Sophie À La Carte!

I’m sitting in a restaurant at the Frankfurt Airport with an advertised view of “the airfield,” spending my last Euros on a pretzel and sparkling water. I have about four and a half hours until my flight to Minneapolis leaves, plenty of time to write a blog post, finish my book, make a to-do list, and start on my homework- at least, I hope! A path in Hotnitsa village, Bulgaria Several times before and during this recent trip people asked me why I came back to the Balkans to travel instead of going somewhere, and I modified my responses almost every time. However, after some bus rides/flights with not much else to occupy me, I came up with some definitive answers. Along the bay in my first stop, Kotor, Montenegro I needed something to look forward to, and the Balkans fit that category. In late spring, I experienced a large amount of stress and anxiety due to graduate school, work, and my personal relationships. I had been looking at flights abroad for a few weeks,

Three years. Three years since I hopped on an Icelandair plane to Europe, not knowing when I’d be back. Fifteen months later (not including a quick hop over in May 2016) I landed back in the states and picked up where I left off. As is tradition, I wanted to give you all a quick update on what’s been going on in the last year since I wrote a two year travelversary post in 2017 . I want to acknowledge that living in the United States is kinda rough right now. There’s been a lot of bad news coming out of DC this week, and it’s hard not to let it seep into your psyche, affect your daily routine, and darken your thoughts of what will happen next. I had the privilege of hearing NYT columnist Thomas Friedman speak on Tuesday evening. This was after the Supreme Court upheld the Muslim ban, and it wasn’t just me in the audience who was feeling hopeless, for lack of a better term. I think all of us were looking towards Friedman, a Minnesota native, to give us something to l