Life begins at the end of your comfort zone
So our 3rd anniversary came and went. Whoop whoop! And as hard as it was for Paulina to come home from nightshifts and fall fast asleep without even spending a moment together, we were just as grateful to reflect on that we are happily together and our anniversary last year was …
What’s the plan? What’s the plan for? Man, landing back on native soil and digesting one year of imagineering we are coming to grips with the reality ring of our current situation. All these thoughts, ideas and experiences from the last year are now spilling …
We’re pretty adventurous eaters and over the past year we’ve tried everything from beef tongue hot pot in Japan and cow brain soup in Turkey to – yes, INSECTS in Thailand. And honestly we walked away from each of those three meals with a smile on our face and nutritious food in our belly.
Entomophagy is humans eating insects as food. You can eat the eggs, larvae, pupae and adults of an array of insect species. So we tested out what the big hype is all about. We gathered the gang, got on our scooters and went to a local market in Phuket to sample crickets, larva and worms. They were freshly fried up right in front of us then heavily seasoned with some spices and sauce before ready for the feasting.
To be honest it took us all a little courage before we dug into the mixture but once we tried and realized it just tasted like the seasoning that was on it, there was nothing to be intimated by. One-by-one we chomped down and were really surprised with the flavor and juiciness of the larva’s insides. It became an addictive little snack to carry around and munch on at the market.
We can see it now: being cuddled up on the couch with a bag of Roast Chicken flavored Crispy Creeps, watching a Bug’s Life with Murphy.
So although eating insects is one of the “Top Things to Do When In Thailand,” it really is more than just that. For some it’s a way of life, culturally normal and extremely necessary to supplement protein, fats, minerals and vitamins.
In the developed countries, eating insects may seem uncommon or gross but in many parts of Asia, Latin America and other developing countries you’ll see locals collecting bugs for dinner on their way home from work. It’s a cheap and sustainable source of protein with other nutritional benefits.
There are some huge mindset hurdles to jump over before landing into the idea that bugs are okay to eat. First of all, bugs are creepy and have this gross slime on them but when cooked properly the texture is fantastic!! Put proper seasoning on them and BAM! you have yourself a great little favorite next to your popcorn. Most of anything in life that we think is super bad or gross is only really made up in our own minds and what we’ve been exposed to as normal. That’s what was nice about being uncomfortable and unfamiliar with traveling to these new lands – eating bugs became an opportunity to experience and be open minded to the way other people live.
These days, there are some companies that are trying to introduce insects into Western diets for a bunch of reasons like the rising cost of animal protein, environmental/ecological factors, population growth, etc. If you’re interested in reading more check out the following link Edible insects – future prospects for food and feed security or click below to watch a 16 minute Ted Talk. You’d be surprised but the speaker mentions that each of us already unknowingly consumes 500 grams per year of insects in items such as peanut butter or tomato soup.
So Paulina’s rule of thumb is you have to try everything THREE TIMES (even if it makes you gag the first two times). That doesn’t mean try three bites of the same piece of food in one sitting – it means try it on three separate occasions, prepared possibly three different ways by three different cooks. Don’t just dismiss something as gross the first time you try it because food depends on quality of the product, creativity of the cook, and the good ol’ TLC it’s prepared with.
Our first experience eating bugs (besides the overpriced, chocolate covered ones we get in Canada) was surprisingly enlightening and we’ve decided it’s definitely worth learning about a little more. We won’t be surprised if one day down the road between your fish and chicken options at the grocery store, will be a tidy row of refrigerated creepy crawlers.
Go out and be weird guys! Try something new … maybe try it three times!
Building a new family, going camping on weekends, flying across the country for weddings, and apprenticing for a new position as a guard – that’s what our dog’s been doing while we’ve been away. I don’t know if we were lacking love from each other, competing …
At our Workaway in Turkey we had made some amazing ties to the community. Will played soccer every Tuesday with a group of guys, we visited the neighbors for tea and watermelon even though none of us could understand each other, we met the mayor, had our …
Walking the streets of Cusco, Peru, about one hour away from our flight back to Toronto got Will thinking about if he’s ready to go home.
Share if you know someone who is thinking about a gap year off and may want to talk to us more about it!
Well, Father Time waits for no one. As we glance at our rear view mirror, we have some treasures from Peru we have to share. We are very inspired to share tales of our adventurous experiences in these mystic lands. We can honestly say that when …
If you can get through a year of travelling together, you can probably get through anything. We’ve tested the waters with having no money, being tired, lost and hungry, being together too much, compromising, losing all sense of personal space or privacy, and so much …
We are starving for new experiences this far along the trip and lately have had a few cool experiences that aren’t really all that weird. We have three meetup events we went to recently and want to fill you in on them and give you an inside look to see if it’s something you might want to explore one day.
The first thing that was on our list of firsts was “Play and move together in AcroYoga”. The name caught our eye and it seemed like a “couples” thing to do, so we signed up. We can say that being new to the group and initially showing up, it’s always a little awkward to be there for the first time. But the entire group was so welcoming and we warmed up with some gentle yoga and started this crab game. We felt ridiculous! What it entailed was us walking on all fours and then slapping the opponents leg or arms our from under them. But by the end of it we were all laughing our asses off and well acquainted. We finished by doing a few partner exercises such as pushups and leg presses and we were warmed up.
Then the really fun stuff began. We started slowly learning about postures of being the base person and being the flyer then followed right into doing lifts. We couldn’t believe how doable it was; small females were able to lift grown men! Everyone in the class agreed we would try more AcroYoga classes in the future.
Next meetup was a “Beyond your Dreams” seminar. We really enjoyed it! It was led by this man from the Kabbalah center in Miami who has studied the 
spiritual world of dreaming for 30 years and this was an introduction seminar to a series that would follow.
How we understood the concept was that you need to rest in order for your
soul to re-energize; your body does not need to rest but your soul or spirit
does. When you sleep and have dreams, this is when you are getting the best rest because your soul has left your body. Your body is still here in the physical sense on Earth but the soul has now crossed to another dimension to explore, understand and sometimes meet other souls. Sometimes the soul gets trapped in the body because we are holding on to resentment or anxiety throughout our day. So when we feel tired and not rested it’s because our soul has not been given the chance to leave the body to re-energize itself.
Now there is a way you can dream every night and wake up feeling great. You go to sleep with an intention of wanting to dream and let go of the things emotionally you’ve been holding onto during the day. From there, you reflect on what you are grateful for and then you ask yourself to dream tonight.
When you awake you will remember that you have dreamt for a little bit and this may be a message. What your task is to do is to see how you are feeling in that moment when you awake. Be aware of your feelings when you wake up and note your dreams. Any one single dream may not be the message but a sequence of dreams may give you a message for healing, greater purpose, insight, ideas and much more.
We have done it a couple times and have found our days have been different when we wake up aligned with our feelings and piecing together what the meaning could be.
Being in Amsterdam and enjoying ourselves a little too much, we wanted to get off the hooker trails and space cake shops to enjoy something we could actually learn. We stumbled upon a Japanese tea ceremony. It was pretty eye opening to understand the various health benefits beyond just anti-oxidants you could get from tea, the different flavors from the tea when you prepare it at different temperatures of water, and the many variations of tea leaf you purchase depending on the way it was grown.
So over the course of about 2 hours we tasted six different Japanese teas, learned about the process of cultivating the tea, learned about the business and how the small company started and now are touring the world, learned how to eat the tea leaves after with roasted brown rice (DELICIOUS), and a lot of other cool tips!
We felt well detoxed after our session and ready to go back to our Amsterdam way of life!
So in closing what do we say? TWO THUMBS UP TO MEETUPS!! It’s a must do and we are regularly checking out the app to see if there’s something cool going on wherever we are.
Well that’s a snapshot of the past little while with us doing AcroYoga, going to dream seminars, and Japanese green tea drinking. We are now really finding one year to be a long time and our wings are ready to fly home. Till the next time friends.
Signing out, Paulina and Will
So every second week we’re gonna do a video blog … a vlog! Hopefully it’ll be more than verbal diarrhea and obviously it will be a work-in-practice that’ll get better with time. But hopefully you’ll stick with us, give us your feedback (good and constructive), …
Getting lost is very much a frustration and a thrill for us as we explore new cities, towns and villages. Sometimes we’re physically lost and other times we’re emotionally or spiritually lost. Sometimes one person is super stressed out and wants answers and the other …
We initially bought this book because we were both interested in learning more about genetics. But specifically we wanted to understand which DNA test (ie. AncestryDNA, Family Tree DNA, 23andMe) was best for Will to take. We were hoping to learn more about about tracing your ancestry through either the father’s line (y-DNA) versus your mother’s line (mtDNA) and the pros/cons of each.
Let’s say the book didn’t help us too much. Instead we just ordered a test based on online reviews and who would ship to Turkey, which ended up being Family Tree DNA.
Stay tuned to hear about Will’s DNA Results!
River out o
f Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
by Richard Dawkins
Reader: Paulina & Will
Method of reading: Hardcopy
Rating: 2 out of 5
Golden nugget: Simplifying genetics isn’t easy.
The concept of the book was to create an analogy to the river of DNA. But like we said, it’s just not that simple.
Let us know if you find a better book that explains human ancestry and how to differentiate between DNA tests!
It’s very common for many people to go into something and not think of all the things that could go wrong. But that’s okay because if you had to know all the consequences then you may not ever do a majority of the things you …
We want to let you know that if you don’t have money coming in while you are traveling and you are running off savings, you will soon notice the pace of money disappearing. So let’s talk about it … disappearing money. The world is abundant, with …
We’ve been working on our blog for the last six months and although WordPress almost makes it dummy-proof, we will be the first to admit we’ve still struggled at times! But today we finally figured out a better theme for our website which means, beyond a doubt, it is going to look sexier when you open it on your mobile device!
CHECK IT OUT and LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK!