Nik and Jia: Two digital nomads traveling the world and writing about it.
Hi 👋 Welcome to Our Nomadic Notebook!
This project was birthed from an afternoon conversation in our tiny garage apartment in Houston, Texas. We were planning our upcoming graduation trip to Bangkok and looking through travel blog after travel blog when the lightbulb moment suddenly came.
Why don’t we make one?
For weeks, we’d been looking for a fun weekend project that we could slowly work on together during our weekend cafe dates. And after a few more weeks of procrastination, we finally decided to take the plunge and start this blog together.
Who are we?
It wasn’t until a spontaneous trip to San Francisco, California that he truly became travel obsessed. From that day onward, every school holiday and long weekend was filled with some kind of trip, even if it was a short one.
Favorite place he’s been: Mexico City, Mexico 🇲🇽
Place he’s most excited for: Busan, South Korea 🇰🇷
Biggest goal in life: To sell 1,000 copies of his novels and write/direct a fully independent, self-funded movie
Jia
Nicholas
Jia was born in Guangxi, China, and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. She had been to several continents before she was three, but her proper introduction to the world of travel began at 15 years old, in the back of a Jeep in Uganda.
After that, she was hooked, quickly scheduled trips to Costa Rica and Aruba. But it wasn’t until college that she got her first taste of long-term travel.
Upon hearing that her study abroad program in Santiago, Chile was cancelled, Jia took matters into her own hands and simply moved to Tunja, Colombia on her own for 7 weeks to work on her Spanish and learn the local culture.
Today, she’s a teacher, photographer, and always on the hunt for the world’s best bao (a random street vendor at the Chinese New Year festival in Houston currently holds the title).
Favorite place she’s been: Istanbul, Turkey 🇹🇷
Place she’s most excited for: Paris, France 🇫🇷
Biggest goal in life: To learn at least some of the language of every country she visits.
How did we meet?
Our story began in a cramped, middle-school-turned-college classroom. Seriously, all the little kids would walk past our window and stare during their passing periods while we studied to become their future teachers.
We didn’t talk much that semester. But at the end, on a whim, I sent her a quick DM on Instagram congratulating her on graduating. And to my surprise, she actually ended up replying!
I was on vacation in Las Vegas at the time, so we couldn’t meet up in-person for another week or two, but after that we talked pretty much every day.
The only problem was we both had long-term trips planned. She was moving to Colombia for 7 weeks, and I was going to Toronto to work remotely and experience a city I’d always dreamt of.
At first, we both kind of thought that our newfound relationship would fizzle out, but it didn’t! If anything, it just grew stronger. We talked more and more, and by the end of her trip to Colombia she was rerouting her return flight to meet me in Toronto and stay with me for a few days.
And the rest of the story is being written as we speak.
Countries visited together: USA 🇺🇸 Canada 🇨🇦 Mexico 🇲🇽 Japan 🇯🇵 Thailand 🇹🇠Vietnam 🇻🇳 Malaysia 🇲🇾 United Arab Emirates 🇦🇪 Turkey 🇹🇷
Location now (August, 2023): Istanbul, Turkey 🇹🇷