This past spring, I studied abroad in the Netherlands, a country known for windmills, tulips and its famous capital city. To many, Amsterdam has a certain reputation, but this doesn’t fully capture all that this city offers. My experience was made up of esteemed museums, delicious food and beautiful city streets. The Netherlands has been an art hub for centuries, and I saw [...]
My first destination literature blog post took us all the way to Italy, but this time I’m going to venture a bit closer to home: glamorous New York City. NYC has always been a go-to travel destination and is the perfect spot for a long weekend. In Amor Towles’s novel The Rules of Civility, 1930s NYC is brought to life in an exquisitely [...]
If you are anything like me, picking your next travel destination can prove to be a difficult choice. Lately, however, I have been turning to some of my favorite books for travel inspiration. Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley weaves the elements of a gripping crime novel with the alluring tale of a young American exploring the beauty of Italy. The idle, [...]
I took my very first trip to England last summer to visit my longtime friend and pen pal, Alex. Since she and I have similar interests—reading, writing and pleasing aesthetics—it was only fitting that she would introduce me to the coolest bookstore I’ve ever been to: Barter Books. Located in Alnwick Station in Northumberland, Barter Books is a secondhand bookstore where over 350,000 books [...]
You’ve probably heard some of the popular US superstitions: don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back, knock on wood, don’t walk under ladders and avoid broken mirrors. But across the world, there are some very different superstitions! In South Korea, it’s believed that sleeping with a fan on can kill you! This superstition is so ubiquitous that many Korean fans [...]
In a few weeks I’ll be headed to San Diego, California. My sister is typically my travel buddy, but this will be my first trip without her. I planned this trip a few months ago with one of my friends, and booking the trip was a lot easier than I anticipated. When we booked the trip we were able to bundle our flight, [...]
Have you ever fantasized about meeting your favorite writer? How about serving her a plate of mountain trout, with a hearty helping of Sriracha sauce on the side? While working at a restaurant in Western New York last summer, not only did I get to serve dinner to the beloved poet Sandra Cisneros—I got to tell her about the time I followed her words [...]
Some landmarks are designed to stand out: DC’s Washington Monument, London’s Big Ben, Russia’s the Motherland Calls (a sword-wielding stone woman who reaches nearly 300 feet!). But other marvels are easy to miss if you aren’t looking for them. In contrast to its towering warrior, Russia houses the smallest public monument in the world. The tiny frog statue, named the Frog Traveler, sits [...]
My mom and I are most similar in our Irish heritage and love of reading. We recently traveled to Ireland together and soaked up not just the cloudy countryside, but also Ireland’s rich literary history, by creating our own literary Dublin walking tour. We began with the Dublin Writers Museum. In an unassuming yet charming eighteenth-century brick house in northern Dublin, we saw unique [...]
There’s something oddly comforting about seeing everyday objects scaled down to miniature size. It reminds me of the days of dollhouses and army men, when I controlled my own tiny worlds. I can only imagine the thrill of seeing Gulliver’s Gate: a tiny world of epic proportions. Since May 9, 2017, visitors to Times Square could pay to enter the 50-thousand-square-foot exhibition of [...]