The Travels and Life of Päivi and Santeri Kannisto

Eating in local restaurants in the Balkans can be a bore as there are only a couple of vegan options available: mixed salad, french fries and Italian pasta with aglio and olio. Even rice is often cooked in broth. However, there is fresh produce available almost throughout the year, from early spring to late fall. Strawberries, cherries, apricots, nectarines, peaches, apples, pears, and plums abound, and vegetables are tasty. Beans and lentils are also part of local diet as well as walnuts and hazelnuts.

We love to go to buffet restaurants once in a while to enjoy variety. In the Dominican Republic finding one was not easy. Most restaurants offer a buffet-like selection of dishes during the lunch time, but you choose what you want to eat and pay accordingly, while fixed price all-you-can-eat alternatives are missing. Fortunately, international hotels serve buffet breakfasts in all big cities in the world, and Santo Domingo was not an exception.

Photos of our 18th wedding anniversary in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic on our never-ending honeymoon trip.

We had been hoping to go to Guadeloupe for years but the island was closed during the recent flu hysteria. When France finally reopened it, we rushed immediately in.

What can one say about Sarajevo? It is charming yet brutalist; there are ruins of an old Ottoman caravanserais but also dilapidated Soviet style housing blocks; the streets feel safe, yet the memorials and remnants of war abound, everywhere.

We wanted to escape the high season in the coastal Mediterranean Balkan states and so were asking around for suggestions where to go. Upon this mission, we got into contact with Portuguese Vicente on BeWelcome hospitality exchange , and got interested in the place where he had been staying on and off for some years. The place is Kalna in Stara Planina Mountains that run from Serbia to Bulgaria.

We travelled to Kalna , Serbia to interview 28-year-old Vicente who left Portugal eight years ago to travel the world. In this Global Nomad interview, Vicente is talking about his life on the road, the hippie community where he has been staying, his projects and future plans.

Our visit to Skopje had a mission: we wanted to be positively impressed. The previous time we were in the city — ten years ago — we only changed buses at the main bus station and had a somewhat a miserable time. We were waiting for our connecting bus to Serbia in the late hours of a Friday evening. All seats in the waiting area were taken by local hooligans, and we didn't have a single Macedonian dinar to pay a visit to the toilet. Nobody wanted Euro at that time and the only currency exchange booth was closed. When our connecting bus finally arrived, we were happy to leave.

This wasn't our first visit to Albania. We had crossed the country on our previous Balkan tour ten years earlier but didn't get a very good impression then. Now everything was different. We stayed longer, tried different parts of the country from north to south, and fell in love with the Mediterranean coast. We ended up staying in Saranda close to the Greek border, a 30-minute ferry ride from Corfu. Saranda is a small former fishing village with approximately 15 000 inhabitants. It is big enough to have different kind of supermarkets and services and small enough for it being laid-back.

Dear Mr. Niinistö, I am deeply concerned about the current state of affairs in Finland. We left Finland in 2004 to travel the world. We have been living in 102 countries around the world, and travelled through countries devastated by the US, NATO, and Russia. The last three years we lived in Georgia , which is at war with Russia . There is a ceasefire agreement, but a peace accord was never signed. Russia – the second biggest arms exporter in the world right after the US – benefits from such instability.