Living a Dream

Traveling is good. Traveling does things to you that staying in one place cannot. But traveling poses one of the most difficult questions that a person can be faced with: Where do you want to go? Most people have a list of places that they'd like to go. Depending on your station in life, that list might include Paris, Tokyo, Disney World, Bora Bora, or Branson, Missouri - all of which are fine choices, if given the right set of circumstances. But that list is probably longer than one place, and you're almost certainly not spending an unlimited amount of time in whichever place you choose, so how you do decide where to go and what to do while you're there? The truth is that it's hard. I'm lucky, I know it. I've been a lot of places - more places than were originally on my "I have to go there before I die" list, if I'm being honest. And yet, I still want to go places. Every time one place gets crossed off the list, another place gets added. Wh...

Boy, it's been tough to catch my breath this week. This week saw a LOT of words go to NBA articles of mine. Two ended up getting published - this one and this one - and a third one hasn't yet seen the light of day because it needs to be reconfigured after the NBA trade deadline. The three of them were about 4500 words total, so that's something. Additionally, we've been dog-sitting for a german shepherd who spent her first 18 hours in our home strengthening every negative connotation I had of german shepherds. She effectively didn't stop whining even once the first night, while also occasionally barking like a lunatic and keeping us up all night. She's also super-high energy, which is fine if you're not used to having a dog that's part dog and part ottoman, like this angel. At any rate, the week has turned into waking up earlier than normal, throwing a ball 20x in the backyard, going for a 2+ mile walk, throwing the ball again as soon as I get...

As anyone who has met me knows, in 2014 I quit my job in Chicago, convinced my then-girlfriend (now wife) to do the same, and moved to Italy to teach English. It was a leap of faith, for sure, but it was never as scary as friends and family feared it would be. It was everything I dreamed it would be and then some; the stories of which have been peppered throughout this blog over the past two years. So today, I simply give five reasons to quit your job and teach abroad. It's surprisingly easy to get started . I used a company called International TEFL Academy to get licensed, but there are countless accredited "schools" that do the same thing. Major cities - both in the US and abroad - offer month-long in-person classes to get certified, but I did the online class. It was not difficult. Anyone who has been licensed and taught will immediately forget what they're taught at the exact moment they're thrown into a classroom, so there's only so much need for pr...

My brother just went to Yosemite and he is about to experience a feeling that people who go on great trips get. It's the same feeling we got when we returned from living in Italy, or got back from our anniversary trip to Iceland. Everyone wants to know - and lots of them genuinely  want to know it, too - what was it like? What were your favorite parts? Was it over/under/properly rated? Tell me everything. This, unfortunately, is a brutal set of questions to answer. He sent me a text several days ago about having hiked up Nevada Falls. He said, "you would never believe some of the things we saw today," and "I'll tell you about it later, but nothing I say will equal the experience." That's the feeling. While I obviously think that travel is an essential part of the human existence due to how it makes you feel about situations you're unfamiliar with (among about a million other reasons), travel is also a personal, intimate experience to have wit...

In 2012 I had the chance to visit Europe with my friend Graham. We spent a couple weeks going to a few different areas - one of which was Milan, my future home. We planned to go there for a soccer game, see the famous Duomo, and use the train station as a launch-pad for the Lake Como area. In our time in the city we wanted to browse a little bit of the local art scene but unfortunately couldn't get a time to see the Last Supper (Jenna and I were able to see it during our time there. It was awesome). We walked the city streets though, and not surprisingly there was a lot to see. Statues abound in Italy - guys you've never heard of and extremely famous people alike. There are buildings older than the USA, there are fascinating shops, and there are restaurants that offer burgers named after Native American tribes in a vaguely offensive atmosphere . So one day we were walking from our hotel to a random corner of the city. We started by passing a shop that offered pens - the w...

We Americans have a bit of a reputation. We're loud, we're ignorant, and we often make sure everyone around us knows that we're loud and ignorant. On a beautiful April day, a group of family and I visited Pompeii. Like many, we were excited to see the ruins, impossibly preserved areas, and the casts of people who were perpetually stuck in their final moments. It was a very cool place. We did see all that and more, because Pompeii is huge. Most people head to the main points on the tourist map, but there are places where you could easily get lost and not see anyone for 10-15 minute on this particular day. At one point, near one of the main squares of Pompeii, an American woman stopped us and asked us to take a photo. She asked that we take it of her and her...boyfriend? Son? She appeared to be in her 40s and he appeared to be in his 20s, but they certainly didn't give off a mother-and-son vibe. After the photo - they posed in a way that gave no hint of their ...

When the situation calls for it, I am a mature person. I can talk comfortably about reproductive health, I can watch a movie with a sex scene and not make a joke, and I can look at nude statues and think nothing of it beyond art. Hell, my senior yearbook quote was about how maturity is just knowing when and where to be immature. I won't laugh when you fall down because you might be hurt and I absolutely do not laugh when an animal humps something because it's instinct and the animal can't help it. I believe you shouldn't laugh at something if the thing you're laughing at is helpless in the situation. But sometimes you find your limit. The National Archaeological Museum of Naples (abbreviated MANN in Italian) pushed me near my limit. See, Naples is home to brilliant and interesting historical artwork. With the nearby town of Pompeii buried under the ash of Mt. Vesuvius, tons of pristine artifacts which were rescued from Pompeii ended up in MANN. Some of these p...

I went into Whole Foods today because I occasionally like to pay an extra $5 for every item that Wal-Mart sells and I got a taste of nostalgia. I was in the diary aisle and saw yogurt drinks for the totally idiotic price of $4.59 and it took me back. As I've discussed with anyone who will read or listen, living in Italy was really cool. There were rough parts - transit strikes , language barriers, and the smell of dog pee almost everywhere - but there were obviously wonderful parts. Big, wonderful things like train travel, proximity to cool places, history, art, generous people, great food, and others were just part of our lives. I'm not going to talk about those big things. I want to talk about the little things that I miss about being in Europe. I'm starting with yogurt drinks. This may seem silly, but you know those little Dannon drinkable yogurts? They're 6-8 ounces and come in 4-packs? They're tasty, but they're not exactly filling. You can also get C...

Italy is so full of wonderful things and places that I've written about 20+ different places that we visited without getting to one of the most iconic structures in the entire country. I'm talking, of course, about the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I don't actually remember our train route to Pisa from Milan, but I do know that I took a photo of the toilet on the train. It was the first time I'd ever seen a train-toilet that didn't even pretend that the waste was going anywhere other than the train track below.                                   (That's the ground) We hopped off the train at Pisa and started wandering, not really knowing where we were going. We sort of assumed that we'd get off the train and immediately see the Tower somewhere off in the distance and just walk that direction. We were wrong. Basically we left the train station and walked straight ahead in a 12:00 direction. The Tower was ...

Jenna had the idea that we should go to Verona for Valentine's day of our year abroad. Thanks to Romeo & Juliet, Verona claims to be the city of love and pulls out all the stops to make Valentine's day extra special despite the fact that Shakespeare had never been there and Juliet's balcony is a sham. In any case, this was our third stop in Verona but this one was on a mission. The city hosts something called "Verona in Love." They basically set up chocolate stands everywhere and put hearts on almost anything in the city that draws people. This is great if you like chocolate and even better if you know, unequivocally, that chocolate is the best thing in the world. We fall into the 2nd category. There's more than just chocolate though: They have photo-ops, rose gardens, markets, entertainers, and much more. A walk through the city is somehow even more alive on Valentine's day than it is on any other day, which is an accomplishment. There's ...

Bardonecchia was not on our "must go here" list in Italy. It was a matter of circumstance, however, as we'd heard it was a very beautiful area in the mountains and we could go quickly and inexpensively. As an added bonus, the tourism website for Bardonecchia showed snow-tubing at the ski resort as an activity. Sign us up. Neither of us really knew what to expect from this small town, but we knew it had hosted a few Olympic events in the 2006 Torino games (photographic proof at bottom). Our hotel was inexpensive and overlooked a small parking lot which turned out to host a market during our snowy stay. This was perfect, because I needed boots and got them for cheap...after I wore them walking around the wet, snowy pavement, effectively buying them without realizing it because you're not supposed to wear shoes outside when you're testing them. The "city" has a bus system that stops in 2-3 places in the town and then goes to the bases of the main ski...

I teased this a little about two weeks ago, but now we're here and ready to talk about a little road trip that we took. The plan was simple: Get a place to stay near Florence (but not in Florence), have a good old-fashioned Italian farmhouse meal, and drive around Tuscany, mainly looking for hill towns. In practice, it was at least that simple - maybe simpler. You can't end up in a bad place. Everywhere is beautiful, even if it was a little hazy at times. It was February 28 when we left, so it was supposed to be cold, but we were going south without much knowledge of the elevation at-play on this trip. Our first stop answered some questions. A sign on the highway pointed toward a (maybe) national park of the lakes Suviana and Brasimone. I don't know which on this actually is, but it was beautiful. We had a nice time tossing  rocks into the lake and watching the ice spider-web. Quite a setting. We hopped back in the car, periodically pulling over to take photos, a...

If I can pare travel down into one thing and one thing only, it's that traveling successfully is a mindset. While going to cool places helps you enjoy it, you have to be OK with the fact that something will inevitably go wrong. Embrace it, or else you'll be pretty upset. Rain happens. Foggy, smoggy, hazy days happen. Awful tour guides in the group next to you happen. Trains run late, buses don't run at all, flights get cancelled. Open your mind a bit and realize that some of the most fun memories you'll have can happen when things are going completely wrong. Last night I was reading through my own notes from our 9 months abroad and realized just how much I had forgotten from a trip to a place called Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic. If you recognize the name, it's because you've read a lot of "10 European Towns You HAVE to See to Believe!" articles on god-knows-what website. Cesky Krumlov makes those lists because it looks like this . It's ...

Italy is a pretty cool place, as you might've noticed from all the photos I've been posting and blog entries I've made. With that in mind, we decided to try a road-trip weekend. The plan was to pick out some notable hill-towns in/around Tuscany and just drive. We'd also booked an Agriturismo for two nights because that's something we'd heard about doing. An Agriturismo is essentially a farm-house that rents out rooms. Some are more luxurious than others, including pools, hot-tubs, and more. Others focus on the agriculture aspect and are working farms where wine, jams, meat, fruit, and much more are produced. We opted for a small place outside of Florence because it featured an onsite dinner. We'd heard that the best part about Agriturismos were that they serve seemingly endless dinners for a flat-rate that gets added to the price of your room. We wanted that. The dinner did not disappoint, but that's going to show up in photos in a subsequent post. ...

Not like that fake 100th post from a week or two ago. This is actually my 100th post at kevinpaulnye.blogspot.com, which would be more of an accomplishment if it didn't actually take me 6+ years. That's right, the first post on this site was in July of 2009 - about seven weeks after I graduated college, which is a seriously distant memory at this point. There've been some ups and downs along the way. Originally it was meant to be a journal of finding some legs in the entertainment world: I talked about my first ever stand-up comedy audition , talked about the week-long trip I took to New York with Lou-Chaz Bitsko, and even what my life would look like if it were a movie . Life changed: I moved to Chicago and wrote about people on the train biting each other's ears and just being gross , posted a total of five times in 2011, pretended to get back into blogging in 2012, then left this old thing dormant from August 2012 until November 2014. Oops. But now that I...

(See last week's post for Rome part 1 , which covered the following: Outside the Colosseum, inside the Forum, first trip to the Pantheon, Torre Argentina/Area Sacra, Piazza Navona, the outside of Castel Sant'Angelo, and a few other incidental visits.) After a wild first day in Rome, we jumped out of bed early for an over-fill of our hotel breakfast because we knew we'd need calories. By 8:30 we were queued for the Colosseum and were inside before 9:00. Of course, it was still head-scratching to walk there and pass Trajan's Market, the various forums, and the Arch of Constantine to get there, but that's just part of being in Rome. Inside the Colosseum though...that place is a trip. They do a pretty good job of loading the concourse-area with information and artifacts, allowing you to learn about the building instead of just rushing to the inside area and looking around (which is obviously what everyone wants to do anyway). There's not a whole lot I can say ab...