Hello World!

Whether you’re a travel enthusiast looking for tips and recommendations, so you do not make the same mistakes I made, you simply enjoy reading other people’s stories from the comfort of your own home, or you’re a relative or friend of mine and therefore read my posts out of solidarity. No, jokes aside. This is a safe-space for EVERYONE and I’m always happy to receive your feedback!

But now a short word about me: I’m Romana and I’m originally from the beautiful Weinviertel region in the north-east of Austria. In the course of my Tourism and Leisure Management studies I got the chance to leave the country and spend a year abroad.

End of 2022, I decided to apply for an exchange semester in Chile. As I had already been learning Spanish for about seven years at that time, it was clear to me that I wanted to go to a Spanish-speaking country. And Spain wasn’t enough for me. I was accepted in February 2023. I would spend four months studying at a Chilean university, in Viña del Mar to be precise. I would also be staying with a host family there.

My degree programme also requires an internship abroad, which should last six months. After sending out several applications and getting in touch with a couple of companies, I finally decided for working at a DMC in Costa Rica and thus secured my one-year stay in Latin America.

It’s now been nine months and I’m already in the middle of my internship. Fortunately, between studying and working, I still had two months to explore numerous countries in South America. Now there are only three months left until I return to my beloved home country. I still have one year left to complete my studies then.

So now you know why I have the privilege of spending a whole year in South America at the age of 21. But how exactly did I come up with the idea of starting this blog?

I’ve always loved writing. For a while I was in the process of writing my own book. But my tendency to procrastinate definitely got in the way.

During my trip through South America, I started posting reels of my experiences on Instagram regularly and quickly noticed how much fun I was having and the increased attention I was getting from my followers. Unfortunately, the caption under the posts is limited to a certain number of words, which usually wasn’t enough for me.

It wasn’t until I started my internship in Costa Rica that I found the time to think of a solution to my problem. A space where I could share my own thoughts, ideas and experiences had been my dream for a long time. After all, you experience a lot during a year abroad and who doesn’t like to share their experiences with others?

But before I could start my own blog, I had to create a website. Fortunately, I love playing with computer programmes and that’s how I finally came up with Bussi Baba (translates to something like „Kiss Bye“, which in Austria can be used for saying goodbye to a friend or loved one).

If you already know me from Instagram, you may have noticed that all my posts are in English. As I make a lot of new friends from all over the world while travelling and my community is therefore very international, it was important to me to make my posts accessible and readable for everyone. Here, however, I wanted to create a place to simply write down my thoughts and feelings as they arise from my head. And of course, this works best in my mother tongue.

However, after writing and publishing the first few posts, I decided that it was important to me that my texts were accessible to everyone again. So as a temporary solution, I will translate my posts individually before I create an English version of my website at some point in the future.

Bussi Baba should not just be a platform for sharing tips and recommendations for the best travel destinations. After all, there are already plenty of those out there. When travelling alone through South America for a year, funny incidents and exciting adventures are of course not an uncommon occurrence. And it is precisely these stories that I would like to share with you. I will not mince my words here. I will report honestly about my feelings and impressions. Including spelling and grammatical errors (or bad translation) 😉

Over the next few weeks/months, you can look forward to reports from my previous trips through South America and hopefully in the future also reports from my travels through numerous other countries.

If you’ve read this far and are now actually curious about my blog and would like to read more from me, then just continue to my first post about the beginning of my big trip in Santiago de Chile.

I am always open to honest feedback. And if you like my posts, I’d be pleased if you could share them with your friends and acquaintances.

Until my next post, I’ll say

Bussi Baba!