INSPIRATION TO TRAVEL

Hey everyone! Here is an awesome little message about traveling, I'll let it speak for itself...

While you're young, you should travel. You should take the time to see the world and taste the fullness of life. Spend an afternoon sitting in front of the Michelangelo. Walk the streets of Paris. Climb Kilimanjaro. Hike the Appalachian trail. See the Great Wall of China. Get your heart broken by the "killing fields" of Cambodia. Swim through the Great Barrier Reef. These are the moments that define the rest of your life; they're the experiences that stick with you forever. 
Traveling will change you like little else can. It will put you in places that will force you to care for issues that are bigger than you. You will begin to understand that the world is both very large and very small. You will have a newfound respect for pain and suffering, having seen that two-thirds of humanity struggle to simply get a meal each day. 
While you're still young, get cultured. Get to know the world and the magnificent people that fill it. The world is a stunning place, full of outstanding works of art. See it. 


What I find to be most important to take out of this is not necessarily to travel while you are young, but to just travel. No matter what age, get out and experience the world, explore it, meet people, see new things, and enjoy it all. 

here is the link to the full article if you want to continue reading: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-london/travel-while-youre-young_b_3975195.html



XOXOXO Rana 

The Amazing Ricefield's Base

Our home for the two weeks we were in Thailand was the gorgeous Ricefield's Base. It was amazing, like a resort in the middle of a bustling village.

Here is a picture I stole from Rustic Pathways that shows the layout of the base. It was basically a huge piece of land with ricefields, ponds, and palm trees scattered around.
Along with the kids from our program, Ricefield's, Monks, and Smiling Children, the medical kids also stayed here. This wasn't too big of a deal the first week since there were only around 15 of us in our group and maybe 10 from the other but when 60 new kids plus a school group came the second week, the base got a LOT more crowded!

Here is the front entrance, what you would see if you were just walking in. 

Here is the view from our rooms or hongs every morning. It was absolutely gorgeous. That building in the picture is the sala where we ate all of our meals. Eating here is a totally different experience from in America. 

 First of all, when we entered the sala we had to take off our shoes. This was something we had to do often, so most of the time around the base no one even bothered to wear them. Second of all, we ate all meals on the floor in circles. Both of these things are big in Thai culture, and were surprisingly fun to try out. The last thing is that for all of our meals we always only had a fork and maybe a spoon, never a knife or a napkin (I don't know if the last part was a mistake or that's actually a thing with the Thai). Sometimes, when the really sticky rice was served (there's a billion different kinds) we used our hands to eat it, which was a totally accepted thing here. I tried to bring this culture back to America and it pretty much failed...

The cook on the base was awesome, his name is Chris, here he is in the picture. 

The food was pretty good, we usually were served some sort of chicken and noodle dish or on a good day, spicy papaya salad or spring rolls. And never forgotten was the sticky rice! We ate the same rice every day for lunch and dinner and after about two meals at the base, I was done with it. 

Here is the best hang out spot on the base, the Golden Burma Cafe, run by the Burmese counselors. 

It was a slow process to order, but the milkshakes were the closet thing to American food we could get once our goldfish supply ran out. 

The Golden Burma was an urban cafe by day but when the sun went down, the colored strobe lights and speakers came out. Most nights there was music playing so loud we could hear it in our hong next door, but it turned out to be a really great system for us! 

Back to our hong, here is a picture of the main house we stayed in. 

(from the Rustic Pathways website)

And here is the inside, "lobby area", there were a couple of other hongs who also stayed in this house and the counselors upstairs. 

The first week our hong was just the four of us, Sophie, Wallen, and Lauren and me. At night Wallen and I would do our daily wall sits and blast music if the cafe wasn't already. 

Near the end of the first week, it started raining like crazy, a tropical thunder storm! Here is a photo of our hong in the rain, it was really raining a lot harder than you can see...

This tree even fell down in the storm! Also an entire bunch of coconuts fell from one of the palm trees into the pond-watch your heads everyone! 

Here is our hong the second week, with the addition of three girls, Meryl, Sarah, and Francesca. Our room was a total mess here since we were packing up on our last day.

Last but not least, the base house had an awesome pool.

Many night swim parties were held here along with it being the place to jump in after hosing off from working in the ricefield's. One of my favorite service projects was also done here, bobbing and floating, where we taught the kids how to swim, but we will post about that later! 

One of the bobbing and floating classes in action

And of course, I can't forget to mention the many dogs that randomly appeared all over the base. This one in the photo, Snuckers, seemed to be a permanent resident since he never left. Actually he mostly appeared during the eating hours, where he was impossible to get rid of! Right after I took this picture he stuck his head into the cookie jar next to him-what a mess. 

And the other dog, at the end of the path in this picture, we named Scruffy, for obvious reasons. One time we found him rolling in the muddy ricefield and then he chased us into our room! It was really an adrenaline racing experience...

Here are a couple more of my favorite photos I took of the base. 

Whether it was waking up to water buffalos milling outside your room or having dance parties in the cafe or just simply hanging out in the hong, life here proved to be a crazy amazing experience!

These flowers were all over the base and made great hair accessories!

XOXOXOXO RANA 

Thailandevntures! Hongs...

Hey blogistas! So as many of you probably guessed, Rana and I went to Thailand this past summer!!!!! Say what???! It was honestly the best thing ever, and so so much fun. In this post though, I thought I would talk a little bit about our hong. For those of you who are not close with Thai culture, a hong is basically the Thai word for room. While on the trip, we stayed at this gorgeous base house called Ricefields. Seriously, it was unbelievably beautiful, like a resort almost. I was personally not expecting it to be that nice, so if you are going on a Rustic Pathways trip that stays at the Ricefields base, you are one lucky duck!!! Anyway, when we got to the base, we were assigned rooms. Here's a picture of the cute little name tags that our hong-leaders( I'll get to them in a second) put on our door!

 Our hong mates for the first part of the trip were named Lauren and Wallen! We shared a lot of memories in this hong...starting with the need for wifi. When you are in a foreign country, it's an obvious fact that you want to post cool instagrams. Well in our room, we started out having amazing wifi...then tragedy struck...they shut it off! EXCEPT we found a small glimmer of hope on one of the beds in our, we could access wifi from it. This bed was later referred to as the bitch bed, because we all joked that when our new roommates came we would send the bitchiest to sleep over there. We never did, because obviously that would've been terribly blunt and rude.

 These few pictures where we look like hot messes, were taken after this thing called Thai games. Basically like a "everyone is on a color team and does challenging activities" type of situation. Yes friends, that is dried yogurt on my shirt. EWWW. I remember when we took this photo, we set my camera on a timer on the fridge. It ended up capturing more of the beds than us, but it's still pretty cute.

This one on the left was the first attempt at a group selfie, what a joy! I also mentioned that I would talk about hong leaders, they are kind of like your camp counselors except for your hong. They were there to make sure you felt ok during the trip and ya know did stuff that adults do, like helped you fill out paperwork or with money. But mostly, they were super fun twenty year olds who shared cool stories and just chilled with us!! Being in a hong was like being in a sorority, a bunch of girls doing charity work in the day and then having workout parties and stuff at night. :)

This is me and Lauren on the right, I've tried to put a pic of me with every person of my hong. I called her Lolo as a nickname.

 Don't even get me started on Rana...







This one on the bottom left is me with ma sassiest roommate Wallen, don't we look so evil/adorable with our ice creams!!!! You can call her by her street nickname WaWa

How to Survive an International Flight

Phoenix to L.A,
      L.A to Tokyo,
              Tokyo to Singapore,
                       Singapore to Bangkok,
                                Bangkok to Chang Mai,
                                            Chang Mai to Udon Thani,
                                                        Udon Thani to the Ricefield's 
It took 23 1/4 hours of flying to make it half way around the world to Thailand. The trip was worth it, but the getting there was seriously not a fun experience. Lets start from the beginning.

Basically, for a little background, Sophie and I decided to go on a Rustic Pathways trip this summer. Rustic is an amazing organization that offers trips for teens all over the world. Here is a link to their website, http://www.rusticpathways.com/usa, definitely worth checking out.

Back to the flights, they started off pretty well, until we left the United States. In LAX we boarded a huge Singapore Airlines plane and trudged to the very very back, where Rustic had gotten us some nice coach seats. Luckily, on the way there, I got an aisle seat. Still it was an uncomfortable ride. If you want an idea of what this section looked like, it was nothing like this, although we did try to sneak up to find these beds.

Our lovely chairs were about the 1/18 the size of that bed above and had a tiny TV jammed in front of it.

I boarded this flight with a huge duffel filled with potential things to do but this turned out to be a dead weight since I barely opened it. One thing I brought was paper and colored pencils, I don't draw at home why on earth did I think I would want to draw something on this plane?! And of course I packed a light ready, Theodore Rex, 555 pages of fun filled times with the former President. Just kidding that was for school and I closed it about two minutes after I attempted to read it. 

A photo of our enormous, two decker, plane 

Anyways, the flight to Tokyo was about 11 hours, where we got off for them to clean the plane. After we got back on the flying torture chamber it was another 6 or 7 hours to Singapore. There seriously is no way to survive a flight this long... unless you're flying first. The best thing to do is just try to go to sleep, use a sleeping pill, or watch a lot of movies/t.v; whatever you have to do. 

One major point is the food is probably the worst thing you will ever eat in your entire life. That is not an exaggeration, just thinking about it now makes me sick. And they offer you this food about every hour. For our flight, there was an asian menu and a western menu, both were pretty gross. Basically, drink a lot of water, pack your own snacks, and do not eat their food unless you have a death wish. 

Long story short, we had a seven hour layover in Singapore, starting at 2 a.m their time, then another flight to Bangkok, once we met up with the NY kids who were also flying with Rustic Pathways to Thailand. In Bangkok we said goodbye to our new friends, turns out flying for almost a day with someone is a really good bonding experience. They went off on other programs in Thailand, while lucky us still had ANOTHER flight to another city.

It took this last flight and a two hour bus ride to finally make it to the Ricefield's base near Udon Thani, a city next to us. Check out the next post for the whole story of our crazy fun time in Thailand...

                            XOXOXO Rana

Labor Day Weekend in Flagstaff

At first I thought Flagstaff was just another boring place in Arizona, probably due to the fact that we had way too many grade bonding trips all over weird places in the state when I was in middle school. But after a weekend in Flagg last year and the same this year, my opinion has totally changed for the better on this beautiful and cute little town.

For the past two years we have rented this gorgeous house in a gated community, Forest Highlands, with another family. The neighborhood is great and even better with a bunch of friends around, as we found this year when we biked almost everywhere we went, a drastic change from Phoenix where you have to take a car to cross the street. Our house is placed right on a golf course, making an amazing view and great backyard (if you ignore the golfers), especially the first day when it poured rain all afternoon.

One day we took a trip into town, which was probably not the best idea due to the insane amount of traffic we had to wait in to get there. But the caramel apples we got from a little store called Sweet Shoppe, were totally worth it. 

Honestly, I think this apple was one of the best things I have ever eaten. The first day I got the heath bar one which was later stolen by my dad so of course I had to get another the next day. This one was even better, an apple dipped in caramel and topped with crushed Oreos. Seriously heavenly. 

One of my favorite places in Flagstaff is this fishing lake, a short bike ride from our house. Its a super pretty area, surrounded by flowers and tall green pine trees on the edge of the grassy golf course (golf seems to be a staple of life in Flagstaff). Anyways its a great place to go fishing if you're into that kind of stuff... our friends caught a trout and a bass in the same day!

Pretty much every hour we took a trip down the street, mostly to get out of our constantly chaotic and loud house of eleven people (five under the age of 11), on our bikes or via walking. 

 The roads our wide and safe, tucked in between sides of grass and tall green pine trees. Here is a photo I took of everyone walking through the "forest" on our way to the park down the street.

This was at the park, of the two twin girls picking some of the many dandelions here to blow wishes.

And last but not least, we all biked to a fair on Sunday at the local country club down the street. Tons of people were here and there were a couple game booths set up for kids with food and drinks. Of course the baby pig in the petting zoo was the highlight of this place. It was so cute and so small! 

 I hope after reading this your perspective has changed on this town in Arizona, it really is a much better place than you would expect! With a great bustling ski town, rolling green golf courses, amazing weather, and friendly people, it is an awesome place to spend a long weekend and get out of this terrible heat! 

XOXOXO Rana 

WHISTLER, B.C.

One of my favorite places in the whole world is Whistler, I love this place literally beyond what words can describe. This year I went there for winter, spring, and summer break; so it's pretty safe to say I know what is up in that town! It is the perfect place to spend time in all year round. The snow is unbelievable in the winter, literally out of control! And in the summer, it's like a party popin' paradise with awesome beaches and live bands playing all around the town. So now I am going to give you all the inside scoop on the best restaurants, stores, and activities!

I mean charming is obviously the first word that comes to mind! Also green...

The best place for ice cream in town is a little place called COWS. This ice-cream will literally blow your socks off it is so sensational! Unless you are lactose-intolerant, in which case they have an awesome selection of fruit sorbet. All of the employees are so sweet and they always have at least one cute guy scooping cones, so that is always a plus. They also have like fifty different t-shirts with puns about cows and such, I recommend the "Hello Cowy" or the "Moo-Moo Lemon."

The best accessories store in town is called Ruby Tuesdays, I have been going to this store since I was around seven years old. It has awesome bags and hair clips, also a lot of different hand-made charms for necklaces. It can be kind of expensive, but the products are so worth it!

Even if you are't a shopper, look at that swanky lawn chair. 

And if you are looking for a sick-sizzle slice of za, check out this little local joint called AVALANCHE PIZZA! This place is kind of a hidden treasure, but every local knows about, so you will totally blend in! I prefer the cheese or the ham n' pineapple, so so delicious and literally tastes like a heavenly food!!! They also have a variety of different toppings if you have a more unique preference.

If you love fine dining, then you will love the restaurant Quatro. It's Italian dishes are so delectable, even the picky eaters will find something they love! Seriously, I could live in that restaurant and it also has the coolest cathedral like decor. Honestly, it's a full blown experience.

As many of you may or may not know, Whistler was home to the Winter Olympic Games!!! This town takes a lot of pride in this and all around town there is memorabilia  that you can take pictures with. For example, these Olympic rings always have people snapping selfies and taking X-mas card pics! Even some of the people put their dogs in the rings, those smart thinkers. I did this to my own dog, so I would recommend it!

Look at this pride in action...

SO IF YOU GO TO WHISTLER, YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT TO DO!

Me with a Moose, every Canadians dream 

Seriously, how little women is this! Jk this just seems so cute and old fashioned

XOXOXO Sophie