Who is La Travel Freak?
Hi! I'm Roma
a third-culture kid, full-time traveler, and digital nomad. My dream is to see as much of the world as I can, really experiencing deeply each place I visit, and sharing it all on this blog. How did it all start? This is my story:
Most people can pinpoint the moment they discovered their passion for travel. Maybe it was sparked by taking their first international trip, or by meeting someone from a different country, or simply having a strong desire to leave their hometown.
For me, however, travel was just always a part of my life from the moment I was born! I don’t remember my first trip or even my first plane ride. Airports felt more homely than scary, and I’ve had my own suitcase for as long as I can remember. A lot of this had to do with being a third-culture kid.
What even is a third-culture kid?
A third-culture kid (TCK) is defined as a person who has spent a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents’ culture and outside their own passport country. The first culture is that of the child’s parents, the second culture is that of the country or countries in which the child lived, and the third culture is a fusion of the first two – the child adopts certain traits from the various cultures to create their own.
Someone could grow up as a TCK for a variety of reasons. They might have moved a lot because of their parents’ jobs (many children of diplomats or military children become TCKs); they might have been refugees or asylum seekers; or, like me, they may have just come from a family who just loves to travel.
In my case, my father is Italian-American, my mother is half Swedish-speaking Finn and half German, and I grew up in Amsterdam, New York, and Rome.
Many TCKs experience the world in a different way than those grown up in a more physically traditional setting. They often have an expanded worldview, speak two or more languages, and are better at adjusting to new situations, but at the same time they also suffer from a feeling of rootlessness and non-belonging. Ironically, while many TCKs have the ability to relate to nearly everyone, they are often misunderstood and have a relatability problem. That’s why they often only find a sense of belonging with other third-culture kids even if they come from completely different backgrounds.
The Early Years
I was born at home in upstate New York in a wooden cabin built by my father. Even though I don’t remember those early months, as we moved shortly after I was born, I feel like being raised in nature (even for just a short period) had a profound impact on my future life. I love the sense of freedom and peace that comes with being in nature and, although I also visit a lot of cities, I seek out nature too wherever I go.
At six months old, my family and I moved to Amsterdam in the Netherlands and that’s where I spent many of my formative years. I went to a Dutch nursery and kindergarten and learned how to speak the language. As any Dutch kid, I learned how to ride a bike early on and we cycled everywhere; my favorite foods were “leverworst” and “pannenkoeken”.
At seven years old my parents split up and we moved once again. My father stayed in Amsterdam (where he still is to this day) and my mother took me and my siblings (there are four of us) back to New York, this time the city. This move definitely had a profound effect on me. Apart from the difficulty of my parent’s divorce, I missed Amsterdam and my life there.
We spent one year living in Tribeca, Manhattan, in a cramped apartment that was too small for our family and too costly for our coffers, before moving to Greenpoint, Brooklyn which was much more affordable and our house much bigger, though our neighborhood was quite poor at the time, and we were surrounded by abandoned warehouses. On weekends we would drive up to the cabin upstate that I was born in, and we’d spend the days running around the woods and climbing trees.
Those two years in New York were eye-opening for me. Kids in New York seemed more brusque than the ones I knew in Amsterdam, and as a result, I had to get tougher, fast. I struggled a little to fit in, but already speaking the language helped a lot, and in time I found some close friends. When I remember my time in New York now I think of juicy watermelon and grass stains on a hot summer’s day, brownstone buildings and barbed-wire fences, and every single harsh scent and loud noise you could imagine.
The Rome Years
We moved to Rome one month before 9/11. My New York school was only a few blocks away from the Twin Towers and had had to be evacuated. I remember coming home from my new school in Rome and seeing it on the news and crying, worried about my friends. I was just about to turn nine.
My mother chose Rome kind of on a whim. She wanted to leave New York because she didn’t like American politics and because she wanted her kids to grow up in Europe, it felt safer to her, and closer to her family in Finland.
Most summers for as far back as I can remember we would spend some time in my grandfather’s house in Finland with lots of members of my extended family. Finland was peaceful, beautiful, immersed in nature, with trees and lakes everywhere. Being there felt so different from my normal chaotic life. Finland felt like a safe-haven to me – it still does.
Sometimes my mother would drop off us kids and go traveling by herself. She did this the summer before we moved to Rome. While I was enjoying the peace and quiet of Finland, she was hopping around Europe trying to find our next home. There were two serious contenders: Lisbon, Portugal, and Toulouse, France. On a whim, she decided to stop by Rome too, as she had fond memories of visiting it in her youth. One month later we moved there.
I vividly remember landing in Rome for the first time and exiting the airport. There were signs screaming ROMA everywhere I looked – just like my name! Everything was so new to me and while Rome felt very foreign to me at the time, I soon realized that my family and I felt very foreign to them as well.
The first two years there I went to an international school. I met kids from all over the world but who had international English accents. Many of them were kids of diplomats and other traveling professionals. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was surrounded by other third-culture kids and I found some very good friends there.
After two years my mother switched us all to Italian state schools for two reasons: she wanted us to integrate into Italian society, and because the international school was way too expensive for us. Although we had some Italian lessons in school, we had picked up very little of the language at that point, so the change felt quite extreme, especially for me.
I was eleven years old and starting middle school. An already very difficult age was made harder by the fact that I couldn’t communicate properly and because I was one of very few foreign students in the school. My foreignness made me a spectacle for the other kids – my clothes were weird, my accent was weirder, my mannerisms were wrong, and the food I ate was wronger. It was as if my strangeness was contagious so the other kids kept their distance.
Everything I did made me feel embarrassed, especially speaking with my foreign, clunky accent that made the other kids laugh. I couldn’t make friends and I couldn’t keep up with the lessons. Pretty soon I retreated into myself and stopped talking almost completely. At school, I didn’t utter a word, and at home, I spoke the bare minimum. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to speak, it honestly felt like I couldn’t.
Somehow five years passed like this. I read a lot, I learned to enjoy my own company, and I made occasional, short-lived friends. I changed schools 4 times in as many years. I was mostly miserable and I knew I couldn’t continue this way. Summer holidays were what kept me going because my family usually traveled during that time, and I always felt more like myself when I was traveling. We traveled to many places around Europe, as well as to far-flung destinations such as Costa Rica, Egypt, Morocco, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, and more. Seeing so much of the world at such a young age really shaped me. I loved every second of it.
The summer before my last school change my mother sent me to Paris by myself for a month. I was 16 years old and absolutely terrified as I had never been to Paris before, let alone by myself. It turned out to be a life-changing trip. I took a few French lessons but mostly I explored the city and met many people along the way. I realized that far away from home (and Rome) I didn’t have such a hard time speaking as I normally did. I came back a changed person. Solo travel had transformed me.
When I started school again I tried with all my might to start speaking again. It was a painful, long, and awkward journey, but it worked. By that point, I spoke Italian fluently but my accent (because it had had almost no practice) was still very foreign. I was still considered a weirdo but this time I embraced it. I reveled in my foreignness. I made friends and had boyfriends and although I never integrated as fully as my mother intended I do, I made do until I finished high school and could leave and start what I considered at the time to be my “real life”.
The Dublin Years
There was a part of me that thought that if I could communicate in what I thought was my native tongue (English) then I would fit in. This wasn’t true, but it certainly made it easier. I moved to Dublin for university where I studied English Literature and History of Art. Culturally, Irish people were as foreign to me as the Italians had initially been, and I to them.
While there I realized that all my years in Italian schooling had weakened my English. I could speak fluently but I made a lot of grammatical mistakes, I mispronounced a lot of words I had only ever seen written down before. I had never written an essay in English before so I had to relearn how to write as my writing style was more similar to the floral, neverending sentences that worked in Italian, but that perplexed my Irish professors.
Despite all that, I thrived in Dublin and in university. I regained my love for studying, I made friends with people from Ireland and from all over the world, and I rediscovered a side of myself that I thought no longer existed. I went from being extremely shy and awkward, to loud, confident, and the life of the party. I had such a 360-degree change that when I told my new friends how shy I used to be, they didn’t believe me, and when I went home to visit family, they didn’t recognize me.
It was in Dublin that I met my long-term boyfriend and travel partner, Nacho. He moved to Dublin all the way from Argentina and it was his very first time taking a plane or leaving his home country. We fell in love and, a year later, when I finished my degree I asked him if he wanted to move to London with me. He was in a dead-end job so he agreed. The plan was to find new jobs in London and set up a life there.
But before moving and starting my “working life” in London, I wanted to go on a big trip, so I spontaneously bought plane tickets to South Korea and Japan after seeing a good price online. I was used to traveling because my family often traveled a lot, but for Nacho this was completely new and nerve-wracking, especially since we were quite broke and didn’t have jobs lined up for us in London yet.
It was a whirlwind three weeks and one of the best trips of my life, despite almost completely running out of money by the end of it. I cried when it was time to leave, and after checking my visa I seriously considered staying in Japan for a couple of extra months but eventually decided to go back because Nacho had put his CV online and managed to score an interview for a music-publishing company in London.
London and the Pandemic
Thus began the London years. Nacho did well in his interview and got the job. Meanwhile, I took a temporary job as a nanny while I searched for roles in the book publishing industry. I naively thought a lifelong passion for reading and a degree in English Literature would be enough to secure me at least an internship, but the world of publishing turned out to be extremely competitive, cutthroat, and oversaturated, so I turned to other pursuits.
The five years that I lived in London were some of the most stable of my life and (partly because of that) also some of my worst. While Nacho worked a 9 to 5 and rose through the ranks of his company, I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do. I worked as a nanny, in a shoe shop, in a bookshop, and as an assistant director, but nothing seemed to fit. We still traveled when we could take time off, but it never seemed to be enough for me.
At the time I didn’t know how to make travel more obtainable. My whole life I had been told by society that the correct thing to do was to settle down in one place and build a career, but then why did this idea make me so miserable? The harder I tried, the more I seemed to fail, and the bigger my identity crisis seemed to grow.
Then COVID hit, the whole world was put into lockdown, and travel was no longer a possibility at all.
I consider myself luckier than most during the lockdown. At the time Nacho and I were living in a shared house with my brother, his girlfriend, and another couple. My mother had traveled to London last minute and ended up getting stuck there as well for the entire lockdown which turned out to be a blessing as she normally lived alone.
Having an eclectic group of people helped keep us all sane during those months. We kept ourselves busy with drawing classes, home-gym sessions, home-cinema nights, and themed parties. I found an old camcorder in storage and discovered a passion for filmmaking. Together we ended up shooting a couple of shorts which I filmed and edited. I remembered the basics of the editing program from my days as an assistant director and the rest I taught myself.
Many times we would talk about what we would do once the world opened up again. We talked a lot about community and traveling. Now that I knew how precarious life was, I didn’t want to waste a single second more. As soon as I could, I wanted to start traveling again.
A Life of Full-Time Travel
When the restrictions started to ease me and Nacho took our first big step and moved out of London. I had quit my job and Nacho now worked fully remote and city life had become stifling to us so we went up north, to Sheffield, where we spent six months roaming around the Peak District. Once we tired of that we tried to figure out our next move.
The initial plan was to hop around Europe (Nacho still had to adhere to the London timezone so we couldn’t go too far) in search of our next home. The plan was to do monthly stays in different cities we thought we would want to live in. We loved everywhere we went but we were always finding excuses as to why it wasn’t the perfect place to settle down.
Pretty soon we realized that we didn’t want to settle down! Why not just keep traveling indefinitely? That was nearly three years ago, and that is what we’ve been doing ever since! We’ve traveled to Leipzig; Hamburg; Athens; Switzerland; all around Italy; to lots of places in France; Amsterdam; Brussels; all around Croatia; and more. We also frequently spend time in Rome and in London which are kind of our two bases. And we can’t wait to travel even more all around the world. I eventually want to visit every country, but I’m in no hurry!
What’s Next…Sailing?
Living out of a suitcase full-time and not having a place to call home can be tiring (more so for Nacho than for me) but we also don’t want to settle down in one place. Luckily, while we were hopping around Europe, my brother (the one from the lockdown) had become a sailing instructor and sail-maker. We wanted to build a community, keep traveling, and have a home all at once, so, together with my brother and his girlfriend, we came up with the idea of buying a sailboat and slow-traveling the world with it.
We’ve spent the last couple of years looking for the perfect (yet affordable) boat. As I’m writing this we might recently have found the one! Keep an eye on this space to see how the story progresses!
For me travel isn’t a hobby, it’s a lifestyle. Follow along on my journey!