A little more about Molly

I grew up in a small town in upstate New York, but I have loved to travel ever since I can remember. I think it may be in my blood since my mom was a travel agent, but I have always been curious about new places. This led to me studying languages in middle and high school, doubling up on Spanish and French. And eventually, in 10th grade, I heard about Rotary youth exchange: a year long international exchange program for high schoolers. I remember coming home and immediately asking my parents if I could do it. They laughed it off and said no, but the idea stuck with me, so I spent the next year researching and building my case for why I should be able to go. I read blogs, met with Rotarians, and eventually presented my case to my parents yet again. This time they knew I was serious, and they said yes, with one stipulation: we host an exchange student first, so I can get first hand experience of what it is like. That resulted in the fall of my junior year being filled with Rotary interviews and the chaos of adding a Bolivian exchange student to our already busy household. I learned so much about Bolivian culture and practiced my Spanish, and got very, very excited to begin my own journey the next year. I eventually found out I’d be spending my year in a small town just outside Zurich, Switzerland. I packed my bags, said goodbye to family and friends, and embarked on a journey that changed my life (cheesy, I know). 

That year was filled with European travel, studying German, and making a slew of friends from around the world. It was incredible, confidence-building, and honestly wildly challenging, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. When I came back home to finish out my senior year, I heard about another free study abroad program through the government called the National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y). I applied on a whim for the Tajiki Persian program the next summer, and to my (and my parents’) surprise, I was accepted. That’s how I ended up spending two months learning Persian, living with a host family, and exploring Tajikistan with a group of the smartest people I’d ever met. 

After a summer of fun and language and adventure in Dushanbe, I headed off to Indiana University for my freshman year majoring in International Studies and Russian with a minor in Central Eurasian studies. I was in the Russian Flagship Program, which involved rigorous language study and summer and year long immersive study abroad programs. This was all great until… spring of my freshman year, COVID-19 hit. My grand plans for multiple study abroad trips and in-person language instruction slipped between my fingers. I spent the next year and a half as everyone else did, in some version of quarantine. Luckily, things leveled out for my Junior year and I was able to have a relatively normal final year on campus with a few great travel opportunities. I was part of a delegation to COP26 in Scotland in the fall, I took a spring break road trip around Iceland, and I got accepted into two study abroad programs. One was for a summer at the London School of Economics, and the other was for the following year in Almaty, Kazakhstan with the Russian Flagship Program. 

I headed off to Europe a bit early with my sister and best friend for an incredible two weeks in Greece. Then I popped over to Germany for a climate conference, with a weekend in Amsterdam (one of my absolute favorite cities), and I finally ended up in London. I absolutely loved the city and friends I made there. It was a real chance to reset after what had been a difficult and confusing few years. I came home in August, just in time to spend some time with family and visit Ethan before I headed off to Kazakhstan for the year. In Kazakhstan I lived with a host family, attended intensive Russian courses for 6 hours a day, and explored a country that very few get the chance to visit. It was difficult, but so rewarding, as all of my culturally immersive study abroad experiences have been. I think that is why I am so passionate about culturally engaged travel and the chance to delve deeper into the local experience. In all of the places I have lived with a family, I have learned about the culture in such a nuanced, enriching way, that has made travel one of the most fulfilling aspects of my life. I am so excited to keep traveling and digging into the cultural linguistic nuances of each place I go, all while sharing what I can with you guys. I really hope to empower people to explore and immerse themselves fully, whether it be for a short trip, study abroad, or life of full-time travel. I am so excited to get to know you guys, build a positive + inclusive community, and learn from each other!

I have always been fascinated with culture and what motivates and excites people across the world. What values have been instilled in people around the world and for what reasons?  Sometimes the key to unlocking these ideas lie within the language itself. My first time being introduced to a culture truly different from American culture was in 2nd grade when an Obama era program brought Mandarin language classes to my public elementary school. Every week during the school day, I would have one to two Chinese classes that were an hour long. I distinctly remember that the Chinese teacher would use lion puppets to introduce old Chinese stories during our school’s morning news show. While at the time I didn’t take learning Chinese seriously (by the end of elementary school I could only introduce myself, count to ten, and say words I found fun to say like apple, Píng guǒ 平果, and hamburger, Hànbǎobāo 漢堡包), I ended up sticking with it into middle school.  

My middle school Chinese teacher was a white man who we all called Peng laoshi (teacher Peng). He learned Chinese at Brigham Young University and studied abroad in Beijing and Hong Kong. On the first day of class, myself and all my classmates were all shocked that a white guy was our Chinese teacher. We all really wanted to hear him speak Chinese so we all begged him on the first day to say something to us in Chinese. He responded with “What do you want me to say in Chinese?” in Chinese and we all freaked out. It was mind blowing at the time to think that someone not from China had mastered the language enough to be our teacher. Peng laoshi was also a great teacher. His method for teaching us in middle school was that we would play games to solidify grammar and act out skits to increase our speaking capabilities. He told us that in school he would study the vocabulary and grammar, but not prepare for skits he had to do because he felt that was the best way to test if he had truly learned the lesson. That has stuck with me to this day as I have always felt that the ability to communicate with people across cultures by hurdling language barriers is special.

But now it’s time to talk a little bit more about my travel experience. I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to travel in my childhood. This includes both international and domestic travel around the United States, particularly to National Parks. My parents have always been active and adventurous. The first international travel experience I can remember was a trip our family took to Panama when I was in middle school. On this trip we saw the beauty of the Panamanian jungle and its biodiversity. On days out, we stopped multiple times along the side of the road to watch sloths that our tour guide had spotted in the trees. It was incredible! The most memorable time from this trip was when we took a boat across a lake to a subterranean cave and swam through this cave. There were thousands and thousands of bats that were hanging and flying above our heads in the cave. We also saw poison dart frogs in the cave and at the end came out to a quiet alcove of the jungle that had some of the most beautiful large blue butterflies that you could ever imagine. It was a magical experience. Of course, it was only afterwards that our tour guide told us that he had seen an alligator in the cave a week before. But this is all to say that this experience opened me up to the joys (and adventurous nature) of traveling.  

My mom had taken Spanish through college, so on our trip she would often speak to our tour guide and some of the locals in Spanish.Thanks to her Spanish skills, she secured our family an invite to our tour guides home for some snacks and beverages and got to see more of what it was like to live in Panama as a local. It was exciting to see my mom (and my dad at times as well as he took Spanish in high school) use this skill she had that I had never really known existed at the time to communicate with people in a way that I wasn’t able to without knowing the language. This opened me up to the importance of language and cross-cultural communication. While I currently only speak one other language than English, I would love to learn more to keep growing in my ability to have more personal experiences to gain a better understanding of what it means to live in different parts of the world.

After this trip in the summer before I started high school my family traveled to Switzerland which was AMAZING, and I hope to go back one day. During high school on school breaks, my family would travel to national parks. One of the most memorable of these trips was our family trip to the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Zion, and Bryce National Parks. Each of these places are unique and highlight some of the natural beauty that the United States has to offer. During my junior year of high school I also had the opportunity to travel to Europe with a group of my friends for a band trip to 7 countries. One of my most memorable travel experiences in high school (or honestly just the summer after I had graduated high school) was a six-week study abroad program to Taiwan through the National Language Security Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) to study Chinese. That’s right, both Molly and myself were fortunate enough to have been awarded NSLI-Y scholarships during our high school years to study abroad. Like Molly, I lived with a host family for those six weeks in Taiwan, and I must say that I was also surrounded by some of the smartest high schoolers I’d ever met.

I then returned home and packed my stuff to Indiana for college. At Indiana University I was a double major in International Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures. But the biggest draw of Indiana University for me was the Chinese Flagship program. Besides the multiple scholarships and opportunities to study abroad that the Flagship program provided, I was most interested in being able to achieve a professional level of fluency in Chinese by the time that I graduated college while also being able to pursue another degree of my choice. It seemed like a fantastic deal. But anyways, everything got thrown off about halfway through my freshman year when the COVID outbreak began and we were all sent home to finish out our freshman year of college online… which then turned into a summer of online language study… which then turned into my entire sophomore year of college being online as well. It was a tough time and also frustrating, like I know it was for anyone who was in school at the time and was passionate about their learning, or even just wanting to be able to socialize with their friends everyday.

Luckily, my junior year was back to in-person teaching and learning, and I had a great year. It was the year that Molly and I became true friends with our participation in the same volunteer club together. I fondly remember spending most of my Friday nights that year in Molly’s dorm room with a poke bowl, peach milk tea (with lychee jelly of course), and a movie. My next year was my year abroad back in Taiwan for my capstone year abroad for the Chinese Flagship. Similar to Molly, for the first semester I was in language classes for much of the day and had tutoring classes scheduled most evenings during the week. It was difficult, but it was so much fun and so exciting to finally have the opportunity to live long term in the place where I had been working towards so long to study the language. My second semester was an internship at a university in Taipei and it was delightful to be in a professional environment where my language skills were utilized. It was also amazing to explore Taiwan, hike some of its many mountains, and make some amazing friends. It was truly an experience that I look back upon with affection for what I learned and is a place I look forward to revisiting one day (hopefully on Molly’s and my year abroad ;)).  

Now, Molly and I are working and saving up for what we hope will be an amazing full year abroad. Of course we want to document our experience and share it with any other people interested in doing something similar or even just want to watch some entertaining travel content as Molly and I often enjoy doing together. However, it is also our goal to be able to empower young people to travel with the means that are available to them. Often, travel is viewed as a luxury, which don’t get me wrong, it certainly is when you have to work and have limited funds/days off, but travel can be surprisingly affordable with proper planning and budgeting. We hope that the content we produce, both via video and blog, are authentic and realistic for everyone that is interested in travel and can experience for themselves, and also to provide additional unique insights on our travels through our linguistic and cultural knowledge. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to read a little bit more about myself and Molly and I hope you enjoy what we create as we both learn how to create content and better document what we are learning along the way.