In the recent years, Danes have earned the reputation of a pretty happy nation: their country has topped the UN’s World Happiness Report three times since 2013. A combination of high levels of social support, freedom to make life choices, good healthy life expectancy,...

Good news came in a couple of days ago - Abroad and Beyond has been nominated for the Liebster Award by Paula from Gone with the Wine! Thank you, Paula, for recognising my website and for this exciting opportunity to tell you guys about the idea behind this award.

Today, on the 6th of October, Abroad and Beyond is celebrating its second birthday. It blows my mind to think that this blog, initially a mental distraction fro

A couple of weeks days ago, I was working on a translation assignment for a project on urban planning and city development. It reminded me of the blog post on

Ever wondered when waiting in the passport control queue why people carry different coloured passports? It is no secret that national passports widely differ from each other by what doors - or borders - they open for their owner (I've talked about it before in this blo...

Once upon a time, many moons ago, I used to think that seasoned travellers must have a recipe for how to travel right. This recipe would involve a kind of routine following which you’d have a perfect or near-perfect trip every time you go on one. I genuinely believed t...

The other day I was catching up with a friend of mine who had just come back from Russia. Always exciting to hear about how foreigners experience your country, isn’t it? You never know with the Motherland though: to be fair, it does not always feel like the most welcom...

Have you ever been somewhere that is, on a whole, pretty nice, but somehow incredibly boring? It’s like a vanilla cupcake: it’s fine, there is nothing wrong with it, yet it just doesn’t give you the thrills? I always wondered if it is just me being spoiled by travellin...

*arrow points at the bigger windows on the right

I have to be honest with you - I really do not like talking about floors. In fact, I try to avoid those conversations at all costs. The reason is I have completely lost track of how people refer to different levels of bu...

What is it that makes a good film about travelling - is it stunning scenery or adventurous plot lines that are somehow incorporated into the landscapes? Exotic destinations? Maybe it is a combination of the three, as in the recent hit Eat, Pray, Love about how to drop...

Have you ever scrolled through your Facebook or Instagram feed and thought that those pictures were almost too good to be true? Well, your gut feeling might actually be not that far off. When Zilla van den Born shook up the Internet last year with her project on manipu...

A couple of years ago, when I was about to move from Canada to the Netherlands for a semester abroad, moving halfway across the globe still felt like a big deal even though I'd already done it before. During the pre-departure sessions my university organized for outgo...