Hi friends! 

Two weeks ago I graduated college and it feels great to be back home for summer. I start working full-time in August so I have a few months to relax, travel, and catch up with friends & family. With a lot more free time I started finally getting back into the dance studio and I absolutely love it! I leave to compete for Miss Illinois 2017 in just two weeks so I decided to add improv dancing and choreography to my daily work out routine. Every week I will be posting a new dance choreography video to some of my favorite songs. Feel free to message me if you have any song requests!

To start off this summer series I decided to go with this wonderful Carnatic version of Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You". 

Hey y'all! 
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This past December my family and I decided to embark on a spontaneous road trip to the Southeast. We didn't have a concrete idea of where we would be more than 6 hours in advance each day! Overall we got to experience a lot of history, culture, and delicious food. We ended up traveling through and visiting Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Georgia. 

I decided to try to vlog throughout my days there, so here's a glimpse of the trip through my iPhone.

​And here is part two of the vlogs.

I absolutely loved the warmer weather, the hospitality, and the Southern accents. We made it back home to Chicago around 11:45PM on New Years Eve, just in time to celebrate the countdown!

I'll be posting my Nashville and Atlanta vlog soon, stay tuned for that!

​As always, thanks for reading and checking in!

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Hello! I am thrilled to finally be here in China. My family and I arrived at the Beijing Capital International Airport last night. I was so excited to get the tour started. We started off the morning with breakfast at the our hotel, Grand Mercure Beijing Dongcheng. The rooms are spacious and lovely. 
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​I tried Beijing pancakes for the first time, they tasted like very thin, flat omelets. I decided to take every opportunity I had to use chopsticks, so there’s a picture of my first time eating breakfast noodles (is that a thing?) with chopsticks.
 
As a huge history nerd, I was very interested in the first stop of the day: Tiananmen Square. Our tour guide skipped over the details, but I remember reading about the massacre that occurred there on June 4th, 1989, in history class. We passed through the long lines to get inside the square thanks to our tour guide. 

One week before arriving in China I had attended Taylor Swift's 1989 concert in Chicago and had purchased a shirt that simply said "TS 1989". My tour guide was quite relieved that I was not wearing this shirt on the tour, because he said it would have been very misleading...
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​After that we headed over to the Forbidden City and the Palace Museum. One thing to note about this location, guests can only enter the North gate and leave from the South gate. That is why there are long lines and huge traffic getting in and out. This location has also been the Imperial Palace for 24 emperors during the Ming and Qing dynasties. It is referred to as the Forbidden City because in earlier times it was forbidden for anyone to enter the palace grounds unless they had special permission from the emperor. 
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Next it was lunchtime! We ate a typical Chinese lunch at a local family’s house, This was a unique part of the tour. Afterwards we had a short rickshaw ride around the neighborhood. 

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​I am really enjoying absorbing the culture and activity here in Beijing. After lunch we headed to a Tea Palace (I couldn’t catch the name the particular one we went to) and there we attended a traditional tea ceremony. I don’t drink tea, but I tasted the samples that they provided, my personal favorite was the mixed fruits one. It was sweet like juice with essentially no fat grams because it was all natural fruit flavor. 
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​Thank you taking the time to read my blog! Please check back tomorrow to read my post about day 2: visiting the Great Wall of China & the Summer Palace!

I can't believe 2013 is already over! It was a year of a lot of "firsts" for me and changed my perspective on reaching for those goals that I never thought were possible. After competing for six years straight I finally accomplished my goal of holding a state title for National American Miss. I got to experience Southern culture as I spent two weeks in Alabama for the Distinguished Young Woman of America final competition. And the biggest one in terms of education, I graduated high school and survived my first semester of college. Living in the city is wonderful and it's nice to only be an hour away from home.

Here's to 2014 - another year of "firsts" and reaching my goals!