There’s something powerful and captivating about waves crashing into a rocky cliff, sending up a fountain of sea foam, then retreating back into the ocean.
It’s calming. It’s humbling. And it’s beautiful.
Continue reading The Rocky Coast of Peniche, Portugal
I’ve been following various travel blogs for a few months now, and realized that while we travel with our kids, ours is not really a family travel blog. Is it?
First of all, our name is wrong.
It looks like most “family blogs” include the word “kid,” “mom,” or “family” somewhere in the title.
We’re simply “Casual Travelers.”
Also, most family travel blogs (though not all) tend to post articles about planning beach vacations, best ways to entertain kids on the airplane, or list most kid-friendly restaurants in a given city.
In other words, most family travel blogs are, in general, very kid-centric.
We don’t do that either.
Continue reading We’re not really a “Family” Travel Blog, are we?
It is 6 a.m. I close the door, set the timer for 30 minutes, and sit down in my swivel chair, with my eyes closed, and my hands loosely resting on the arm supports.
It’s an assignment for a “Social Media and Analytics” class I’m taking, taught by Leila Samii (@reallyleila) – “sit alone, with no technology, friends, family, or reading material for 30 minutes, then blog about it.”
I admit, I’m a social media junkie – I love, love, love Facebook and because of the class I have also recently been spending a lot of time on Twitter and Instagram, tweeting, retweeting, participating in Twitter chats, and posting photos like crazy, frantically trying to keep up with the tsunami of incoming information and images.
And then, just before Thanksgiving, I’d had enough.
It was too much. I just simply could not keep up with it all, no matter how hard I tried.
So I stopped – for a few days I had not tweeted anything or posted any photos – even though I knew that my Klout score would go down.
That’s why this assignment – to be alone for 30 minutes – didn’t feel like a chore, or a homework, but was more like a gift, a gift of “ME TIME” that I don’t get very often.
Continue reading The gift of “me time”
If you are planning to visit the newly opened Harvard Art Museums, and are willing to play “scavenger hunt” with me, please read first “Invitation to Play ‘Scavenger Hunt’ at the Harvard Art Museums – The Clues.” 🙂
If you are not going to visit the Harvard Art Museums for a while, or at all, because Cambridge, Massachusetts way off your itinerary route, and you like to read about art, read on.
Last week I posted close up photos of a few details from five paintings at Harvard Art Museums that I found interesting. Some of them would be hard to miss as they are quite prominent in the painting, some might take some looking for, since they are just a small part of the overall piece.
The blobs of paint on the easel in Nicolas Régnier’s “Self-Portrait with an Easel” are hard to miss because the easel is positioned right in the center of the paining and is quite prominent, though it would not be the first thing you’ll look at, I bet.
What captivated me in Nicolas Régnier’s “Self-Portrait with an Easel,” painted around 1620s was… well…. how pasty pale he is. 😉
Continue reading A few thoughts on Nicolas Regnier’s “Self-Portrait with an Easel”
Note: This post was written to satisfy an assignment for the “Social Media and Analytics” class I’m taking, taught by Leila Samii (@reallyleila), but I hope you’ll find it interesting nevertheless.
Last May (2014) the Marriott hotels chain started a promotion allowing social media users to earn Marriott Rewards points through a “Plus Points” program for:
Continue reading Tweeting for #MRpoints: A Few Comments on Marriott’s Plus Points marketing campaign
You may have heard that Sunday, November 16, 2014 is the Opening Celebration at Harvard Art Museums, which is reopening after a long renovation that started with the closing of Harvard’s Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums in June 2008, and the Sackler Museum in June 2013.
Now collections from all three museums are housed under one roof in the completely renovated and expanded site of the former Fogg Museum designed by Renzo Piano, renowned architect who also designed the post-modern The Centre Pompidou in Paris and the expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
Even though the official opening is on Sunday, two days away, Harvard Art Museums had opened its doors to Harvard affiliates earlier today and of course I simply could not miss the chance to go see it. (I should point out that while I work at the university, I am NOT one the museum staff, and sadly, my job has nothing to do with writing about art or travel.)
Continue reading Invitation to Play “Scavenger Hunt” at the Harvard Art Museums – The Clues
