me on slate.com

For the next month I will be contributing to the TravelBox Blog over at Slate.com. My posts there cover some of my favorite European travel destinations. They even did a fancy-schmancy caricature of me for the site. Can you pick me out of the three? Quick, go look now!

Has it been a year already?

Time flies when you’re unemployed for the first time ever and trying to get used to a new country. The newlywed thing was the easy part.

A year ago today we celebrated our wedding in Stresa, Italy, in a beautiful setting surrounded by more friends and family than we usually see in a year (thanks to our country-hopping habits). The next week we packed up our apartment in Milan and set off to conquer Switzerland.

This also means I have been unemployed for a full year now, since I quit my job right before the wedding and move (and Scott started his around the same time). These major life events were certainly not planned to crash down on us all at once, but that’s just how things happened. It was a stressful, fun, surreal transition period to be sure.

OK, I’m going to stop here before I start to wax philosophical. Happy first anniversary to us! Too bad we don’t have any of that dark chocolate Italian wedding cake to celebrate with…