I'd only ever seen my grandma cry once, back when I was 12 and my grandpa died. Yet eight years later, as I walked towards my departure gate, I looked back to see that I had brought tears to the eyes of one of the strongest women in my life. It was a very dramatic…
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said.
We were drinking champagne from the bottle, wearing only bathrobes in the suite of a 19th-century estate turned hotel two hours south of London.
As the alcohol and dopamine coursed through my system, I managed to dig up a fact I’d heard in a science podcast months earlier:…
Ten years ago, I lived on an island off the coast of Honduras. It was summer when I was there. It was summer almost all the year. The air was hot and buttery; day lasted long into the night. Through the afternoons, men played dominoes in the shade beneath the mango trees. In the evenings,…
It was approaching midnight on a cold Tuesday. My boyfriend and I were drunkenly trawling the backstreets of Shibuya, leading us to the street of dôgenzaka in search of a Love Hotel (rabu hoteru).
The hotels towered over the street, drawing in cliental with grandiose light displays that looked like they had been plucked out…
I’m halfway through my month-long escape in Bali and my weeks have begun forming a pattern.
Monday morning, wake up early, yoga, green tea.
Tuesday morning, wake up early, journal, green tea.
By the time Wednesday rolls around, I’m dead out of wholesomeness and ready to party. This week is no different, as I prepare…
“Finding the one” is a concept I am utterly fascinated by, but I also find it deeply puzzling. What is it that fuels peoples’ desire to continue trying after so many failed attempts?
For me, this urge doesn’t exist. At a mere 20 years old, with two failed relationships already behind me, I don’t have…
Like many young women who’ve watched the Abba-inspired Mamma Mia! films, I was recently struck by the urge to relocate to Europe and have unprotected sex with three strapping lads before settling down on a Grecian island to raise a daughter with questionable patrilineage.
As I mark two notches in my Spanish belt, the correlations between…
I have a habit of getting into cars with strange men. And despite what your mother may have told you about such activities, I’ve had a good run. I’ve lived to tell the tale of Venetian musos, Nepali gurus, Indian politicians and Spanish royalists, all prepared to give a reckless Kiwi lass a lift in…
I will be bold enough to identify as an expert dater, although I will probably receive a stream of hate messages from exes upon publication. Dating is not simply an arduous task to end the misery of monogamy, but it can be a MasterChef dessert when someone with a refined palate plates it up (that’s…
I remember those little details of our first meeting so clearly.
The way he stood over our little group, a mix of misfit travellers and local Egyptians. I remember first taking in his tall, lean body, long, wild hair and straight, perfectly white teeth and thinking he was the most beautiful human I had ever…
You’ve finally done it; after what seems like years of post-rave early morning, kick-on conversations, half-drunkenly promising each other that you’ll always be friends and that “of course we’ll travel the world together”, the supposed trip of a lifetime has actually fallen into place. You and your friends, by some fucking miracle, have managed to…