When this post goes live, I’ll have just boarded my plane to Europe! As I was packing the night before, I thought it’d be fun to take a quick snapshot of what clothes I’m bringing for my 10 day trip because I never share this kind of inventory stuff. Nothing deep here. (Please excuse the dim lighting. As I said, it only struck me to do this as I was packing the night before.)
If you’ve been following the blog for the past month, you’ll know that I kicked off summer break 2017 with a west coast road trip, including San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. After the trip, I spent about two weeks in Philly before flying home to Beijing, where I thought I’d be staying for the rest of summer. But as you might have guessed from the title of this blog post, my travels for summer break 2017 are not yet over!
I love the community that I’ve found through blogging. I love sharing my experiences, reading your comments, and popping over to your blogs to read about your experiences as well. Not only do I feel a connection to you guys, but I feel like some of you might feel a connection to each other and frequent each others blogs as well. So some of you might know Arden, who blogs over at Hello Arden (previously Stories of a Telescope and Missing Wanderer). Arden reached out to ask if I was interested in reading and reviewing her self-published anthology, and I didn’t hesitate to say yes! I’m always interested in seeing what y’all are up to and love to support in any way I can.
– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
Published by Little, Brown and Company on 06 Sep 2016
Goodreads | Amazon
Pearl is in charge of: the sad, the good, the past.
Stasha must care for: the funny, the future, the bad.
It’s 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood.
As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele’s Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain.
That winter, at a concert orchestrated by Mengele, Pearl disappears. Stasha grieves for her twin, but clings to the possibility that Pearl remains alive. When the camp is liberated by the Red Army, she and her companion Feliks–a boy bent on vengeance for his own lost twin–travel through Poland’s devastation. Undeterred by injury, starvation, or the chaos around them, motivated by equal parts danger and hope, they encounter hostile villagers, Jewish resistance fighters, and fellow refugees, their quest enabled by the notion that Mengele may be captured and brought to justice within the ruins of the Warsaw Zoo. As the young survivors discover what has become of the world, they must try to imagine a future within it.
I’m so sorry that I haven’t been consistent about replying to your comments, but you can be assured that I’m reading all of them! Lemme give you a lil update about my Internet situation in Beijing: Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter are not blocked (surprisingly, but Tumblr and Pinterest are blocked), but the Internet connection sucks, so my activity on those platforms are still limited. WordPress is not blocked, so I’m able to write blog posts and upload photos, albeit uploading photos takes forever. I receive emails when there are new comments, so that’s how I’m keeping up with them, but Disqus is either blocked or takes five-ever to load, which is why I haven’t been replying consistently. Bloglovin’ is on the same boat, which is why I haven’t been keeping up with your blogs or others and why I haven’t been sharing Friday Favourites, other than the fact that I’m generally bad about sharing Friday Favourites every week.
I hope you’ve enjoyed following along my west coast road trip these past few weeks, whether it was via Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, or the blog. I think this is the most thorough coverage I’ve done for any of my trips. I posted twice a day every day on Instagram. I was as active on Snapchat as ever. I created a vlog for each city. I recapped each city in snapshots on my blog, and then went into it day-by-day in individual blog posts. I wanted to take this moment to do a recap because there’s a lot of content to digest, and there’s still more thoughts I have about everything.