#single woman travel

[pascalstar]

New picture book from my trip sola in Cuba 2013 (Small chapbook) for sale at www.thepoetrydervish.com

You can view more of my artwork at www.thepoetrydervish.com as well as my many books in both French and in English. This cuba picture book will be available for about 12-15$ shipping included in a week or two.

[incognito-lionbeast]

I think in my AU Tianlang-Jun/heavenly demons in general are a (demon world variant of) Mew. So.. essentially. Big, bad gyarados Su Xiyan saw this funny little foetus cat & was like "I can't NOT have an egg with that"

Thankfully Mew knows Transform. It's fine.

[soliloquent-stark]

y'all it's my sweetheart's birthday today 🥹💗

[iceyrukia]

the ‘influencer lifestyle’ really rotted a lot of women’s ( + girls) brains and I’m not necessarily talking about the traveling part but the whole self-imposed prerequisite requirement of having to look like an instagram model before getting to live your life to the fullest as a woman. This internalized monitoring of the ‘self’ that women do when it comes to their own physical appearance, something to show off externally, is really pervasive and you can see it reflected in social media.

( and if you are familiar with the whole concept of having a ‘bikini’ body for the summer, that is a perfect example of this, like the absurd idea of women having to visualize themselves snapping a perfect bikini pic in order to fulfill this image of enjoying summer. Like they can’t just live but have to look and dress a certain way because it’s what a ‘successful’ women is supposed to look like, a status symbol to always emulate- yeah :/ )

[fantastic-mr-corvid]

just saw the 'if ur oc was canon what discourse would there be' post and suddenly i remember that actually i dont want Celia & co to be seen by a large audience.

[bmpmp3]

i do wonder if one reason i tend to go for the method of "kidnap a vague story idea and make expies of all the characters i think are relevant and make up something new and barely recognizable" instead of the much less complicated method of just "writing a fanfiction" is that i play fast and loose with lore details if i think they suck or are boring or just irrelevant and i have this very intense possibly irrational but maybe rational fear that if i write a i dunno. zelda fanfic and i dont get everything 100% right based off the official nintendo timelines that ive been ignoring since they came out that the fanbase is going to take me out back and put me down.

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads // twitter thread  

Margins and Murmurations

set in a near future after a climate crisis, in an oppressive militarised state somewhere in Europe

A 72yo trans woman and her friend have long since escaped, living in the woods together, until a resistance fighter arrives and they find themselves drawn back into the fight

centres queer and trans characters, sex workers, and the complicated process of activism and survivial

large cast

[ghaziyounes1967]

" This too shall pass "

I believe that good will always overcome evil, just as spring comes, and with it eternal life, overcoming the bitter cold of winter. We will overcome this genocide very soon with God's help and your continued help and support. One of the advantages we achieved during the war is to convey to you our voice, which has not been heard for many years, and to reveal the nature of this occupation and its actions that have been covered up for hundreds of years.

I would like to introduce you to my simple Palestinian family, who lived in peace in a very beautiful house consisting of a ground and upper floor and a charming garden that we renovated shortly before the war, but the occupation had a different opinion regarding the barbaric bombing of civilians and homes. The occupation destroyed our dear home, which reminded me of my father, the dearest person in the world. My life, may God have mercy on him. The occupation killed every happy and even sad memory by bombing our house.

This is my aunt with my younger brother Ahmed, in his last year of school before university. My aunt's house was next door to ours, and she had been single for years. She was not married, and since we are a small family, I have no uncles, It was always my duty to check on my aunt and provide her with everything from food, drink, medicine, and everything else. Before I went to university every day, I always liked to go there to have breakfast together, chat and get her approval before I went to my studies. every memories the occupation destroyed it.

This our beloved home before and after Israeli bombing 💔

My priority is to help this kind old woman, when the Rafah crossing is opened, to leave the Gaza Strip safely for Egypt. I do not care about the homes destroyed by the occupation. Money can be compensated, but the soul cant be compensated. Iwant to see my aunt again. I want her to be with us again. This is really what I want. I want to send her money so that she can support herself in the northern Gaza Strip. The prices are crazy, folks, especially the food prices.

this is my friend Ali Al-Tababi, and my name is Ghazi Sheto, he was closer to me than many people in my family. I met Ali at university, and we had a goal: to graduate and work together. I will stay up all night to make this dream come true. He was always at my house, playing, studying, sleeping together and going to university together. We were conjoined twins. Ali and all his family members they are all died because of Israeli bombing.You can see the massacre of the Tabatabai family. May God have mercy on them all. I want to fulfill my dream and my friend’s dream and bring my aunt to Egypt and build my house again if possible.

We asked for 30 thousand as compensation, less than a little for what we lost in the war. Frankly, our homes cost half a million dollars, but I asked for 30 thousand so that I could bring my aunt and protect her soul from being killed and so that she could do that. Come to Egypt safely and give her food and drink while she is stuck in northern Gaza, but unfortunately I have only collected $500 so far.

These donations will go to my aunt, the old woman stranded in the northern Gaza Strip, to give her the opportunity to travel, protect her life from being killed, and secure her daily sustenance of food and nutrition. I ask everyone who can help, do not hesitate, because we really need help. Thank you all, and I hope you don't suffer as I do. We suffered, especially my weak aunt.

i Hope you all good thanks you for our support towards our cause 🙏🤍

[sanguinifex]

I really wonder why Taylor Swift is being singled out for her private jet usage as opposed to the dozens of other celebrities and CEOs and über-rich who also heavily use private jets. I can’t find any reason in conventional logic. No, it quite escapes me…

[heauxlistictherapy]

Maybe you should just focus on something else?

1. Black women do not own black men. They can date and marry whoever they choose. And guess what sis? So can you! Instead of wasting your time insisting on having ownership over random men that you don’t even know, maybe you should just expand your own dating options. The world is huge. Men of all races are all over the globe. Travel. Stop obsessing over what black men do. They don’t seem to be interested in whatever you’re doing 🤷🏾‍♀️

2. You got bigger fish to gry sis. Instead of allowing your blood to reach the boiling point over a stranger, why not book a spa day? Most black women suffer from heart disease and stress. Why not try to relax and mind your own business? Try yoga or take a walk. Buy some Ayurvedic powder and try a deep conditioning treatment. Get a massage. Find a yoga studio. Book a flight. Schedule a therapy session with a therapist who can maybe help you to understand why you’re so bothered and triggered by strangers.

There’s so much more to life than obsessing over men who don’t choose you and don’t owe you any explanation. I hope that more black women will learn to stop making these embarrassing comments on social media. It won’t stop black men from marrying white women and honestly, it’s not your business and you shouldn’t even care. Take care of your heart health and your scalp. Stress can cause baldness and swelling in the joints.

Follow for more tips on how to improve your scalp and health by simply minding the business that pays you.

Til next time, blessed be the fruit 🍓 🧜🏾‍♀️

[mycenaae]

the problem with father brown is that i love it so much as a show on the whole, but mrs mccarthy reminds me so much of my hypocritical, gossipy, often racist, and emotionally abusive "good christian" grandmother that i have to steel myself every time she's a large part of the episode. evil evil church ladies

[ahlam910]

Please help❤️🙏

Hello everyone, I am Ahlam, 21 years old. My life before the war was simple, filled with ordinary dreams like any young woman my age. I envisioned a future full of the ability to help others. I lived with my family in a warm house full of love and security, thinking about how I could achieve my dreams and become an impactful person in society.

But suddenly, everything changed. The war swept through our city like a relentless storm. In a single night, my home became just a memory, and the city I once knew crumbled before my eyes. The sound of planes and shells became the only thing people could hear. We tried to find shelter, a safe place to hide our dreams and lives, but the war followed us wherever we went.

We were forced to leave everything behind—the house, the memories, and even the university. We became displaced, homeless, with no destination, just trying to survive. I walked with my family through unfamiliar roads, searching for a place to take us in, trying to escape danger, running from one explosion to the next, from one ruin to another.

The war didn't just destroy our city and homes, it destroyed our dreams. My dream of completing my studies became far out of reach, and every day, I feel hope slipping further away. But despite all this, something inside me refuses to give up. There is a desire to escape this reality and build a new life, a life worth living. I dream of continuing my education, I dream of standing on my own feet again and achieving the goal I was once striving for: to help others who have lived through the pain of war like me.

I ask for your help, humbly. I can't get out of these circumstances on my own. The donations you gather will help me travel to a safe place where I can continue my studies and start a new life away from war and fear. The amount I'm asking for is the key to a new life, to the dream of becoming strong again and one day helping my family and community.

Help me rebuild my life and become the person I dreamed of being. Every donation, no matter how small, is a step towards safety, a step towards a better future.

Thank you for reading my words. Many thanks and respect to you

Vetted by:

@gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #73 )

@dlxxv-vetted-donations

@heba-20

[thestuffedalligator]

When ogres travel, they do so in human shape.

They hate doing this. They think it’s beneath them. But they do it anyway.

The Vicomte Graoul de Saucisson – and this is another thing about ogres. Ogres as a species are nobility. There is no such thing as a low-born ogre. There is always room in the ogrish peerage for another vicomte, another prince, another branch to tie to the rotted tree – strode up to the chateau in human shape. The roses in the garden shivered as he passed by. The huge, high doors opened by themselves and he walked through them without a shift in his stride.

When the doors slammed shut behind him, he moved to shrug the shape off his shoulders like a coat.

Then he saw the woman.

He froze. He stared. She stared back.

He slowly pulled the shape back on. “Who are you?” he asked.

She looked mildly appalled. “Who are you?” she asked. “What are you doing in my home?”

“Your home? This is–” He stopped. He reconsidered. “I am the Vicomte de Saucisson,” he said. “I’m looking for the Marquis de Pamplemousse. He is a… colleague of mine.”

“Oh,” she said. She could’ve looked more abashed. “I’m sorry, monsieur, he’s never mentioned you before. You must be here to share your congratulations, of course, I can fetch him right away.”

“He’s never mentioned you either,” the vicomte did not say. “Of course,” he said. “Congratulations. What about?”

She seemed surprised. “Have you not heard? Monsieur, the curse on my husband has been lifted.”

He stared. His lips started to form the words “What curse,” and then there was a sound like a horse falling down a set of stairs and a man he had never seen before wearing the marquis’s clothes came barrelling down the hall.

“Vicomte!” said the man with the marquis’s voice. “My human friend! The curse has been lifted, and I am a human once again!”

He was slightly out of breath when he reached the woman. He clasped her arm and grinned at him with manic desperation. “This is wonderful news! You must be here to share your congratulations!”

“Lie like hell,” said the man’s eyes.

The vicomte stared. “Oh!” he said. “My – human friend! Human once again! Words fail me. After all these–” (there was the slightest hesitation) “–years?”

The woman put her head at an angle and narrowed her eyes at him.

The man walked up, still grinning like a rictus chimpanzee, and clasped a hand on his shoulder. “Yes, of course! Darling, me and the vicomte are going to have a manly one-on-one conversation while he shares his congratulations, as we human men are wont to do.” And then with a strength that could only be ogrish, the marquis pulled the vicomte by the shoulder down the hall and into a drawing room.

When the bolt of the lock clicked into place behind them, the man wearing the marquis’s clothes visibly sagged.

“What the hell,” said the vicomte.

“You should’ve sent word ahead that you'd be coming today.”

“I never do.” He gesticulated and tried to conjure a single question out of the swarm buzzing in his brain. “What the hell is going on? Who was that? Why are you pretending to be human? What curse are we talking about?”

The marquis groaned and crumpled into a chair. As he did he shifted out of human shape, clothes magically tailoring themselves to contain his ogrish form, something like a moose and an orangutan.

“I had a moment of weakness.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t a stroke?”

“I got married.”

“And that’s another thing–”

“Graoul, please.” He sighed and put his face in his talons. “Last winter a merchant broke into my home. He stole one of my roses, and in exchange I asked him to send me one of his daughters to be my bride.”

The vicomte nodded. This at least was a sacred and recognizable ogrish custom, and he did like to see the old ways in practice.

“And it was fine! It was perfectly lovely. She’s a wonderful woman, but one night I decided to put on a human shape to change things up in the bedroom, and she lost her mind! Started talking about how I was clearly an enchanted prince and that her love for me must’ve broken some curse and turned me human again! I had no idea how to tell her otherwise, and now I’ve done it for too long to back out.”

The vicomte stared. “Sorry,” he said. “You decided to turn into a human to spice things up in the bedroom, and that was the face you chose?”

The marquis growled. “If I knew I was going to be wearing it for the rest of my life I would’ve gone with something better.”

[homunculus-argument]

I may be swinging a fruit bat in a room full of hornet's nests here, but do americans know that most of the world doesn't look the way the US does? Like, specifically concerning ethnic diversity.

Coming from Europe, the fist time I went to the US, I was shocked by it, not in a negative way but in the same "wow, that's a real thing?" sort of way as western people finding out that there actually are that kind of pillar mountains in China, or americans who had never seen Fjord Horses in anything but the movie Frozen finding out that those fantastical yellow ponies are actually real.

And it wasn't some "backcountry rural hick sees Different Colour Person for the first time and dies of shock" sort of a thing. I had travelled before, and at 19 I considered myself quite worldly enough to go to a different continent I had never been on to go meet up a man from the internet, all by myself. I had been all over Europe from Iceland to St. Petersburg and from Norway to France, I have travelled. It was a slow realisation that it's turtles all the way down, that actually got me.

Being in an airport, going from one airport to another, I wasn't surprised by the sheer range of different kinds of people I saw. Airports just look like that, all over the world. Taking one flight after another, I didn't pay much attention to that, because airports just look like that. The "wait, holy shit" didn't hit me until I was already in rural Kentucky, in a fucking Wal-Mart. And if you're an american and the thought of a late teens nordic kid stepping foot into a Wal-Mart for the frist time and thinking "wow, this is actually what America looks like, all the time" makes you want to get defensive, it was by no means a negative feeling.

It was like looking into a bag of M&Ms. That's the only way I could describe it. Every single fucking person, group or family that I saw was apparently different colour and creed than the last ones who passed by. I had never seen black women with styled hair before because in Finland almost every single black woman you see is muslim and their hair is covered. I was used to the concept of large cities being more diverse, in FInland larger cities are the places where you're most likely to see people who aren't white. And I was stunned by just how colourful the population was in goddamn Beaver Dam, Kentucky.

I'm not trying to make any kind of a political point here. I'm just talking from my own experience as a Chronically Online European who has actually been abroad: City streets that look the way they do in the US are completely foreign to most people who are not american. And every time you people start complaining about why a game that's set in Poland, made by polish creators who have never been outside of Poland, only has polish people in it, they genuinely do not know what the hell you're talking about.

[hedgehog-moss]

Last time I went to the village to buy bread I saw a woman in the street who was dressed like a 19th-century peasant, complete with a thick old-timey accent with dialect words no one uses anymore—she was telling a little group of people to follow her so of course I had to drop everything and follow her too.

And it turned out she was a theatre actress who has read a lot of local archives in libraries and town halls, and offered her services to organise guided tours of various villages to tell people about local history in a fun way, by playing characters who lived here in the Middle Ages, the 19th century, or WWII. It's such a cool idea! I talked to her for a bit after the visit and she said she wasn't sure it'd work / attract enough people, but she had groups of tourists + local families show up for the visit every week, in every village where she did this, so she think she'll be hired again next summer.

When I joined their group she was talking about WWII, and how my & other nearby villages were known by the Nazis and Vichy as a hotbed of terrorists, with some Gestapo officers killed in bomb attacks. (In retaliation the Nazis eventually rounded up 100+ locals and deported them to camps, as well as shooting a few.) I was mostly familiar with WWII anecdotes from the North-East, where my grandparents lived during the war, and I found it funny how different they sounded—my grandfather made Resistance activities sound well-planned and careful (espionage, sabotage, underground presses, infiltrating railway services etc) while oral histories around here make them sound a lot more spontaneous and—handcrafted? like "Emile brought what we needed for the bomb in his wheelbarrow hidden under a layer of straw and we exploded 2 Nazis."

We then went to visit the former girls' school, and I learnt a lot about my country's history of education for girls! Also it was really sweet because there was an old lady in our group who had attended this school as a child and had lots of school memories to share. Most of them were very wholesome, until eventually our tour guide went "Surely you also have some School Mischief to tell us about" and the old woman at first was like no no no no, I was a good girl. And then she conceded that when she had to sort lentils for the nuns' dinner and she resented one of them for berating her in class, she'd do a shit job on purpose and leave some little stones in the lentils.

Then our last step was the fairground where the town fair was (and is still) held, and our tour guide told us little 19th-century anecdotes (in-character, more like acting them out) that she'd found in old postcards and letters in the archives—how the town fair was where you'd go for your dentist appointment (i.e. to have your bad teeth pulled with pliers with no pain medicine) and to get any object repaired, like damaged pans or clogs; how there were dancing bears and performing monkeys; how one year the merchant who sold linen for women's trousseaus had her linen display trampled "by 300 cows" (might have been an exaggeration) and she hit the cow herder and it started a massive brawl.

My favourite anecdote was how back in the 1800s the local innkeeper was frustrated by the fact that the nearest village is just 10km away, and people who came to the fair often decided to go spend the night there so their journey back the next day would be less long, and so he started to tell them about the beast that lives under the bridge between the two villages. Travellers say horses go mad when they see it and just jump into the water. Some say the beast has dug up corpses from the cemetery because it likes human flesh, though of course it prefers it fresh. I'm now convinced half of local legends were single-handedly created by business savvy innkeepers determined to get more customers than the rival inn 10km away.

I'm sad I only learnt about these visits at the end of summer when they're coming to an end, but I'll definitely follow this woman around again if she returns with more stories next year!