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The Break Free podcast, a summer in Berlin and how to keep up with the Globetrottergirls

The Break Free podcast, a summer in Berlin and how to keep up with the Globetrottergirls

Last Updated on October 8, 2024


“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
– Ferris Bueller

This past week we have been spending time with friends and family on two continents who have all made clear how hard it is to keep up with us. If even those closest to us can’t keep up, then we know we need to have an update on the site for our extended family (that’s you!) on this website.

I can see how things might be confusing. Our two most recent posts covered time spent traveling in Uruguay, but we just finished two months housesitting in New York and actually we are about to spend a month in Berlin.

In fact, as you read this, I’ll be in the air flying from Denver, Colorado – where I was visiting my best friend who is about to have a baby – to Germany to meet Dani in Erfurt, her hometown. After a few days hanging with her family – including a brand new baby niece – we head to our apartment rental in Berlin for the month of July.dani and jess

So, why Berlin?

Berlin’s gravitational pull started attracting us over two years ago and we finally decided to commit to a month – but it wasn’t an easy decision. Let’s spend the summer in Europe, we said a few months ago and immediately began toying with the idea of living on a Greek island or the beach in Portugal, or even revisiting London – where we lived for three years and yet have never returned to since we left to travel in 2010.

In the end, we decided to live in Berlin this summer for two reasons.

First of all, Berlin has blasted onto the world stage as a place where creative people across all industries have convened to create a vibe entirely unique to the city. We want to be a part of it, exploring the neighborhoods, cycling through the green spaces, checking out the street art, museums, bars, restaurants, connecting with great people and becoming a part of the fabric of Berlin – if only for a short time.

The other reason we decided to opt for Berlin is because at some point, we are going to need to find a base. Not settle forever, I won’t commit to that idea just yet. But in the future, we might like a base, perhaps a dog and a cat, have our own housesitters or even house swap and live in New York, Paris or Tokyo throughout the year. Living in Germany would be convenient as Dani is German and I have lived there in the past. Berlin is the only German city we feel has the multicultural, artistic feeling we would need to feel truly at home.

So, as we spend time there this summer, we will be exploring the city for what it is and also what it could be…for us.

dani and jess on governors island

It will be hard for Berlin to beat our amazing time in New York City!

We are expanding – the Break Free podcast

Throughout the years, people we meet constantly tell us that they WISH they could do what we are doing, and that we are so LUCKY to be doing what we are doing. Of course we appreciate what our lives have become every day, but here’s the thing:

Our lives have nothing to do with wishes and luck.

We have been able to make this work for over three years now and have plans to continue living life on our own terms. We feel confident that we can do this not only because we are taking steps to create a full business out of GlobetrotterGirls.com, but also because along the way, we meet incredible women from all walks of life who have created a life balancing work and travel – most of whom do it much better than us.

As we try to learn more from these great women, we want to share their stories with as many people as we can who want to do what we do, but just don’t know how. That was the inspiration behind the podcast we launched – Break Free: Forget the Glass Ceiling, Break Down the Walls.

We’d love you to check it out, subscribe if you like it and leave a five-star review in iTunes. This way the podcast will reach more people and we can share more stories of people who have been able to Break Free and live life on their own terms, like us!

How to stay up-to-date with the Globetrottergirls

As we said in the beginning, we are in the thick of covering our South American stories, even though we move to Berlin next week. There are just so many stories to tell and so many different helpful tips to include. We covered so much ground in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, so these posts are definitely behind our current schedule.

One way to keep track of where are actually are is through our Polaroid of the week series. Dani has never missed a Thursday Polaroid, choosing a highlight from that particular week, so you’ll always know where we are.

The best way to stay up-to-date with us is of course our free monthly newsletter. Here we share more personal stories beyond the blog, our favorite travel articles around the web, our own top five posts of the month, travel tips, the books we read and love and we also answer reader questions – so make sure to get in touch to ask us anything about travel or lifestyle! We also run giveaways exclusively for newsletter subscribers, plus we always reveal our next big destinations here first – like when we decided to postpone Bolivia until October and head to New York in April instead.

sign up

Google Reader is dead – how to subscribe to our RSS feed 

If you are reading this post through Google Reader, you know the service is being shut down this weekend. Although Google Reader was like Dani’s travel Bible, there are actually several RSS options in order to keep track of your favorite blogs – GlobetrotterGirls.com included.

Bloglovin’

Bloglovin’ makes it super easy to import the blogs you are following on Google Reader – so if you’d like to do that, make sure you import all of them before Google Reader shuts down on 30 June.

Feedly

Feedly also has the option to import the blogs you’re reading on Google Reader and has been named by many as their favorite replacement.

The Old Reader

The Old Reader looks and feels exactly like Google Reader, as the name implies. It also lets you import all the blogs you are reading in your Google Reader (but it’s a little bit more complicated than with Feedly or Bloglovin’), or subscribe to the blogs of your choice.

Whatever you choose, our RSS feed is:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/globetrottergirls

Email

You’ll have the choice to select the RSS Reader of your choice or below that, you’ll find the option to subscribe to our posts via email. That way, you’ll get all our posts delivered in your inbox and won’t miss a single post.

We would love to meet you!

If you are in Berlin in July, please get in touch! We are also always looking for recommendations to cover here, so if you have Berlin tips, please share them in the comments below.

Vicky

Tuesday 9th of July 2013

When will you guys be leaving Berlin? We'll be spending August in Germany starting with Berlin and would love to meet up with you guys (and would happily absorb any and all recommendations you have for Berlin)!

Dani

Wednesday 10th of July 2013

Hope we'll still be here when you get to Berlin! We'll leave on 2 or 3 August, will still be in Germany for a while (heading straight to Leipzig from here for a 1-week housesit, if that's on your list of places to visit?) When will you get here? And we have a ton of recommendations for Berlin for sure!!

Tesst

Sunday 30th of June 2013

Without any doubts you will have an amazing time in Berlin! It's good to 'try' out a city you might want to settle in, any time later. We're actually doing a similar thing at the moment in South America. After 3 years in Buenos Aires, it was time to move forward and we decided to pick 5 cities throughout South Ameirca to try out for any time between 4 and 6 weeks in order to see if we could life there. We're currently in Lima, our 3rd stop and love it! Try to life like a local and meet up with the locals in order to soak up the 'real' Berlin way of living! Looking forward to any new updates!

Jess

Monday 1st of July 2013

Hi Tess. We definitely try out cities as we go, and living like a local is why we stay longer in cities like Berlin, New York, etc. Loved BA, could have also stayed longer there!

For 91 Days Travel Blog

Sunday 30th of June 2013

You will have a blast in Berlin!!! Where are you guys staying? If you are in Kreuzberg got to Kimchi Princess ... your friends Young-Mi owns this place. If you go tell them hello from us! Have an awesome time!!!

Jess

Monday 1st of July 2013

We are indeed in Kreuzberg and will indeed check out the Kimchi Princess if we can! We will definitely have an awesome time in Berlin. Loving it already!

Sean M. Madden

Friday 28th of June 2013

Hello Girls,

Best wishes with your move to Berlin. My slow-travel partner, Mufidah (http://MufidahKassalias.com), and I have — for a year-and-a-half or so — considered heading to Berlin for an extended stay. Sounds like a good place to be right now.

We've been traveling since May 2012 — housesitting, CouchSurfing, staying in a friend's inexpensive flat in Burgos, Spain for seven months, etc. We're now touring around Britain for the summer, and are presently in Scotland, house- and cat-sitting, after a week in Edinburgh and a couple weeks in house/cat-sitting in the Lake District.

Anyway, it's good to connect with you both. I've just subscribed to your newsletter. You can read more about our goings-on via Mufidah's and my blogs (hers above, mine presumably linked to this comment). She published a lovely piece, yesterday, about our time in Edinburgh. And an essay I wrote last week was Freshly Pressed this past Monday. It's still the latest post on my http://SeanMMadden.com blog, if you'd like to have a look.

Looking forward to reading about your Berlin adventures, and your possibly setting up a base there, etc.

With warm regards,

Sean

Jess

Monday 1st of July 2013

Hi Sean, Great to 'meet' you and Mufidah here. Love your travel style, obviously, since we do the same a lot of the time! Thanks for subscribing to our newsletter, too, we'll be happy to have you keep up with our whereabouts and would love for you to let us know how things go with you guys, too!

TammyOnTheMove

Wednesday 26th of June 2013

I have only spent a week in Berlin earlier this year to visit my best friend, however in that week Berlin has done something to me. It is a place where I felt instantly at home. Maybe it is because it is so rebellious and alternative, or maybe because there are so many creative people there. Whatever it was it caught me. I haven't lived in Germany for 9 years now and I am not planning to move there in the near future, however, if I had to go back now I would go to Berlin. It really inspired me and I am sure it will do the same to you.

Jess

Monday 1st of July 2013

Hi Tammy, that's exactly how Dani and I both feel about Germany - Berlin is probably the only place we can settle after traveling for so long. We need this feeling that you describe - the creativity, the rebellion, and definitely the openness to alternative lifestyles!