No matter where you go, you can seeing children playing, smiling, and laughing with unabashed innocence. Are there places with suffering, pain, and even death, of course there are. But even in the midst of poverty and despair, you will still find children who somehow, perhaps only in brief moments, do what children do, have fun. This week’s Discover Challenge is Portraits, which got us thinking about the children that we met in Bolivia. We especially enjoyed meeting Bellina, a little girl from a small village who graciously allowed us to take her photograph. Although we love the coy smile in the one picture where she looked at the camera, the photo where she is just sitting quietly is perhaps an even better window into her personality.
It has almost been a year since we posted our first blog on our site. We’ve learned a lot since then and it is interesting to look back and see how things have changed. This week’s Discover Challenge is Origin, so that got us thinking about how we started down this interesting journey called blogging. We certainly had no idea what we were doing back then and we learn something new almost every week, so we know that we still have a long way to go. What we’ve enjoyed most is the interaction with everyone who’s taken the time to read what we’ve written as well reading the interesting stories from all of the blogs that we have followed over the past year. We are definitely amateur photographers at best, but we do like to share pictures of the places that we’ve seen and gone to, so we figured that for this post we would share the original photo that we shared in our introduction post. It is a picture of Warwick Castle from Warwickshire, England.
Warwick Castle
This is also the picture that we selected to use for our page header, which was from a pub in New York City.
There are plenty of obstacles to travelling. Time and money are the most obvious obstacles, but there are language barriers, accessibility constraints, conflicts and wars, and sometimes simply our own fears. Sometimes the best way to overcome these obstacles is to simply take the first step, book a trip, and make it happen. This week’s Daily Post Discover Challenge – Obstacles is about the things that block us from blogging or keep us from doing the things that we’re passionate about.
Longing for the BeachHere’s What They Were Looking AtBeauty Beyond the Fence
Certainly our biggest obstacle is our jobs, but they are also the source of our income that allow us to explore places that we never could have when we were younger, at least not in the style that we’ve become accustomed. It is somewhat ironic, but it was actually the stress of work that motivated us to start our blog last year. We needed an escape from the daily pressure that we felt and writing about what we are passionate about, the places we’ve travelled to, the people we’ve met, the foods we’ve tried, seemed like the ideal outlet. In turn, the blog has encouraged us to travel more often than we have in the past, which is extremely rewarding in itself.
Another View of the BeachTemples Locked Behind Gates
It isn’t always easy finding ways to travel and there are definitely things about travelling that still give us that unnerving feeling, but we try not to let it keep us from doing our best to experience as much of the world as we can. We try to use photos from our travels for these challenges and the picture of the boy and the couple staring through the fence at the ocean seemed like the perfect symbolism of how we feel when we aren’t able to travel. They can see the beach, but yet it seems as if they can never get there. All of these pictures were from our trip to India, which was definitely a trip where we overcame some obstacles to make happen.
