Hi friends! I’m the long lost co-blogger who has yet to hold her own weight in this venture. And I am thankful Amanda has waited patiently for me to get my life somewhat together. You see, I recently got married, recently “lost” my job, and moved back home to Missouri. It’s been a whirlwind. As you will start to gather from my blog posts, I love to travel and often travel with my husband on his work trips. We’ve had the opportunity to travel around the southern United States for work, and around the world for pleasure. We are also keen on finding amazing travel deals that sometimes lead us to random places at random times, like Capetown, South Africa for our honeymoon. Because who can pass up a $500 roundtrip travel deal to Africa? Not us. Earlier this year, we found a travel deal to Baltimore and thought, why not? The trip from Memphis to BWI was short, and the trip from BWI to Washington DC was even shorter. We spent the weekend exploring DC  by following Yelp’s best restaurants (Urbanspoon for my husband) and TripAdvisor’s top things to do. One of the most memorable moments for me was stumbling upon something that was not on our list of top things to do.

Within the Smithsonian Natural History Museum was a temporary exhibit on Asian Americans in the United States, specifically from South and Southwest Asian of Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan decent. The exhibit hit close to home, as it spotlighted Indian immigrants who got into the motel business in the United States. My dad (who is Sri Lankan) and mom started a small motel in Missouri when I was little. That motel was our livelihood and we literally lived there. Our housing was connected to the motel and my brother and I cleaned rooms, answered phones, cleaned the grounds and played in the backyard. It was our home and our work.

The exhibit made me realize that there were thousands of other kids like me who lived the exact same life. This thought was so surreal for me as a kid growing up in a town of 7,000 because I constantly felt I we were the only ones living in that type of situation. Now, 20 years later- I have come full circle  with the fact this not only shaped who I was, but the lives of so many other Asian American kids who grew up in motels. Traveling can show you so many new things, but it can also bring back memories that end up giving us a satisfying closure.