity me
The wrong question? As soon as the question escaped my lips I knew that I had become That Annoying Person Who Asks The Stupid Question That Misses The Point. My poorly articulated question spread across the auditorium like a bad taste on the palate. I was at the Justice Conference in Melbourne, and it was an “In conversation with…” session on the intersection of art and justice which ended up … Continue reading Misunderstood: artists, do-gooders and missionaries
For one glorious year, I was almost-no-longer-twentysomething – but 29 is still twentysomething. Alas, those days are behind me. I desperately wanted to write an uplifting post about how excited I am about this new decade of life. But milestones seem to lend themselves to melancholy – they’re about past achievements rather than future hopes and dreams. Birthdays provide me with a forced moment of … Continue reading Getting down and thirty
What’s the difference between a tourist and a traveller? And how can we have more meaningful travel experiences even while traveling for leisure?
Throughout my experiences of being a tourist, exchange student, international intern and expat, I have been reflecting constantly on these questions of identity, foreignness and the assumptions bound up in the practice and concept of travel. Continue reading 10 Tips For More Meaningful Travel
Three thoughts chewed over with friends in the last month or so: Religion is a relationship: it’s not really about exactly what you do, but the relationship that those acts and activities somehow sustain and develop. Am I great company but a terrible friend? And what would make me a better friend? Why do we still have reservations about online dating? Given how technology has changed every other way … Continue reading Questions about relationships
Moscow was hot and muggy when we landed. She was temperamental – at times overcast, at times sunny. She was vast, immense like Russia itself. She was full of metro stations, Italian restaurants, kebab outlets. She was completely Cyrillic and very little English. All in all she was quite pretty, really. We dragged our broken suitcase and four backpacks to Lux Apartments (a euphemism if ever I came across … Continue reading Meeting Moscow
