Organization is key to maximising what you can take on this next step of your life.

Now is the time that many a student will be packing up their belongings for their first semester at college or university. They may be taking a short hop flight to another city in their own country or moving completely to another country, to pursue their education. It’s not easy packing your life into a suitcase. It may seem a Herculean task, so let’s look at some ideas to make the job easier.

Research

Check if your chosen airline has any special offers just for students. Surprisingly, many airlines offer discounts on air fares, flexible date change on tickets and most important, extra baggage allowances. Some have student clubs that you can join for added benefits, such as free WiFi onboard. Definitely worth looking out for.

Documents

Get your documents in order for travel. This might include an identity card/passport, any required medical tests, and travel insurance. It is a good idea to take proof of any certifications that you have and also a copy of the university’s acceptance letter.

Packing

You will need clothes for all seasons, so organization is a must. Choose practical clothing suited to studies as well as underwear and nightwear. Consider if you need to take clothing for the gym or a well-earned night out. Also pack something smart like a suit, in case you are required to go for an interview, meeting, or other formal occasion.

Roll with it

You can use packing cubes for some items as it can make your clothes super organized and easy to find. Any individual items can be rolled up and packed easily – this helps items to be crease free and allows for more space in the suitcase. Shoes can be packed in shoe bags to keep everything clean and tidy, and shoes can also be stuffed with smaller items, for complete capacity. If you have larger items, like a winter coat, it is worth investing in vacuum bags. The air is sucked out of the bag, allowing a lot more space.

Ask questions

Ask the university, what is needed at the accommodation and what can be bought cheaply in the surrounds. They may even have a packing list or a list of local suppliers. You may well need bed linen, towels, pillows, and kitchen items, but it might be easier to buy them there than use up your precious baggage allowance. Avoid taking books if possible, as they will add to the weight. See if the books are available online or on loan at the university. Stationery can be bought once there.

Other items

Of course, you will need your phone, tablet, and laptop for studies, so pack them well. Pack all the wires and adapters in a packing cube, so that you have everything in one place. Toiletries will be needed, but maybe don’t take full-size items, just travel size and buy once there. There might be personal items that you want to take to remind you of friends and family. Things like photos and souvenirs can be comforting when a long way from home.

Finally

Check the weight of your luggage on your personal weighing scales. You can stand on it with your suitcase and then take your own weight off the kilos. Most airlines will allow a total baggage weight of between 20kg and 30kg. You don’t want a surprise at the airport with extra baggage fees, which can be very expensive.

Our best health tips for long-term travel as digital nomads will help you stay fit, making healthy choices about food while traveling and help you get the right amount of sleep.

Staying healthy while traveling might seem overwhelming because you’re away from all your routines at home.

For us, part of the fun challenges of exploring new places is figuring out how to stay healthy and fit.

We stay healthy while traveling with a bit of balance and conscious effort. While trying new things, we also tie in habits from home and translate them into different places. How do we stay healthy during long-term travel as digital nomads?

• We make an effort to work out.
• We shop at markets to get our fruits and vegetables.
• We cook our own food when we can.
• We make time to rest and reset.

Staying healthy while traveling didn’t always come easy, and we’re still working on our goals of working out to stay fit and eating well to maintain good health. Here are our main tips and how we achieve them.

1. Work out while you travel, from running to CrossFit to yoga.

At various points during our long-term travel together as a couple, we’ve developed and kept (and also gotten lazy with) several fitness habits. In Lima, Peru, and Medellin, Colombia, Dan was a member at the CrossFit gyms in our neighborhoods.

Dan’s biggest success was doing a strenuous workout class after a day of remote work in our workspaces. He, therefore, avoided less-healthy habits like going to happy hour or eating a big dinner out at a restaurant.

Becca also worked out during the same months, but in a different way. In Lima, she was a monthly member at local yoga studio called Lima Yoga, and in Medellin, she bought a 30-day pass for weekday morning yoga at the Medellin Selina coworking space.

Knowing that she had made an investment for a 30-day membership, she sometimes went to yoga classes as early as 6:45 am on weekdays and as early as 9 am on weekdays (rough, right?), averaging yoga classes usually four times per week!

Starting in Mexico City, after acclimating to the high altitude, we both started running on our own. Mexico City has an awesome park called Bosque de Chapultepec, which has a great running path.

The neighborhood of Condesa is nice as well for running because the traffic isn’t heavy, the sidewalks are pretty wide, and there’s a running path around Avenida Amsterdam, which forms an oval around a park.

We also ran together during mornings in Hanoi, Vietnam, where a promenade around the city’s most popular lake is an ideal place for a run (if you go early before the traffic starts and the tourists come out!).

2. Be conscious of the foods that you eat when you’re not at home.

The food is, of course, one of the best reasons to travel. In Mexico, you can get a taco for $0.40, and in Vietnam, you can eat a bowl of pho on the street for $2. We can’t enjoy these types of foods for the same prices at home in the US!

While great food might come at very affordable prices for us (compared with prices where we come from), chances are that not everything we see is healthy. We’re conscious of when, how and what we consume when we aren’t the ones cooking.

Control how often you dine out.

To this end, we try to control how often we dine out at restaurants. This is challenging, especially when entertaining friends visiting, going out to a catered event or social gathering or going to a food festival as a cultural activity.

We always try and make dinner on days when we go out for lunch. If we are home to cook lunch, we may consider having dinner out if we haven’t had a chance to get new groceries.

We’re most likely to eat out in vegetarian-friendly destinations, but for places where it’s hard to be vegan or vegetarian, we default to cooking.

Control which types of food you eat when dining out.

We also try to control the types of foods we eat when we dine out. We also try to eat healthy alternatives if we want to have a quick snack or a meal when we’re away from home.

If we’re walking around and craving a snack, we’ll opt for fruit smoothies over French fries, and unsweetened tea or coffee rather than beer or wine. This method helps us solve cravings, while not consuming excess fat or calories.

A tip for flying is to bring healthy snacks for the flight. This is so that you don’t wind up buying airplane food (cheap budget flight where they have a menu of snacks like chips and junk) or a flight with no food offerings at all, for when you have to find something to eat at the airport.

Pack some fruits and veggies from a local market in reusable containers and you’ll be so glad you did. We like the stainless steel EcoLunchbox food containers for travel, which are leak-proof, eco-friendly, reusable and plastic-free food storage solutions for trips.

3. Make the extra effort to cook meals while traveling.

We mention that we cook a lot, so we’re going to tell you how we manage this.

We filter our accommodation search with having a kitchen as a priority.

We feel most comfortable when we have a kitchen, so we put this at the top of our list when searching for Airbnb apartments, listings on Booking.com or hostels. If we have to, we contact an Airbnb host directly to ask about the components of a kitchen – is there a burner or stove? Is there a rice cooker? Are there pots and pans for cooking?

We look up the nearest market so that we can start shopping.

In Mexico, it was really hard for us to resist tacos (Becca) and tortas (Dan) for three meals a day, but we made an effort to go to the local market and pick up fresh vegetables.

While traditional produce markets were easy to find in Mexico City’s downtown, they were not so prevalent in the Condesa area, which was trendier and did not have these types of markets so accessible to us. We, therefore, had to opt for the nearest modern supermarket.

Determine if you need any extra kitchen tools.

Take inventory of the kitchen and see if there’s anything that you need. For us, in Hanoi, we had to get a cutting board and some spoons. Most of the places that we visited had a good stock of kitchen items to choose from.

Choose your cooking oils and condiments wisely.

The benefit of cooking at home is that you can control your oil, salt and sugar. We prefer to buy olive oil for health reasons, but if we’re somewhere where we can’t find it, we opt for the next-healthiest type of cooking oil.

For seasonings, we both have our own preferences. Dan prefers cooking with salt and other seasonings, and Becca prefers avoiding salt and using pepper and chili. We both like hot sauce, salsas and chili sauce, so we buy these items (in plastic bottles when possible) and take them with us to a new place if we travel by bus or train.

4. Snack on fruits and veggies and avoid things like chips, street meat or sugary junk.

In most places, from New York to Vietnam, you can find vendors who sell fruit on the street. This seems much more prevalent in warmer places, such as Central and Andean South America, and Southeast Asia, when compared with Europe.

We admin, these street snacks are good, really good. If you make a habit of grabbing a few quick snacks throughout the day, you can find yourself in an unhealthy situation!

We do keep in mind that buying fruit from the street means there may be a layer of pollution or dust on the fruit. For this reason, unless the fruit has a peel, we wait until we get home to wash fruit from the street.

Lots of cities, towns and villages have farmers markets. Look up if a local farmers market exists, or ask around.

Aside from travel costs, we tend to opt for fruit and vegetables rather than chips and things that come in packages. Eating fruits and vegetables feels better and helps digestion, and you can usually find cut-up fruit in a convenience store or grocery store if you cannot locate a street vendor selling fruits or vegetables in most countries.

Our favorite fruits from places we’ve been are the mangoes and dragonfruit in Colombia, the guavas in Mexico City and the granadinas in Peru.

5. We shop at local markets and grocery stores.

We love markets and grocery stores! It is wonderful to see how people in other countries shop, and we think this is one of the coolest things about world travel.

In Medellin, our neighborhood of El Poblado did not have a produce market, so we would shop at the local grocery store chain called Carulla. We didn’t have any complaints about this, though, as the produce section was gigantic, and we always were able to pick the freshest fruits and vegetables in huge amounts.

In Mexico, once we “moved” across town to Selina Mexico City Downtown, we found ourselves next to Mercado San Juan Arcos de Belen, where we came so often that we got to know a mother and son who sold dried fruit, nuts and fresh juice. They started to know us because we came several times per week.

6. We stay hydrated daily during travel.

Staying hydrated is key to a healthy system! Especially in hot climates, it’s crucial for our bodies to have enough liquid. This is where drinking enough water and consuming fruits and vegetables that have high water content are great!

If you tend to drink a lot of coffee and tea like we do, staying hydrated is also important to counteract caffeine levels. So, what do we do?

We always carry around water in our water bottles and we fill up whenever possible, in case we won’t see a clean water source for a while. Of course, we like to avoid buying plastic bottles (sustainable travel tips!) as much as possible, so we take around our water bottles with us all day.

7. We aim to sleep eight hours per night while traveling.

While we both need different amounts of sleep to function properly, we tend to average on eight hours, which is a healthy and recommended number of hours to sleep. A few things help us sleep this proper amount.

Having blackout shades or curtains

If you luck out with a hostel room, hotel room or apartment rental with blackout shades, congratulations! You will probably be sleeping through the night.

If you like being woken up by the sun, it’s sometimes smart to check what time the sun will rise. Cities around the world will have varying sunrise times during different seasons. You can calculate how this will affect you!

A sleeping mask

Becca uses a sleep mask if she’s trying to sleep in a room that lacks curtains, or on a plane, train or bus.

The sleep mask came in the most handy in Estonia, where we traveled during the ‘longest day of the year.’ The sun would come up around 3:30 or 4:00 am, and our room would get leaks of light well before we wanted to be up. Becca used a sleep mask every night to drain out the light and to sleep until she wanted to.

Earplugs

We bonded over the need for earplugs early on when talking about travel. Becca is a lighter sleeper than Dan is, so we handle noise differently. We both sometimes need earplugs if we’re in a hostel or any type of property that has noise coming from above, below or outside.

The most challenging noise we’ve dealt with recently was in Mexico City, where we lived in a first-floor apartment. In addition to overnight construction and street repaving, some types of vendors would start rolling through the streets around sunrise. The noise was pretty loud! Ear plugs help drown this type of unwanted distraction out.

8. Aim to make time to relax and reset while traveling and working remotely.

Not having an office environment all the time can make working any time of day a reality. Especially in Asia with the shifted time zones, we find ourselves working on things in the morning, in the afternoon again, and then at night when our colleagues and clients come online in the US.

In order to make time for ourselves, we block out time for activities like sightseeing, meeting with friends, cooking and resting. This is almost harder than it seems, but because our laptops are our offices, we can get dragged into all types of work the minute we connect to WiFi.

Our favorite ways to make time for ourselves outside of work are going for runs, going on photo adventures to new places, sitting down for a new type of food and cooking for each other.

Could yoga be the missing piece to your whole body health puzzle? Many people experience increased energy and lower stress when practicing yoga regularly.

Most people experience increased energy and an improvement in overall well-being as physical activity becomes routine. Studies have shown that regular physical activity can help relieve depression and may even lower your risk of developing it.

But what if you’re not the active type, are older or have physical limitations? You can still add healthy movement to your life.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) describes yoga, tai chi and qi gong as centuries-old, mind-body practices. They involve specific postures and movements combined with mental focus, breathing techniques, and meditation or relaxation. Other forms of fitness like walking, running, dancing, and even hula-hooping can also be done mindfully as a form of meditation.

The OM factor

What’s in it for you? Some research studies have suggested that practicing mindful movement activities like yoga may help:

• manage stress, depression and insomnia
• improve heart health including body mass index (BMI), blood pressure, cholesterol and heart rate
• improve balance and stability
• relieve chronic pain
• improve quality of life and mood in people with heart disease, cancer and other chronic illnesses
• motivate you to exercise more and eat healthier

More research is needed on the health benefits, but it’s clear that yoga is becoming more popular. In the last 10 years the number of Americans practicing yoga has nearly doubled. It’s now practiced by more than 21 million adults and more than 1.5 million children.

Yoga and other mindful practices can be gentle and may be done by just about anyone, anywhere, with no special equipment needed.* Look for instructional videos, books and websites.

Whatever way you choose to get active, you’ll be taking a step toward being your best you. And you may find yourself feeling happier and more relaxed, too.

The French capital, Paris, has fine, expensive restaurants in every nook and corner.

Paris is a travel destination that many people love, and countless others wish to visit. From the beautiful architecture to the history on the ground, it is the epitome of a romantic city. Even the food in Paris is said to be the most delicious in the world. Maybe it’s for these reasons that the most expensive restaurants in Paris tend to be on everyone’s list.

Being one of the world’s most luxurious cities, it also has some of the most amazing restaurants. This blog will look at the 10 most expensive restaurants in Paris and what you can expect to pay for each one.

10. Le Pre Catelan in Paris

A man named Frédéric Anton is widely considered to be among the most celebrated cooks in all of France. His restaurant, Le Pre Catelan, is his pride and joy, and he and his staff strive to provide outstanding meals to each and every customer who walks through these doors. The restaurant is located in the picturesque Bois de Boulogne park in Paris, and it has earned three Michelin stars for its cuisine. It is a high-class event from the moment you arrive till the moment you leave, and you should budget approximately 250 euros for yourself.

9. Le Jules Verne in Paris

This incredible eatery can be found perched on the second level of the iconic Eiffel Tower in Paris. It is widely considered to be among the most exclusive dining opportunities available in the country, as well as the cost reflects this status. The vistas speak for themselves; the atmosphere is truly unique, and there is no other restaurant in Paris that comes close to matching it, especially at night.

8. Le Cinq in Paris

Within the Four Seasons Hotel in the 8th arrondissement of Paris is where you’ll discover the restaurant Le Cinq. It’s lavish, it’s beautiful, and it’s been given the Michelin Bib Gourmand award, which is the highest honor in the culinary world. The team at this one of the most exquisite restaurants appears to have an unparalleled understanding of luxury, as evidenced by the fact that they have been awarded three stars. This is an excellent time to “treat yo’ self,” as the saying goes.

7. Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athenee in Paris

If you find yourself in the area at any point, it is highly recommended that you pay a visit to the Plaza Athenee. Inside is where you’ll find the expansion of Alain Ducasse’s high-end dining facilities, the likes of which you won’t find anywhere else in France (or probably Europe). The price of a predetermined meal here will be approximately 350 euros, grant or take a few.

6. Restaurant Guy Savoy in Paris

Guy Savoy expects you to be in and out of the restaurant in under an hour and a half. The restaurant is located exactly on the most renowned pedestrian bridge in Paris. That’s right, this establishment is only open for business five days a week and just for a little over an hour and a half each day. Your meal is served quickly and efficiently, and none of your time is squandered or taken for granted in any way. During your meal, you will have a view of the Eiffel Tower, and if you’re lucky, the man who designed the tower will come to your table to meet you and greet you.

5. L’Espadon in Paris

This eatery may be found within the Ritz Hotel, which is located in the northernmost portion of the 1st arrondissement in Paris. You will be amazed to realize that the room may actually be divided into two different dining areas despite the fact that the environment is suitable for eating. Different sections of the restaurant are used for the service of breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner, and the staff will continue to titillate you from the beginning to the end of your meal. It is definitely necessary to make reservations, and you should also dress appropriately.

4. Le Meurice in Paris

The prices at this establishment are significantly higher than those at Alain Ducasse’s first restaurant. Customers often have to wait many months before they are seated here because it is widely acknowledged as being among the most aesthetically pleasing fine dining restaurants in the entirety of Paris. Prices can go as high as more than 400 euros for every person, but it’s absolutely worth every penny.

3. Restaurant Pierre Gagnaire in Paris

In 2015, Pierre Gagnaire was chosen as the best chef in the world, and if you go to this restaurant that is located right next to the Arc de Triomphe, you will get to sample all of the dishes that earned him the title. Because his restaurants can now be discovered around the world, it is something really unique to make an effort to dine at this restaurant, which serves as the flagship location for all of his establishments.

2. Lasserre in Paris

In the event that discretion is required, this luxury restaurant is highly accustomed to handling commercial matters in a professional manner. You’ve probably never had anything quite like this before—ultra-fine cuisine at its finest. Warning: the roof of Lasserre immediately opens up, providing a view of the sky over Paris while diners are seated there. You’re going to notice that nothing that they do here is like anything else, and it’s all done with ease.

1. Benoit in Paris

You have never experienced true seclusion until you stepped foot in Benoit. It is difficult to describe. Therefore, it is highly encouraged to visit this place to see what the restaurant with the Michelin star has done to something that was quite contemporary and made into something that was completely classic. This is the perfect location for you if you’re the type of person who enjoys being given the attention and focus of the entire room just on you.