About Us

Noha

What is your profession?
My background is in Electronics Engineering, but I work as Business Systems Analyst. I quit my job at Moody’s Investor’s service in New York City, in order to take this trip.

How did you meet Peter?
I was living in NJ at the time, and my friend was teasing me about setting me up with a friend of his. Since, I hate setups and my culture doesn’t really tolerate dating or marrying foreigners, I was not interested. My friend invited me to dinner without telling me that Peter will be there until after i agreed to go. I arrived first, and answered the door when Peter knocked. I think about this moment often, and how we walk into our fate blindly. I didn’t open the door thinking: “this is going to be my future husband” or ” I am shaking my future husband’s hand for the first time”. I was only preoccupied with getting through an awkward dinner. An ironic twist is that our common friend did not really intend on setting us up.

Describe Peter.
Peter is very intelligent and talented not only in science, but in appreciation of literature. He is passionate about languages (living and dead), not only for its practical or literary value, but for its intricate rules. He loves reading as well as browsing books in bookstores. He loves classic movies, but can also speak of pop culture movies like “Alien” just as passionately. As a partner, he is kind, patient and has a great sense of humor. He can be too self critical at times. Like Peter Pan, he is searching for happiness outside of society’s material definition of the word (these were his best man’s words in our wedding toast).

Why did you decide to travel?
We both love to travel. However, being employed in american corporates and having parents overseas, means we have to spend the short 2 weeks vacation we get with them. This leaves, only a week to satisfy our travel bug which is only good enough for an expensive rushed skim of tourist attractions. As we both spent our after-college years seriously studying and working, wee missed out on the freedom these precious years could have offered us to travel and explore other options in life.  If I had things my way, I would have loved to spend each whole year in a different place.

It is important to mention that my ambition for this trip is about more than sight seeing. We lately felt trapped in our 9 to 5 life and wondered if we could be happier with a different life structure. I hope that getting out of the grind, will help us gain some perspective on our former lifestyle and understand whether we have or want choices for a different one.

How did you make it happen? What challenged you the most?
We had to quit our high paying and “cushy” jobs, leave our nice apartment in our beloved New York, even sell Peter’s expensive furniture.  We had to deal with bureaucratic paperwork in order to get a long term visa to travel. We had to choose only a few things to pack and leave behind our clothes, books, etc… More than that, we had to shake off our middle class sensibilities, lose financial security and even health insurance. Last but not least, we had to face our concerned family about our unconventional and seemingly irresponsible plans and somehow find an answer to their perpetual and rightful question: “what are you going to do?”

What do you want to get out of this experience?
I want to experience different places to understand where i would like my home to be. Right now, I think that New York is my ideal home, but i have only seen so few.

I have some fear of settling down to one place, and committing to house ownership and family. I hope that this experience will satisfy my vagabonding impulses.

What are your fears about this experience?
I am afraid that I will not feel satisfied enough to settle down in the end, and will keep wanting more. On the other hand, I am afraid that I will not be able to get my old life back with all of its perks (my career, being able to live in New York, being financially stable, etc…). Another fear I have, is how i will handle the idleness. Ever since I can remember I have either been a full time student, full time employee or both. While having all this free time sounds great in theory, I wonder if it can affect me negatively.

What do you hope to change or improve about yourself by traveling?
My fastidiousness about cleanliness and my financial habits (work more to consume more).  I wonder if I can be happier with a smaller salary and a simpler lifestyle for the exchange of more free time for myself.

What places do you most look forward to seeing?
Central and East Europe ( Prague, Zagreb, etc…),  latin America (Argentina), Russia and Japan (if we can make it happen)

Why are you writing this blog?
At first, I was resistant to the blog idea. I feared being perceived as too pretentious and self important to be writing one. But now that I am writing it, I can see many benefits.  For one, this blog will serve as a journal to easily share our experiences with our friends and family. Two, it will discipline us to capture the memories of our trip better. Another great thing, is that like any journal, I will be amused revisiting it years later at how much I did and did not change.

Why the questionnaire format?
We think it will keep it more structured and easier to write. Also, anyone following it, can easily skip to the angles that interest them more. Hopefully it will keep us from sharing too little or too much.

Peter

What is your profession?
I am an organic chemist. I worked for five years for a pharmaceutical company as a process (i.e. scale-up) chemist.

How did you meet Noha?
A mutual friend introduced us. I knew him through a book store where I used to volunteer. He had mentioned setting us up a few times. One afternoon he asked if I wanted to come to dinner at his house, and that she would be there. I agreed, and when I came to his house, she opened the door. She was wearing a green blouse and jeans, I think. I remember noticing her smile, a little shy.

Describe Noha.
Noha is a little shy but strong-willed. In business-speak, I would say she is very detail-oriented. She likes to make plans and consider all of the options. She works hard. She has a very strong sense of justice, and hates to see people get away with malicious, dishonest, or just plan sloppy acts. She can be blunt. She’s generous to her friends and is loyal, and she expects the same loyalty from them. She’s very smart, she can speak Arabic, English, French, and a little Spanish. She loves fine dining. She’s a night person. She watches classic movies and trashy reality television with the same relish. She likes fashion and presenting herself well but she’s not flashy or an haute-couture snob, and unlike many women, she doesn’t like to shop. Her favorite books are Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Bel Ami (that last one is a little ironic given her sense of justice).

Why did you decide to travel?
I had a vague idea about traveling from when I was in graduate school. I had traveled very little up to that point. The occasional trip from Ohio to New Jersey to visit family (father’s side); a family vacation to Niagara Falls and Montréal; and some trips to Manila to see family (mother’s side); plus several short trips when I was looking at graduate schools and later jobs, but those don’t really count. I thought it would be cool to stay in a place for a while (say, months or years), and work and learn the language, then move on to another place and repeat the process, and so on. It’s rather naïve, though I’m sure there are people out there who do something like this.

Later while I was working at the book store, I met a travel writer, Rolf Potts, when he came to give a reading. I started thinking about traveling again and told myself that I would work for five years and then take off. As the years passed the idea faded somewhat though I kept saving money, aided by my natural prudence/miserliness.

Then I met Noha, and we got married (stuff happened in-between). I had started to think about going back to graduate school in Switzerland (an opportunity which fell through, alas) and floated the idea to her of traveling for a short time before returning to school. That was the seed for the current plan.

We both realized that we’re at a rare point in our lives where we can take time off to travel for several months, rather than two or three weeks at most. We have some money, we don’t have any debts (educational or mortgage), and we don’t have children yet.

How did you make it happen? What challenged you the most?
I had already saved up a fair amount of money, so that was covered. After we started thinking seriously about the plan, we continued to save up a bit of money. There were some logistics and other practical issues to figure out (visas, plane tickets, train tickets, lodging, travel gear…) but nothing very exciting so far.

One thing that challenged us, more-so than I expected, was moving out of our apartment in New York and putting our remaining things into storage. We had originally planned to send things to Ohio but that turned out to be too expensive. We lived in a small apartment in New York, but somehow ended up with an incredible amount of stuff (clothes, books, bric-a-brac) to donate or dispose of. We were extremely lucky that my parents came to help us with moving and cleaning (thanks Mom and Dad!).

Besides the practical issues, the other difficult thing was to commit to the idea of leaving our comfortable lives to travel. We had good jobs and a nice apartment in New York; we ate at fancy places for brunch on weekends and watched interesting movies afterwards. Whenever I tried to explain to someone what we were planning, I felt a little silly. But there won’t be many times like this in our life when we can take a chance.

What do you want to get out of this experience?
Well, I want to see some places.

Actually another reason I liked the idea of traveling was to be immersed in another language. I enjoy learning languages (mostly French so far and a tiny little morsel of Russian) and wish that I were fluent in something besides English. It’s very appealing to me for some reason to be in a place where English is not spoken. Of course it’s hard to really learn a language when you’re too busy with day-to-day things or actively traveling, so I’m not sure in the end how much immersion I will really get. But at least I hope to spend a lot of time in a French-speaking region to improve my French past a beginner’s level.

I also enjoy some of the practical aspects of traveling, once you’ve first arrived somewhere. Figuring out the metro system (if there is one), getting a feel for the layout of the city and its streets, finding out an apartment’s quirks. Learning, improvising, solving problems. Of course, there’s a great way to learn, improvise, and solve problems, and get paid for it, too; it’s called a job. So maybe that’s not a compelling reason to travel.

What are your fears about this experience?
I worry that taking the time off to travel will make it difficult to get a job comparable to the one I left. And that our money won’t go as far as I would like and that we won’t be able to travel as long. And that we will get burnt out after a short while.

What do you hope to change or improve about yourself by traveling?
Aside from the language acquisition stuff? Well, I’m pretty shy. I hope that this experience forces me to be more open and inquisitive, and also assertive if need be.

What places do you most look forward to seeing?
Paris, the south of France, Prague, Berlin. Tokyo would be great.

Why are you writing this blog?
We found on a previous trip that if we didn’t write down our impressions of the day soon after it passed, that we would forget details easily. Since then we have been keeping trip notes, and this is an extension of that practice. And I think it’s nice to have something to show for our time, if not concrete, then at least visual. And I hope my family and friends will get some amusement out of this. Plus I want to be famous.

Why the questionnaire format?
Oh, man. It was inspired by this thing. They had a great idea but I’m almost embarrassed for them sometimes. I hope our fate is not the same (for the blog, I mean. We’re fine.)