Practical travel advice, packing tips, dress codes, and etiquette guides for destinations around the world.
Elena Vasquez · August 25, 2026
Not what to wear — why. The body hierarchy, the register rule, and why Buddhist temples and Greek Orthodox monasteries landed on the same dress code.
Elena Vasquez · August 25, 2026
Buddhist temples don’t ban tattoos. One specific tattoo, in a few specific countries, is a genuine problem — here’s the honest, country-by-country answer.
Elena Vasquez · August 6, 2026
Let me be straight with you: the Fairy Pools Isle of Skye are genuinely spectacular, and they are genuinely crowded. I’m not going to open with misty mountain poetry. What I’m going to give you is the on-foot visitor’s guide — the parking situation, the walk, the swimming, what to pack, and when to show … Read more
Elena Vasquez · July 24, 2026
Here’s a number that trips people up: open house windows for California LDS temples typically run just two to four weeks, then vanish entirely for years, sometimes decades, until the next renovation. That timing detail changes everything about how you should plan a visit, and it’s tied directly to what you’re allowed to wear. If … Read more
Elena Vasquez · June 3, 2026
Rain needling sideways off the Thames, I’m planted outside Shakespeare’s Globe watching the evening crowd sort itself into wildly different tribes as showtime approaches. Blazers and pressed trousers file past jeans and trainers. One woman glides by dressed for a black-tie fundraiser. Meanwhile a couple of visitors near the back of the groundling queue are … Read more
Elena Vasquez · June 2, 2026
Most trip-planning sites will tell you Thailand has one temple dress code, easy, done — pack accordingly and move on. That’s exactly the assumption that got my friend Marcus turned away at the gate of Doi Suthep in Chiang Mai, his cargo shorts sitting a couple of inches above the knee and a guard shaking … Read more
Elena Vasquez · June 1, 2026
Twenty-six years old, one suitcase, and exactly zero experience outside Europe and North America — that’s the version of me who stepped off the plane in Bangkok for the very first time, and I was, without exaggeration, rattled. My mother had mailed me a handwritten rundown of every disease I might contract. My friends had … Read more
Elena Vasquez · March 4, 2026
Fifteen minutes. That’s how long it took me to notice that €180, a credit card, and my Italian train pass had disappeared — sliced clean out of my daypack by a blade I never even felt cut through the canvas. Picture 6:47 p.m. on Line B toward Termini, Rome — the kind of shoulder-to-shoulder rush … Read more
Elena Vasquez · January 25, 2026
I landed in Bangkok for the first time in 2009 with a 35-liter backpack, a Lonely Planet that was two editions out of date, and the absolute certainty that I had prepared enough. Within 48 hours I had been tuk-tuk…
Elena Vasquez · January 24, 2026
I used to be a chronic overpacker. Not mildly — embarrassingly so. I once checked a 32-kilogram bag for a 10-day trip to Southeast Asia and spent three days of that trip doing laundry anyway because I had packed the…
