CJ and Jake Around the World

Editor's Note: Apologies for the chronological gap. The blog post dedicated to the week of scuba diving with Sophie and Grace in Indonesia is forthcoming. In the meantime I figured I would keep the readers entertained.  After spending almost a full month in Indonesia I hopped on four consecutive flights to meet up with my girlfriend Julia in the romantic beating heart of Asia: the People’s Republic of China. In particular, Beijing. Julia and I reunited for the first time in almost four months in the lobby of our fancy hotel - The Fairmont. We loved the Fairmont so much. Luckily Julia is also a major proponent of the wander and eat travel strategy, so we did exactly that. We started with this delicious folded savory crepe pork situation. My first bite of food in China and it was fantastic. An auspicious start to my two and a half weeks in this country. Next up - noodles and pork. At this point Julia began to question "are you really about to take a photo of me eating every sing...

GUEST ENTRY. GET EXCITED. To the loyal readers of this blog who don’t already know me (which is probably not many since most of you are my relatives), I’m Grace, aka CJ’s cousin and a Dartmouth 28.   We go way back. I took a gap year before starting at Dartmouth and it was hands down the best time of my life. So much so that I had not had enough gap year for one lifetime and had to crash CJ’s.   This was the ultimate success story of a trip that not only made it out of the group chat, but made it out of a group chat that didn’t even exist before this trip was planned. Sophie (CJ’s middle sister) had stockpiled vacation days, and I was home for 6 weeks over winterim, and I truly don’t know how this actually happened, but Sophie and I booked flights to Indonesia and next thing we knew we were meeting CJ at the Bali airport.   We then hopped in a Grab (the never dull Indonesian Uber) and headed to our AirBnB in Canggu on the southern coast of the island.   To understand...