Even when you live abroad and travel constantly, sometimes you know when it's time to take a little break.

I'll be honest - I love a great getaway, whether it's just a quick weekend escape or an extended stay to get a break from it all.  And as a person who has been travelling since childhood, I think it's safe to say that I have a lot of relevant experience when it comes to travel safety. 

Let's face it: some of us are not meant to stay in one place.  The world is literally our home.  But when you're away, you can't always prepare for every emergency situation, particularly in certain countries.  As a fellow citizen of the world and someone who has had more than her fair share of travel emergencies in this lifetime, here are a few key things to do when you find yourself in a travel emergency.

There are many things in this life that need doing.  Some pleasant, some not so much.  Every so often I feel compelled to share something that I feel needs to be known.  This is one of those "oftens".

It's easy to jump to an assumption that a blogger can just do a bit of research and churn out post after post after post.  It might be the most comfortable reaction to think, "what does this chick know about life as a citizen of the world?"

The answer to that is: more than you could fathom.

In the spirit of living an informed life, I wanted to share a helpful tip as a fellow citizen of the world that I unpleasantly learned on a trip to Sydney, Australia sometime ago: check and protect your spine.

I'm not just talking about your back and lifting baggage.  Actually, let me explain.

With the advent of electronic passports and the variances in vendors for such specialised paper products, one can forget that the most frequently handled pages of a passport are the cover and the pages adjacent to it.  Unfortunately for frequent travellers, this also means that wear and tear increases the probability of severe damage (in my case, the cover and pages decided to divorce during my trip). 

To cut a long story short and to save yourself from an unexpected fiasco in transit, remember to check and protect the spine of your passport.  And from now on, I know exactly what part of my doc to take care of - and now, so do you.

This was originally posted on 12 January, 2016.

Got some helpful tips to share as a fellow citizen of the world? Do you also have some interesting plot twists along your travels?  I'd love to hear them!

I wanted to follow up on my previous post about shock.  It was a lot of information to digest in a blog post so I thought I'd allow some decompression time before I wrote this one.

In my last post, I highlighted some of the common advantages of networking among people with fellow commonalities.  Whenever anyone finds himself (or herself) living abroad, there may be many opportunities where socialising with fellow countrymen or even persons of one's own ethnicity will present itself. 

So you got accepted to a school away from your hometown.  Fees are paid, scholarships are awarded, you've travelled the distance and touched down in your new second home for the next 2 years or so.  Whether you enrolled in a small junior college or a university with multiple campuses, you are bound to relate to at least two of the three types of shock in your time away from home.

Whether alone or with family, anyone who's lived abroad for any length of time gets a bit itchy about socialising in their new surroundings.  In addition, for those of us who are of a different race or ethnicity than the local population, this is inevitably associated with a certain conundrum: do I or do I not want to hang out with my own people?