Who Am I? Why Am I Doing This?

I started this blog before starting my journey around the world, but sadly life got busy and it has taken me until now to write and publish my first blog post. But I thought that I would start this blog as an introduction to who I am, what I do, and why I started this blog, to begin with. So this will be a short introductory blog post, followed by a longer blog post in the next couple of days.

I will start by saying that, for those who don’t already know me, my name is Mark. I am slightly older than the average blogger and adventurer starting their journeys, but I am hoping that my life and educational experiences will give more insight into what I am writing about. Academically speaking, I am a graduate of Ohio University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology and a double minor in history and classics. In retrospect, one could say that my interests are fairly narrow because they all work together in some way.

Within the field of anthropology, I am more specifically interested in the study of human skeletal remains from the past to learn about who an individual was and what this might infer about the rest of the population. I am incredibly fascinated with infectious diseases that affected large populations in the past, such as the 14th century Black Death outbreak. I am also interested in the study of human diets and migrations in the past. This is what my current interest and research is focused on. I am interested in understanding how groups of people lived somewhat cohesively in a complex period, such as early medieval Iberia, by studying their diets and where they came from.

While my interests are mostly in dealing with human remains, my training in a four-field anthropological approach will help me greatly while traveling abroad. I will be able to understand what exactly I am experiencing in these cultures and be able to comprehensively explain it to the rest of the world. During my undergraduate career, I took numerous cultural anthropology classes, including visual anthropology, that taught me different techniques for understanding living populations.

For the next few months, I will be traveling throughout Europe before settling in Vietnam until May. I will be teaching English while in Vietnam and will hopefully experience brand new cultures that I’ve never had before. That’s where this blog comes in. I understand that not everyone can travel because of familial obligations, funding problems, medical problems, or they just don’t want to travel outside of their comfort zones yet. I intend to use this blog to teach people cheap ways to travel. I’ll use my experiences as a guide for others to understand that traveling is something we should all do at least once. Experience a new culture or country for yourself and you will see why.

The following blog posts will focus on travel tips, where to purchase tickets, ways to get around in the countries and cities that I have already been to, and things that I wish I knew before I first traveled outside the United States. I will also be talking about the top things that I would suggest doing and seeing in specific cities that I have already been to. Hopefully, this blog will help to narrow down what you can and should do.

If you would like to follow me on Instagram, my travel Instagram is @adventuring_anthropologist. I will be posting photos of my travels as regularly as possible on this Instagram as another piece of evidence as to why everyone should travel outside of their country at least one time.