Hi, I’m Lily.
I’m a Boston-raised Hong Kong resident who travels the world as much as I’m able to…all while holding down a full time job at a large company and having an extremely ordinary number of holidays and vacation days.
When I was 7 years old, I began my first personal journal in a black Mead composition book. I wrote a two line entry about how mean my mother was being for not giving into my desire to have a white cat called Princess.
When I was 12, I began another. I wrote about the first time a boy asked me out (online, over instant messaging service AIM – man, those were the times), my all-encompassing passion for a boy I knew nothing about two grades ahead, imagining his smiles in the halls.
I never finished a single one of those Mead composition notebooks (I always preferred spiral-bound anyway), but I did begin my first blog in 2012 (angsty writings on Xanga don’t count): a three-month long stint where I wrote about my first time in Beijing, the friends and adventures I stumbled across at 18, and my first time really being away from home. In 2013, I began another and called it “Lily’s Letters from London” to document my year studying abroad at University College London and the travels I’d been doing on the side.
It was sometime during those many, many, years writing – whether on paper or online – when I realized that although I didn’t think I was “A Writer” – I was certainly writing. I was writing about heartache with family and with relationships, about the people that had come into my life, and some that I’d lost. I was writing about the places I’d been and the things I’d seen, the food I was eating. And the more I wrote about travel and people, the more it taught me to think about them. But even though I kept returning to writing in times of heartbreak and of crisis…I realized that it didn’t need to be that way.
Since I moved to Hong Kong over 2 years ago, I’ve had the great good fortune of being able to take off to a number of countries. But those memories weren’t solidifying for me. They weren’t etched into my mind as permanently as I’d like – partially because I’d long given up journaling, and partially because my photos weren’t any good.
Then, I bought my first full frame mirrorless camera in February 2019. I’d never owned anything but my phone and a point-and-shoot before that. I learned about photography (to my father’s delight). I learned to edit my photos. I’m continuing to learn to create content that I and others love (and absorbing more every day!).
This blog is so many things to me all at once: a love letter to my family, an ode to my lifelong devotion to food, a chronicle of a photography student’s journey, an intensely personal diary.
Most of all, it is an earnest attempt at capturing both the profoundly radiant experiences and the quiet curiosities of exploring the world. It’s a deeply personal travelogue which I hope you’ll find in equal parts helpful and relatable as you embark on your own travel adventures.
Welcome to Lily Wunders. I hope you’ll stay.
