We’re Chris and Ola, the married couple behind Being a Nomad.
Our goal is to inspire people towards more meaningful travel. What we mean by this is travel that encourages integration, responsibility and growth for everyone involved in the trip.
You can read more about this in our blog post about meaningful travel.
Our Story
We don’t know if we wore born with the travel bug, but we got pulled towards it at the same time, before we’d even met.
Ola had left her home of Poland to set up a new life in the vibrant city of London. Chris also lived in London but found himself spending his programmer’s salary on exotic destinations like Tanzania, Borneo, and Morocco.
Both of us weren’t happy with our jobs and felt stuck in one place. We met on a course to teach English as a second language. We both dreamt of seeing the world outside of our bubbles and of working long-term in foreign countries.
Chris moved first, then Ola, to South Korea where we spent our first year abroad together. Then we lived in Poland, where we married. After that, we moved to China.
After three years in China, we started to think about what travel meant to us. Hopping fast from place to place not seeing much didn’t really work for us.
Travelling for us meant staying long enough in a place to truly soak it up. And at the same time, becoming an active part of the community and finding ways to bring meaning to both our lives and those of the people we met along the way.
We started Being a Nomad to encourage others towards this type of travel. We don’t believe you need to live in a place to travel meaningfully. But we do see meaningful travel as an art form. If you like, a way of life.
Although, we’ve travelled to over 30 countries, we don’t believe in checklists. Rather, we instead like to focus on the journey itself, the people we meet, and the (often surprise) experiences we have along the way.
What Is Being a Nomad?
Being a Nomad is a blog focusing on meaningful travel. We’ve talked more about what this means in a blog post but, in short, it’s travel that focuses on bringing value to both yourself and the place that you visit.
It’s about responsible travel that focuses both on the impact you have on a place and the impact that place has on you.
It’s about travel that involves integrating with the communities you visit as much as possible.
And it’s about travel that encourages everyone involved in the trip to grow.
All the articles we publish have these principles in mind. You’ll therefore find tips on things like learning languages, how to live abroad and how to be a better traveller. You’ll also find stories from our own travels that have taught us something meaningful.
It’s our goal to build a community around the concept of meaningful travel and so we encourage our readers to participate in discussions and share our posts to help inspire others.
Thank you for supporting Being a Nomad.