Our one year travel anniversary passed in August fairly uneventfully. While we’ve had a few hard moments, our day-to-day life while traveling has not felt significantly more challenging than our day-to-day life at home. (Though, admittedly, we haven’t yet found a way to A/B test our lives.)
On the map below, the places where we’ve lived for about a month are marked in blue and our upcoming, planned homes-for-a-month are marked in orange. We just landed in Denpasar, Indonesia, marking the beginning of about six months in Asia. We have about four more markers to add after we depart Japan at the end of April.
(Clicking on the map will open it in Google maps, where you can scroll and zoom. Or, if you hate maps, you can scroll to the bottom of this post where I’ve also just listed all of the places.)
We’ve often been asked about our favorite place. We’ve liked everywhere we’ve visited, often for very different reasons. So that’s a hard question! But, based on the places we’ve been so far:
- Stockholm or Auckland would be the easiest places for us to live long-term based on food and culture. (Lyon is a close runner-up.)
- Istanbul is the place where Theo was most doted upon. (This was a plus for Theo, but not always a plus for us adults.)
- Turkish was my favorite cuisine. (Brian says Turkish or Costa Rican.)
- Stockholm had the overall best food quality and variety. (I had just one mediocre meal in Stockholm in a whole month.)
- Stockholm and Reykjavik felt the most gender-equal and socially progressive. (Both big pluses for us.)
- Zagreb, Stockholm, Reykjavik, Costa Rica, and Auckland all had amazing coffee. (I’m the only one of us three who cares about coffee quality, but I care enough for all of us.)
- Lyon, Stockholm, Buenos Aires, and Auckland had the best playgrounds. (We define best in this category as numerous, well-kept, and imaginative.)
- Zagreb, L’isle-sur-la-Sorgue, and Lyon housed our favorite markets. (Not only did Zagreb have a HUGE regular market, but we were also there during Christmas market season and the city was dotted with them. I miss the mulled wine.)
- Istanbul, Stockholm, and Buenos Aires had the best public transportation. (The transport in Istanbul and Buenos Aires were also crazy-cheap. While the general fares in Stockholm were pricier, adults with stroller-riding-children ride for free!)
- Cyprus had the most interesting current political situation. (Which we knew next to nothing about until we were crossing a UN buffer zone in the middle of the night.)
… and a year from now, I’m sure that at least some of these favorites will have shifted.
***
Places we’ve lived thus far:
- Skibbereen, Ireland
- Lyon, France
- L’isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France
- Zagreb, Croatia
- Istanbul, Turkey
- Pissouri, Cyprus
- Stockholm, Sweden
- Reykjavik, Iceland
- Esterellos Oeste, Costa Rica
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Denpasar, Indonesia (we just arrived)
Upcoming homes:
- New Delhi, India
- Chiang Mai, Thailand
- Hanoi, Vietnam
- Taipei, Taiwan
- Otsu, Japan
- ?
- ?
- ?
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