So if you never heard anything about Naples and you are wondering whether to go there, I’ll throw in a little story about how it treated us, so you’ll get some idea.

I can’t promise that it won’t be kinda one-sided opinion. We heard that Naples is beautiful, we didn’t get convinced but I believe every city has both ugliness and beauty in it, depending on where exactly you go, the weather, the kind of people you meet or experiences that come to you… so I am not saying that there is nothing nice to see there. But!

Pozn.: Tento příspěvek je psaný v AJ, aby posloužil co nejširšímu publiku. Procvičujte 😉

I feel that I have an enormous task ahead of me – to write down everything significant that happened in our two weeks in Italy, to make it easy for a reader to find the most important recommendations and warnings, to pick only the best photos when almost every single one I took has a story or a thought behind it, and to not bore you? How am I ever going to accomplish this?

It seems that I could go at it from several different angles, write posts titled like „What (NOT) to do in Italy“,  „Where to go for the best pizza in the world“, „The ultimate Venice guide“, „The dark side of Naples“, „What to pack for a roadtrip to Italy“ or I could just make it a simple diary of our days, pointing out highlights and disasters as they came.

But I think I want to do a bit of both and mostly I want it to be helpful and reachable by anyone, which is also why I decided to write in English this time.

So let’s do it.

So yesterday I saw a show. It was a fantastic show, one of the best I’ve ever seen, actually. I’ll tell you why in a minute but first let me tell you how it started.

I discovered Aurora in 2017, I think. Fell in love instantly. I finally started to watch Vikings and I’ve always been drawn to the rough beauty of Nordic countries, all the interior design inspired by it (and yeah, when hygge became a thing, I was like „huh? That’s supposed to be something new?“), so when Aurora showed up in my recommendations, it was clear that the internet got something right this time.

On top of that, I think the first song I heard was Runaway and since I am an expat who is always missing family and home big time and it had been a while since I’d been home, the lyrics touched me right on the spot.

So fast forward to last December, me and my man were hitching a tram through Prague and I see these posters about Aurora having a show in January. And I’m like „WHY THE HELL AM I ONLY HEARING ABOUT THIS NOW?!“. Follows the desperation when I find out that the tickets are long sold and insecurity because we are just looking for a job in England which can come at any time so we might not even be here by the end of January. So what now?

I consider myself quite lucky for being able to spend 9 months on the british Isles of Scilly, specifically Tresco, that so many are just dreaming about. Sure, I saw it from a very different perspective than they ever will – it was a worktime for me. I spent those 9 months as a cottage cleaner, worked a lot and quickly and it was quite stressful sometimes, so it was hard to find time and strength for everything that there is to explore.

But I still got my chances and experienced some really nice days or just afternoons there, which made me think about the best ways how to truly experience Scilly.

Now, I will be actually talking about Tresco most of the time, because that’s where I’ve been anchored, but some of the points will be referring to other islands, too.

I’m hoping this article could be of help as a nice little summarization from someone who actually lived there, and a place where to start. But at the same time it’s for me and all the other hard-working people who had been there or still are. When you stay on an island as small as Tresco for so long and it is your workplace as well, it can make you feel caged a bit, which is all the more reason for remembering to see the beauty of your surroundings and the benefits of the location.

There is no question what my favorite city in England is. Brighton is the city of life, spark, soul, music and atmosphere and if me and my boyfriend lived any bit closer, we’d probably spend every weekend there. We keep dreaming of living there one day, even ‚though the cost of it is quite high, because we always have stuff do to there, we keep coming back and we just know that even after so many times we still don’t know half of it.

But I thought I could put down at least the bit that we know of, it’s still a lot of great shops and places and if you are looking for some tips or wondering if the city is worth the visit, well here you go and I hope this helps.

Have you been to Brighton? Can you think of other great spots to see and other tips? Please comment bellow, we’d love to know it all! 🙂 

I’ve travelled for actually more than four years now, but the last four were the busiest. I flew planes many times, took coaches many times, sailed by boats and generally, even though I don’t quite fit into the mainstream perception of a travel bloger (as in constantly posting tons of „How-to“ posts with awesome advices and even more awesome photos), I kinda am one.

And I know there are tons of posts like this from all other fellow travellers, and I know that the best posts are the ones with more specific advices, but today I felt more like these general advices needed to be put on paper by me, too. There could probably be even more of them but I wanted to keep it short and readable.

I did post some more specific posts on this matter before but I think only in czech so plan to re-do them and translate. I am constantly learning and improving my flight routine, for example, so I feel like there is an article yet waiting to be posted on that topic. Maybe coming soon, who knows. Let me know your thoughts in comments.

Some books touch you deeper than the others. Some cats, too.

I think the first time I saw this book was in 2013 or 14. The former was the year I finally came to England for a second time and to browse all kinds of shops for all kinds of beautiful things would be amongst my first things to do.

I remember it being on the shelve with new stuff but also I think it was already a bestseller which is why I am not sure about the exact year – I think it became a bestseller quite right away so it might have been quite shortly after the release that I came across of it but who knows.

Anyway, I felt that this is a book that I would enjoy. Well, obviously, there was a cat on the cover and it was supposed to be about this cat and a dude who was found by him and they saved each other. But there was something more, the cat’s look I think, experienced, intelligent, mysterious. It wasn’t like usual cat pictures which are mostly just cute. It was intriguing.

I didn’t buy it at that time, ‚though. I generally don’t buy books anymore as I strive to be a minimalist. I only own a few paper books from my childhood, Harry Potter series and Lord of the rings 😀 So to buy something new that I could probably seek out in a library, if I wait a while, seemed pointless. I somehow felt that it was going to find me again anyway.

I never though how much I would give
to spend all my life with you
I never though that I needed to say
but I’m feeling like all over new

We have made our own world on the top of the cloud
top of our conjoined dreams
inside it’s warm and cozy and ours
and better than sometimes it seems

We need to keep distance to stay really true
to remain each other’s self
but only together we can build the best things
and to live we need each other’s help

We’re bound to be two and function and love
as a true couple only can
I know we can make it through whatever crime
‚cause I am your lady and you my man

It’s 2016, I just spent three months in Alaska and let alone everything else that happened, the dates 5th to 8th of May 2016 shall be forever remembered as my four-day odyssey through this crazy adventure that my boyfriend Mirek came up with – hiking the Stampede Trail in Denali before we fly back to Czech Republic, and visiting the Magic Bus 142 where Chris McCandless (aka Alexander Supertramp) was found dead in 1992.

It was Mirek’s dream, not mine, but I could understand why it appealed to him so much, and I also knew it might be our only chance to do it because we might never get back to Alaska. That itself wasn’t a good reason for me to do it, but I soon realized that no matter what, he was not going to let the idea go, he was going to fight for it and make it happen, so when we fought over it and he gave me the choice not to go and to stay in a hotel, I knew that wasn’t really an option. I wouldn’t let him go alone because him walking the trail alone was even crazier idea than the two of us doing it together. So it was going to happen. We were going.

I wrote this post in Czech originally, but after a while I thought this was something quite important so I should bother to translate it properly since Google translate wasn’t really doing it.

Wherever you came here from, you probably noticed my on-line name which is Em Phoenix and I feel like there should be an explanation to it so that you know what it means to me. In case you care, of course. So there you go.

Em is pretty obvious. It used to be „M.“ but then I felt that I want to stress out how I pronounce it. So it changed but it’s not meant to mean Em as Ema, I’m still M., as for the first letter of my actual name but meaning also a lot of other things. I’m into minimalism (you can read why here) and I saw a picture once that said „Minimal is m.“ and I thought that was just fantastic idea. It rang a bell in me and for a while I had that as my blog description and logo. Me being „m.“ made all sense (I actually originally used it in small letter, too.) But moving onto the phoenix!