Feb 4, 2025 • 5 min read
16.01.2025 - 16:09 / insider.com
Several years ago,I dreamed I was walking down the main street of a small town, where I met a nice bookseller and a local witch. In the dream, I kept getting the message to "go to Skibbereen."
When I woke up, my first thought was, "Where the heck is Skibbereen?" I looked it up, and to my delight, it's a real town in West Cork, Ireland.
This isn't the first time I've gleaned information from my dreams, but they rarely provide such literal instructions. Figuring I should listen to the message, I booked a trip for a few months down the line.
Little did I know that my Irish adventure would lead me to my future husband and a new home.
My travels first brought me to the city of Cork, where I made friends who helped secure me a ride out to the smaller town of Skibbereen.
As I rode through West Cork, I promised myself that I'd follow my intuition wherever it led without asking questions. I came here because of a dream, so why not follow the path as far as it would go?
Luckily, it led me right to Skibbereen's main street — like my dream, it does, in fact, have a wonderful bookseller and a pagan shop.
I felt welcome, and I kept noticing phoenix symbols throughout the town. It felt like a sign since I'm from Atlanta, and the fictional bird is on our city seal.
As I continued my trip, wandering and exploring more of County Cork, a gut feeling began to grow that this was exactly where I needed to be.
At the time, I had the dating app Bumble on my phone. I happened to open it during my travels and match with a local Irish chef.
We met up for a date, and he was instantly warm, welcoming, and honest. Since we both work with food in some capacity (him as an executive chef, me as a writer, educator, and consultant), we had lots to talk about.
We continued talking online, and after I returned to the US, we officially started dating. With things going well, we arranged to meet back in Ireland three months later.
After a whirlwind romance, we got married last year.
In the years since my trip, I bought a house in Cork, and my husband and I are slowly settling in and making it feel like home.
I still live in Atlanta part time, but I feel like all the different parts of my life have fallen into place.
Whether I'm in Ireland or the US, I pinch myself every day that I get to live this magical life and share it with all the incredible people I've met along the way.
I don't live in Skibbereen (yet), but I still visit. In the future, I hope to move out that way and have a few acres of space to host culinary and writing residencies.
In the meantime, I'm settling into my two-continent lifestyle nicely.
There are still questions to navigate (like the best way to move my cats abroad), and it isn't always smooth sailing. However,
Feb 4, 2025 • 5 min read
"New Orleans is a city of mood,” chef Serigne Mbaye tells me one Wednesday morning in September. We've been discussing the merits of Parkway's po'boys and the old-school kitchen at Commander's Palace. While growing up in Senegal and New York City, Mbaye cooked with his mother, and his Uptown restaurant, Dakar NOLA, braids his memories of this time with his haute restaurant experiences and the deep-rooted African heritage of New Orleans.
Feb 3, 2025 • 5 min read
This is part of Why I Moved, a recurring series about Americans building a life abroad.
New Zealand is making it easier to plan an extended stay by relaxing visa requirements to allow digital nomads to work from the country remotely.
United Airlines is rebuilding its domestic network after dropping 41 cities from its route map since the pandemic started.
Intrepid Travel Logo. (Photo Credit: Intrepid Travel)
Porter Airlines is bringing its jets to the other side of the Hudson River.
A record-breaking storm is wreaking havoc with travel and daily life across the UK and Ireland.
Jan 24, 2025 • 9 min read
Australian airline Qantas has announced a mixed bag of changes to its loyalty program. Some award rates and carrier-imposed surcharges will increase later this year, but the airline will also add additional award availability and new partner award tickets. Thankfully, these Qantas Frequent Flyer changes won't take effect until Aug. 5.
In “Domestic Bliss,” a tenderly realized portrait of American life in the 1990s at Alexander Berggruen gallery in New York, the artist Stephanie Shih draws us into a fraught family narrative. The ceramic objects on view play various roles in the interior drama: Cigarette butts and a crushed beer can signal temptations acquiesced to; the complete “Buns of Steel” workout series on VHS and Suzanne Somers’s ThighMaster offer proof of an investment in personal improvement. Viagra tablets point to lust, perhaps hope. Frozen dinners — one for each member of the titular “Nuclear Family”— sit atop a white Panasonic microwave oven, suggesting an uneasy coexistence. On an ironing board, an iron keeps company with the paperback bodice-ripper “Prisoner of My Desire.” The book that inspired this body of work? 1998’s “Divorce for Dummies,” which Shih has rendered here as part of a self-help library. The artist builds the pieces by hand, using a fine brush to decorate their surfaces. There are subtle signs that each object is handmade, evoking the crafted pop sensibility of Corita Kent or Liza Lou — a slightly dappled finish here, a hint of hand lettering there. The net result is the uncanny feeling that the whole room has been seen, recorded, lost, then lovingly recreated, each element conjured by a human being with a memory that aches. “