Sardinia and Corsica have some of the dreamiest beaches and coastlines In Europe. Yes the sand is really that white, and the sea the bluest blue. Imagine dropping anchor in Costa Smeralda, a jumble of fjord-like inlets and coasts of frost-white sand, and exploring the Sardinian coast at its most idyllic. Or imagine strolling in Corsican villages with their stony ramparts at their most captivating at dusk on a warm summer evening.
You get to experience all of this and more on a sailing trip to these beautiful islands. As most of you who follow the blog know I’m a beach person and there’s nothing that could make me any happier than being in the water. Imagine my excitement when I was finally able to go on a sailing trip for a week. Sailing is definitely an experience you have to try at least once in your travels in Europe.
The Yacht-Sharing Experience
We sailed with Miaplacidus sailing yacht through Intersailclub. IntersailClub is a yacht-sharing concept which makes sailing much more affordable. It’s like the Airbnb of yacht sailing because you can just rent a cabin and share the whole yacht with other people instead of paying for the whole yacht. They also call this concept as cabin charter in sailing lingo.
Renting a yacht that comes with a crew for 1 week can easily cost you from 5,000-20,000 euros for a week depending on how big the yacht is. With IntersailClub, you can book a cabin or a bed in a yacht from 700-1,000 euros for a week and they’ll take care of everything! You’re welcome.
Spring has always symbolised rebirth for me. New beginnings. New dreams. It’s like the world is having an orgasm, bursting with flowers and colors it kept all those winter months. How else could you explain this beauty?
So besides enjoying all these beautiful cherry blossoms, what have I been up to lately?
100-Year-Old Granny
If you’ve been following me on Instagram you know that I have been quite busy obsessing about living a healthy life lately. It’s not that I have lived an unhealthy one before. It’s just that I wanted to live even healthier because my goal in life is to be a 100-year-old granny. So my health is my top priority. I obsess about the food I eat, how much sleep I get, minimizing stress and exercising enough. I enjoy cooking healthy meals so much so that I even plant my own vegetables. I have a mini-greenhouse full of super healthy sprouts. And my balcony is now filled with more vegetables, fruits and edible flowers. I can’t wait to harvest them in the summer!
I have been living and traveling around Europe since 2009 and been blogging about it for a few years. If you’ve been following me for a while specially on Instagram you know that I am obsessed with Europe and that I love traveling with my family or friends to show them around my favorite places.
This year I want to offer the opportunity to YOU to travel with me!
I get emails and comments every now and then of you guys saying “Take me with you please!” or “Can I join you on your trip next time?” so now here is your chance to join me on a fabulous trip in Europe.
The last few months have been a spiritual awakening experience. It sounds weird or new-age hogwash to say it but I just feel it. I don’t know how to verbalize it. But there’s no denying I am living in a new kind of world. I’ve been trying to make sense of it and learn as much as I can. But like with everything in life, you just have to go with the flow and the mysteries of life will unravel on their own.
My absence has been deliberate. I started questioning everything I am doing in my life and online including this dear blog of mine. I won’t apologize for it but I hope you understand that sometimes one has to run away from it all to reflect and digest things.
I feel like Pocahontas. I alluded to it on my Facebook post last December. “Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?” Can you? Are you awake? Conscious? Can you talk to trees?
Being surrounded by the beauty of nature has been a major part of my spiritual awakening. Plus being surrounded by magical friends (shoutout to you Vicky!) In the last months I have travelled with my friends to gorgeous Croatian islands and waterfalls, quaint Slovenian countryside, magical Sicilian coves to the dreamy Sahara desert and a quick trip in Madrid to see my gay friends for Halloween. And I am not even mentioning my annual birthday trip which we did for the last 2 months around the world with my husband.
The world is abundant in beauty. In everything.
Here’s a quick photographic snapshot of our travels.
One of the places I was super excited to visit this year was Ibiza island in Spain. Like Barcelona, this place needs no introduction. It is one of the most popular summer destinations in Europe. It has everything: great beaches, amazing food and famous massive parties. On my direct flight to Ibiza with Air Berlin, I was singing this cheesy song in my head.
When I arrived in San Antonio, located at the western side of Ibiza, what I saw shocked me. Dozens of chavs littered the place. If you don’t know what a chav is here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
Chav is a pejorative epithet used in Britain to describe a particular stereotype. The word was popularised in the first decade of the 21st century by the British mass media to refer to an anti-social youth subculture in the United Kingdom. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “chav” as an informal British derogatory, meaning “a young lower-class person who displays brash and loutish behaviour and wears real or imitation designer clothes”.
My take: really trashy British kids. Really really trashy. And apparently this was their enclave. But thank god we were only sleeping here and we were exploring and partying in other parts of the island. The chavs in Ibiza need its own dedicated blogpost so I’ll focus on the experiences I enjoyed in Ibiza instead.
Acciaroli is that kind of charming fishing village along the Cilento coast in Italy where they don’t even bother calling possibly their only bar any other name but that, Bar.
Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway visited in 1953 and met his “Old Man” here. They say that he based the character of Santiago in his novel “The Old Man and the Sea” on a local fisherman called Antonio Massarone.
“Everything about him was old except his eyes, and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”
I love seafood. I could give up meat and poultry any day if I could eat fresh seafood everyday. It’s so difficult to find good or fresh seafood in Germany where I live so every time I find myself in the Mediterranean I make it a point to always eat as much seafood as I can.
On my recent trip to discover the other unknown villages of the Amalfi coast, I visited the quaint, fishing village of Cetara.
Cetara looks like a quintessential Mediterrean fishing village: colorful houses built around a domed Church, a small port and a beach lined with bobbing fishing boats.
If there is one place that keeps surprising me with its beauty, cuisine, culture and history, it’s Italy. As much as I hate to admit it because it is so cliche and predictable even: I love Italy. No no no no. This is not coming from a tourist visiting for a week for the first time. I have visited Italy hundreds of times, ruined my waistline (all the time) and pretty much abandoned my Paleo diet which I worked so hard for to tell you a fact: I REALLY LOVE ITALY.
I love its big historical cities and its smaller, unknown – sometimes abandoned – towns equally. And my favorite coastline to date? It has to be the famous Amalfi coast and my recent discovery, the lesser known Cilento coast next to it.
The Amalfi coast and Cilento coast are both part of the province of Salerno in the Campania region. I visited Positano, the most famous town along the Amalfi coast, in 2011 and immediately fell in love. I vowed to come back and explore the area more so I am happy to make that dream a reality this summer.
You all know by now that I love traveling to Italy. I just recently travelled to the Amalfi Coast for the second time and before I tell you all my stories and travel tips about this beautiful area in Italy, I would like to orient you first about it with a map of the Amalfi Coast.
Why? Because it can be a bit confusing for first-time travellers.. The Amalfi Coast is actually made up of 13 villages, or what they call the “13 Pearls of the Amalfi”. The most popular among them are Positano (which I visited back in 2011), Ravello and Amalfi.
The Amalfi coast is basically the area from Vietri sul Mare at the right near Salerno all the way to Positano on the left. All the other villages of the Amalfi coast are scattered along the way and I highly recommend driving along the entire coast. The views are breathtaking although it can be a bit dizzying with the winding roads.
Greetings from Switzerland! I just recently travelled to Zurich, Switzerland the other week and loved it. It’s a new city and a new country for me so I was very excited to be here. I mean I have been traveling around Europe since 2009 and I only travelled to Switzerland now. Shocking, I know!
I travelled with Michael and also met up with some of our friends who are based in the city (Hello Joel! Hello Omar!).
Zurich has always interested me ever since I’ve seen a feature of it’s bathing culture in Monocle magazine in 2007. I am a bit bummed though that it was still too cold for people to swim in its very clean lakes. So I never really got to see the Zuerich I’ve wanted to see. I still enjoyed the city nevertheless. We explored the city for 3 days and there are actually a lot of cool and interesting things around. I have always thought that Switzerland is pretty vanilla but in fairness Zurich was pretty happening.
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