About joya
Pattaya
A little over a year after I was born, I left the shores of my native land of California and found myself island hopping in the Philippines up until my mid-teen years. During that time, I lived in Laguna, Cebu and finally General Santos City (in chronological order). I went to school at an all-girls Catholic School, went to the beach with family or friends on the weekends, came up with a creative excuse each Sunday to skip church, spent my free time with my friends listening to the Backstreet Boys or at the arcade playing Tekken. At 15, I meandered back to Nor Cal for my last two years of high school, where I first discovered the joys of earning your own money (working at a gas station on the weekends) then jetted off to the other side of the Great United States of America for university in Boston where I upgraded to becoming a waitress and nanny, eventually obtaining a degree on History and the Law.
While I was at university I did a little bit of traveling, going on short trips in and around the East Coast, occasionally venturing across the Bible Belt and spending a semester abroad in Spain (+ exploring some of Europe) and that was when the travel virus that I caught as a child developed into a full-blown incurable disease. Keeping Boston as my home base, I worked for the Labor Union in the U.S. and traveled extensively for work. The job led to a one-year stint in Los Angeles, where I realized having a stable job, a grown up apartment and staying put scared the shit out of me. So, I packed my shit, scuttled across the U.S. on a cross-country road trip, went straight to Montreal for a quick stop before leaving my car in Boston, jumping on a bus to New York City and catching a flight to Montevideo, Uruguay. What followed was a trek around Latin America, which just fueled my wandering spirit. I returned to Boston, thereafter, and worked on a U.S. Senatorial campaign in 2012 (my candidate won, btw) and then went back to waitressing which paid more. Then I took off again, this time to Southeast Asia. I rediscovered The Philippines and learned about my next door neighbors of Malaysia, Thailand, and Cambodia where I was always mistaken as a local, which I always took as a compliment.
Now, here I am in Las Vegas working on The Strip. How about that?
My Travel Map:
