Mountains and Miles

I can't believe I'm writing this already, but our year abroad has come and gone in the blink of an eye. We're so happy we made the decision to travel the world. We met so many incredible people from around the world, and saw things we never expected. We plan to write a few more posts, including our final financials, and we want to thank you for following along on this incredible adventure! We've relocated to our new home, and we're excited to start exploring our new surroundings. Check out our video to find out where we're headed! :)

I knew this day would come sooner or later, and I was always hoping it would be much, much later. We took our last international flight (for now) back to the United States. I don’t want to say back “home”, because frankly I don’t really feel that we have one of those just yet. But, luckily we had friends visiting us in Costa Rica who left the same day as us and made leaving a little more fun.

Just kidding... The only thing I wanted to see while we spent a month in Costa Rica was a toucan. Unfortunately, this was the closest I got!

Tea time, steak, public museums, free healthcare for all, even tourists - wait what? Yes, Buenos Aires might possibly be the greatest mega city in the world for travelers. There were so many things to do and see that we spent almost no time in our Airbnb in Palermo, one of the great residential neighborhoods of BA.

We spent about 4 weeks in the Providencia neighborhood of Santiago and we loved it. I already miss it, and absolutely plan on going back. We were lucky enough to have more family come visit us while we had a "home" for a longer period of time, and we found something to do every single day. Here's my best compiled list (in no particular order) of the top things we did during our stay.    

Sorry everyone, I couldn't resist a good (or bad) April Fools joke. The truth is we did win, but only one of the many NT$ 200 prizes (~$6 USD). Still need a few more of those to cover a ticket back to Asia. Well folks, we thought we were rounding some of the last turns of our trip, but as it turns out, while we were in Taiwan, we learned about the country's free national lottery. Here's how it works. Every time you purchase something in Taiwan, no matter how big or small, your receipt comes with a free lottery ticket. Why do they do this, one may ask? If the population demands receipts, and in turn their free lottery tickets, then businesses are forced to accurately report their sales to the government. Clever way to combat tax evasion huh? Oh, and they draw the winning numbers every two months, for the preceding two months. So I had to carry these things around for almost 4 months to find out that I had won. Here's the prize list: Special Prize - NT$ 10,000,000 (~$3