Sophie À La Carte!

I write to you all during my layover in the Charles De Gaulle airport, en route to Yerevan. Enough of you have said “I’m looking forward to reading your blog!” that I feel obligated to update it more frequently during this trip than in the last couple of years. Given, this is new territory for me, and I know I will appreciate looking back at these posts later in life, as I thought when I first started my travel blog four years ago. Packing went pretty smoothly this year- I recycled my Balkan packing list from last year, give or take a few items. If you’re interested you can see it here . I pulled out a few things last minute in an attempt to lighten my load, which is already pretty light- at the airport it weighed 22 pounds, about half the weight of the bag I lugged around Europe for 15 months several years ago. For a two month trip, I’m feeling pretty good about it, and of course I can always pick up things along the way. (Fast forwarding to Wednesday, my first full day in Yere...

Welp, after two weeks of anxiety and concocting plans B, C, and D, I now have my original passport in hand, complete with a fresh Russian visa valid for three years. How did it happen? I’m going to blame it on sheer luck and the Russian Consulate for giving me a direct number to the visa service center where I sent my passport. I called the ILS center in Houston first thing Monday, June 3 as I was driving back from Kansas. A very nice woman named Oksana answered after a few rings, asked for my name and my phone number, and said “Okay, we will call you back when we find your package.” ...Find my package? After 6 weeks of waiting for my passport to return, it was still sitting unopened in there office. I was not optimistic at all, but lo and behold, three hours later Oksana called me back. The online visa application I had submitted to the Russian consulate had expired, she said, but she went ahead and filled it out again for me. All I had to do was print, sign, scan, and e-...

Greetings, friends. Long time no post! I would traditionally be posting on June 28 to reminisce about my extended time abroad and share with you any upcoming travel plans, but I will already be a week and a half in to my next adventure. A brief update before I launch into my most recent experience: after two very full years I have officially completed my Masters in Public Policy and Masters in Public Health degrees at the University of Minnesota. It was an awesome experience but I am happy to be done with classes and homework. I also have a new job! I’m currently working with a badass healthcare lobbyist at the Minnesota State Capitol. We have a lot of interesting clients, all focused on helping other people. It feels good to be doing such meaningful work. This post will not have too many details about my upcoming voyage, but I’ll say briefly that in late February I decided to go to Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Russia this summer. Since then I have been ...

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...