For the last segment of my travels with Tiff and Cora (as a trio), we arrived in Bologna! After the seclusion of Slovenia and the Dolomites (and tbh, even Croatia), it was nice to be back in a big city. At the time, I felt like Bologna reminded me of New York City: busy streets, a faint scent of urine, and multicultural offerings (there were surprisingly a bunch of Asian shop owners!). Now that I've actually lived in New York, such a comparison doesn't quite fit the bill anymore. But hey, I'm glad 2022 Charmaine felt that way.
My most common refrain on the Dolomites segment of my Euro trip 2022 was: "It's so beautiful!!" After meandering through the entire country of Slovenia, we tucked ourselves in for an early night in Cortina d'Ampezzo, the cute town that formerly hosted the Winter Olympics (and will run it back in 2026).
Everyone is sleeping on Slovenia! It is one of the best places I've ever been. It's SO picturesque and doesn't feel touristy at all. The food is amazing, too!
While I just spent the past two years in Boston for my MBA at Harvard Business School, I happened to experience it as a "tourist" across the seasons. For continuity, let's start with winter 2022.
During this period, I was weirdly living a dual life: I spent half my time traveling out and about as though COVID were a distant memory (with friends or for work), or completely entrenched in an antisocial hermit life back home in Mississauga. Fear not, come summer 2022, things on this blog will go back to regularly scheduled programming.
My workplace enabled me to participate in a special analytics training. Little did I know how lucky I was: in 2019, the program gave me an excuse to visit Miami, which turned out to be the last cohort before the program went virtual due to COVID. Naturally, others like Cait and Malcolm decided to opportunistically seize the opportunity to tour around over the weekend with me.
In 2019, a lot of my closest friends lived in San Francisco. With just one Bubble Republic planning session, Steph and I decided to book flights for an ambitious road trip with Cora in and around the Bay area (IN A TESLA!!).
Is there anything more idyllic than summer in Chicago? Just like 2017, I made my way back here for a Women's conference for the Great Lakes region.