Growing up, as a little girl, one of my favourite books was my copy of the world atlas. If I remember, I had a fairly old one (it should have been at least a decade or so old by then), it actually showed Jakarta as Djakarta, which was the Dutch spelling, but I loved the book. I’d spend hours reading the various maps and learning the names of all the countries in the world as well as their capitals and major cities. Later on in school, Geography became one of my favourite subjects and I loved the map work which came with it, so much that my classmates would wait for me to complete my work just so they could copy it off me!
Source – That’s a life goal for sure….
What’s the above paragraph leading to? I just saw TripAdvisor’s best destinations of 2016 and this has ignited the wanderlust in me. In fact, the other day S and I were talking about trips to Europe and the States. We have family in both places and a chance to visit these countries would be awesome. We just need to start saving up, with four adults, airfare alone will be a huge expense.
Throwback to Siam Reap
Back to the best destination list – London, UK has been declared the best in the world and Siam Reap, Cambodia the best in Asia. London’s already on my bucket list and now that travel has become a lot easier for us as a family, we aim to see a lot more of this region as well as Europe and America. Within Asia, I really want to visit Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Japan and other smaller countries.
I guess this is what happens when you come back from a holiday, you start planning for the next one….
The vivid, often startling memoir of a young woman shaped by two dramatically disparate worlds. Saira Shah is the English-born daughter of an Afghan aristocrat, inspired by his dazzling stories to rediscover the now lost life their forebears presided over for nine hundred years within sight of the minarets and lush gardens of Kabul and the snow-topped mountains of the Hindu Kush. Part sophisticated, sensitive Western liberal, part fearless, passionate Afghan, falling in love with her ancestral myth-chasing Afghanistan-Shah becomes, at twenty-one, a correspondent at the front of the war between the Soviets and the Afghan resistance. Then, imprisoning herself in a burqa, she risks her life to film Beneath the Veil, her acclaimed record of the devastation of women’s lives by the Taliban. Discovering her extended family, discovering a world of intense family ritual, of community, of male primacy, of arranged marriages, and finding at last the now war-ravaged family seat, she discovers as well what she wants and what she rejects of her extraordinary heritage.
In her latest novel, Turkey’s preeminent female writer spins an epic tale spanning nearly a century in the life of the Ottoman Empire.
Memories and Such 
