CocoBella Blog
Places
Places
through
daily life.
Not landmarks. Not hotel ratings. Just what it actually looks like when you wake up somewhere, walk to the market, and talk to the person selling flowers they grew themselves.
Arnhem, the Netherlands
Recently on the blog
From the field notes
All notes
Netherlands
What a slow morning in Arnhem actually looks like
Not a routine. More like a sequence of small decisions that adds up to something you can't replicate elsewhere.
Netherlands
Notes on market culture: what makes a good one
Wandering through Saturday markets in the Netherlands, trying to figure out what separates the ones worth returning to from the ones that are mostly tourist traps.
Travel
The Lisbon neighbourhood guide no one asked for
I kept notes for three weeks. This is what they say about where to go and, more importantly, what to ignore.
"The interesting things about a place are never on the first page of Google results." — From the CocoBella notes
What we write about
A few things that keep coming up in the notes, regardless of where we are.
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Field note posts
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Countries explored
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Years of notes
Staying longer than a weekend. Walking instead of booking tours. Finding the Saturday market and going back the following Saturday to see what changed. It's less a philosophy and more just not having a checklist of things to do.
Not really. We don't write "top 10" lists or rank hotels. If something specific is recommended, it's because we went back more than once and paid our own bill. The blog is closer to a personal notebook made public.
When there's something worth writing. Sometimes that's twice in a week, sometimes not for a month. There's no publishing schedule because there's no quota to fill.