Not that I needed an excuse to go anywhere, but in 2019, I had the perfect ruse to go to Athens for the weekend—the Stoicon 2019! Before you start thinking that it was a gathering of stoics and people with poker faces, let me set this straight.
Author: Ruby
It’s been three years since my last solo journey. In 2016 I wandered through Visayas for a month. Good friends joined me on some legs of the trip; strangers shared my journey through the rest. I clearly remember when it happened. It was a beautiful day, and I was sitting in front of the beach right outside the cottage I was renting when this sinking feeling crept in. I don’t know why I was doing the things I did.
It’s a gloomy February on this side of the world. If you’re a person from the tropics, you should know that it’s a struggle to be a functioning human in northern Europe at this time of the year. Endless gray days, zero sunlight, and if you live in Amsterdam, you’ll get a bonus serving of wind and rain.
The weather was never a subject of concern. Until late 2018 when I moved from the tropics, where you can trust the sun to shine brightly every day, to Amsterdam where sunlight is best described as erratic.
Photos from 2016 show fantastic things that happened to me this year, but the real best things weren’t caught on camera. Traveling was still a huge part of my year but more than these experiences, 2016 was a year of self-discovery. I’ll call it the year I came to terms with my own titahood.