This blog will be full of stories about traveling, pictures, and some cultural observations. Since I graduated high school (not that long ago) I have lived in Rome, Dublin, and Los Angeles (not including Milwaukee where I attended school). Most of my friends and family are still in the midwest, and I began taking pictures of my travels as a means of showing them what I was seeing and experiencing. Things quickly spiraled out of control, and I started taking over 100 pictures everyday in an attempt to capture the "essence" of what I was seeing and doing.
Now, a disclaimer: I am not a professional photographer. Far from it. I have absolutely no training whatsoever in photography, I just happen to like taking pictures. I did take one six week course recently through the rec department in my town where I finally learned what an F-Stop was. The camera I use is one step up from a simple point and shoot, but it is certainly not a DSLR. In fact, some of the pictures you will see were taken with a point and shoot camera. Remarkably, some people still wondered what type of camera I was using to take my pictures. Part of my goal is to document how I take the pictures I do with a relatively rudimentary camera. You don't need a thousand dollar camera to take beautiful pictures, you just need an "eye" (of which everyone has two). The nice thing about digital cameras is you can see what you are going to do before you do it, and you immediately get to see the picture you took....so learning by trial and error is easy.
This is my camera. 10x zoom and 10 megapixels. I have full auto (for when I'm lazy) and manual (for when I'm not) capabilities as well as shutter speed and aperture priority (for when I'm kindof lazy). Also, this picture was taken with my computer. Apologies. Some of my earlier pictures were taken with a 4.3 megapixel camera with a 3x zoom (I'll let you know which ones those are).
As I travel frequently there will be updates about where I've been recently, but as I've done quite a bit of traveling already, there will also be retrospective jaunts down memory lane.
While I do have a permanent home in CA at the moment, the name for this blog originated in a moment from last summer. I was waiting in an airport to travel to my childhood home in the midwest, after spending the summer in temporary housing with my husband in AL, before returning to my apartment in Dublin after I had spent a few weeks with my husband at our soon-to-be home in CA (a home he would be moving to in a few weeks, but I wouldn't be living in for another six months). If that sounds complicated, trust me, it was.
A very nice gentleman asked if I would be willing to participate in a survey about the airport, and as I was in the middle of a rather long layover, I agreed. All the questions were quite easy, until he asked me where I lived. Technically I lived in CA...however, we had no address there yet. I had spent the summer in AL, but I did not have an address there (we were staying in a glorified hotel). I could have given my Dublin address, but that always seems quite misleading as I had just said I was a US resident (a student visa makes you ALWAYS a US resident). I hadn't lived in the midwest for years, so I couldn't give that address either. I suddenly realized I had no idea how to answer an easy question (one we teach preschoolers). I ended up giving him an AL zip code, a CA city, and my midwest street address (because I couldn't remember all the parts of all the addresses....except my childhood one, but by that time I had committed to AL and CA). Thus, Diary of a Nomad was born.
I hope you'll enjoy reading this as much as I'll enjoy writing!
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