Writer & Business Reporter
Rock climbing has been a big part of my life for the past two years. It helped me get over three relationships, make new friends and become fit in a way I had never felt before. I gained self-confidence, impressive stories and a new community. But I also learned a lot of things about life along the way.
“I didn’t pay to go on vacation and throw poop!” Taylor grins at me. “Yes Karen. Yes you did.” This is life in Nicaragua with Free and Easy Traveler. Ten days of beaches, surf, parties and stupidly-cheap alcohol punctuated by birthday parties, volcano boarding, bazooka-shooting, iguana soup and a beach olympics event that has you … Continue reading Adrenaline rush to the finish: 10 days in Nicaragua
Sometimes, there are things that happen to you so out of your control, there’s nothing you can do but keep trying to salvage whatever situation you have left. That happened to me today. Here’s how I went from my original plan of arriving in Liberia, Costa Rica last night to being stuck in San Jose … Continue reading My Super Expensive Day in Airport Purgatory
Writing is a scary thing. Putting your thoughts, ideas, observations out there for the world to dissect, discuss and dismantle isn´t an easy thing, and anyone who tells you otherwise probably isn´t doing it right or hasn´t received their editor´s notes back yet. So what draws people back to it? To a job one friend … Continue reading On what matters.
Karen’s first few hours in Lima, Peru through photos: This is all the clothing I packed. Somehow I managed to colour-coordinate everything to grey, turquoise, light green and cream. It was a total accident. Also, taking photos of all this stuff helps me keep track of what I brought in case anything gets stolen. I … Continue reading I arrived!
Have you ever wanted to say goodbye to your job, jump on a place and just go somewhere? Maybe you’ve already heard about this video that’s been bouncing around the internet about an Australian travel company showing this ridiculously good-looking actor travelling around the world. Or maybe you’ve been wondering why I’ve been talking about leaps of faith and master plans on Twitter lately.
Whether it’s all of the above or none of them at all, here’s a update one what’s going on in my life right now.
I understand what it’s like to be 24 and in a job that seems enviable to a lot of others but that’d you’d like to quit on a daily basis. I’m sure lots of us have had daydreams of leaving jobs we hated with a great screw-you flourish.
The truth is, there are very few people I know who genuinely love their jobs, even the ones who have their idea of a “dream job”. Even the great jobs have slog-filled moments, minor annoyances and some sort of office politics. There is no job purely made up of sunshine and rainbows. This is the mystical unicorn of employment fantasies.
For a few years now, my byline has been Karen K. Ho.
I included the initial for a simple reason: it helps distinguish me from the hundreds of other people in the world with the same name in a Google search. I often get questions about what the initial stands for. Most of the time, I either don’t tell people or I try to be smart and say the k is for “kick-ass”.
The truth is, the initial is just the part of my legal name I’m the most embarrassed to say out loud.
Coming out to my mom was a strange experience.
How do you measure who is and who isn’t a journalist?
What about someone like me? Do I get the right to call myself a journalist?
Sure, I went to journalism school. I did three internships.Co-founded a new press club in Toronto. Live-blogged a few journalism conferences this year and have a decent Rolodex of friends in the industry. Even listed on a bunch of ‘journalist’ lists on Twitter.
But then I got a communications job.
Karen K. Ho 