Euro Trip..

Hello beautiful peopleeee. I hope you all are doing well. It has been a while but only because I legit couldn't talk about my trip because it was a surprise. I honestly think I am done with surprises. Seriously, its too much! Avoiding the truth(or straight up lying lol), my anxiety being on 100000, and everything in between. 

I went to Europe: London, U.K., Paris, France & Amsterdam, Netherlands. I had a great time visiting Europe and I cannot wait to go back. I vlogged my entire trip. And I also want to share some things here. I don't want my readers to think I have forgotten about you all. I haven't.

I am working on a lot of blog posts regarding this trip and I really appreciate your patience. A lot of people have hit me up like, "yoo where's your blog post from your trip!?" And I promise I am working! Thank you all for your unwavering support. I hope you all enjoy the 2 vlogs I have posted below. More vlogs coming soon. I've been having some computer issues but that's being fixed this week and I will be back with my posts and pictures from my trip!

Yes, the blog has a new look. There's no more commenting issues, you can click "post a comment" at the bottom of each post.  And your comment will show at the bottom of the page. I know how confusing that was and I thank you guys for working with me on that one. Hope you like the new look!

Love you guys and I will see you in my next post!

Peace&Love,
Janisha

Natural Hair

Hey loves! Today I am going to share two of my Youtube hair videos.Yes, HAIR! A really good friend of mine has been in my ear about doing hair vidoes since I big chopped two summers ago. I kept putting it off and putting it off. But then I started doing Youtube and I was like oh what the heck let me give it a try.

I am so glad I stepped out on faith and encouragement from friends and family. I was so nervous to do the hair video because I am NOT your average Youtube natural hair girl. Some of them are really into their hair and have very specific and detailed routines. I, on the other hand, do not have those kind of regimens and I was worried that people wouldn't like my videos.

The first hair video I posted is my MOST WATCHED VIDEO! How about that for stepping out on faith!? I am so happy that people actually like it! So of course, I wouldn't be where I am in this blogging/Youtube world without my blog readers and I wanted to share with you guys. So here are my two hair videos. Please be sure to subscribe to my channel. And be sure to follow me on Twitter and Instagram to stay up to date with everything that I do. 

I am so sorry I've been gone for so long, but I have much more content planned for my blog and my Youtube channel. So make sure you are following me to keep up with when I post. Thanks for reading and I will see you next time.

Peace&Love,
Janisha

DR Travel Vlog

Hi my darlings! I recently posted my vlog from DR on my Youtube channel and I wanted to share it here as well. I am most definitely working on sharing my videos here as soon as I post them. But in case I am not able to, here is my channel. Be sure to subscribe so that you get a notification when I post. 

Also, if you want more vlogs just let me know either in these comments(instructions below) or my Youtube comments that you guys enjoy these videos.I hope you love this video as much as I do. Thanks for watching and I'll see you soon!

Peace&Love,
Janisha

Workout Vlog 3

Hey boos! So as y'all know I've been expanding my social media life into Youtube. I have been posting more often and I want to make sure I share them here for my loyal readers.

I hope you guys are being motivated by me sharing my struggles, challenges, and journey. Be sure to subscribe to my channel if you have Youtube so you can keep up with me on my channel.

Thank you guys for all the love you show me here on my blog. I really hope y'all are doing well and I will see you in my next post.

Peace&Love,
Janisha

Getting My Life Together.

Hey my loves! As y'all know I am always trying to help you guys in any way that I can. I think that sharing my struggles, downfalls, success, and strong points really helps us all. It helps me because writing is therapeutic for me and I like to believe that it helps my readers to see that they aren't the only person struggling and that after a storms comes the sun AND a rainbow!

I say all that to say that I am getting my life together! If you read my recent post The Struggle is REAL. then you know all about my struggle with my weight and eating habits. If you haven't checked it out, do so before continuing this post.

 I fell off the wagon, after not seeing the results I thought I should have seen after a month of hard work. For me, if I'm not seeing results I will quit. That's not a good thing, because things take time and I can't give up just because things aren't going the way I think they should. And that is in all areas of life, not just workout goals. 

So like I said I fell off, but I'm back! I just started my lifestyle change all over again! And I'm happy with myself so far and very proud. I have already worked out for 2 1/2 weeks straight, 6 times a week. I have NEVER dedicated that much time to working out. I am open to taking any suggestions from any of my readers so please leave tips in the comments. (Instructions on how to comment are at the bottom of this post).

I am about 7 pounds smaller than when I was at my highest of 229. My goal is to lose 20 pounds by the end of November. I will definitely keep y'all posted and I am documenting it for my Youtube channel as well. I already have 2 workout vlogs posted and I am recording footage this week for my third workout vlog. (Post coming this week.)

I hope I am inspiring you guys by sharing this part of my life. And believe me it is HARD to be this transparent about my struggles, but I want to change and I want to inspire others to change. Just like I want to inspire others to travel! 

Whatever is standing in between you and pure happiness, run it over! Do whatever you have to do to be happy and content with your life. Just remember something important, "God never said the weapons wouldn't form, He promised they wouldn't prosper!" I'm not sure who is the author of that quote but all credit goes to that person.

I'll see you guys next time and pray for me as I pray for you. See you soon!

Peace&Love,
Janisha

Toronto Eats

Hey boos! I hope you enjoyed the first post about my trip to Toronto. When I look back we actually did a lot and it was kind of overwhelming to post. So I'm gonna keep it short and sweet with this post and get right into it. 

Food is verrrrrry different in Toronto. I wasn't looking for your typical "American dining" but I was looking for things that look/sound good via the menu.  It wasn't bad, it was just different. I will post pictures of my meals and where I ate but I don't really want to get into the taste of things because I truly can't explain it.

I did a terrible job of capturing what/where we are on April 5th, so I can't talk about that. I know we did eat at a diner near the Park Hyatt. It wasn't half bad. The next morning we had breakfast at what I think is the equivalent to Starbucks. Its called Second Cup. It has a very similar set up to Starbucks and they sell breakfast sandwiches, pastries, coffee, tea, etc. It was standard.

Honestly, I'm not 100% sure if chicken sandwich is from the diner or not. But its a random food shot, from my time in Toronto, so I wanted to be sure to share it!
We frequented another restaurant that was in our second hotel its called King Street Social Kitchen & Bar. The food was okay. I did have an issue with my fruit being spoiled, but they rectified it by getting me new fruit and taking my oatmeal off our bill. It was an unfortunate incident (because I almost ate the fruit) but they took care of it and I was pleased about that. I also had some chicken nuggets from there. They were decent. I had to make my own honey mustard, and that was a fail lol. But the dessert was good there.  

 These pictures are from lunch at King Street Social Kitchen & Bar. 

There was a nice place across the street from our hotel called Fred's Not Here. It was a two-for-one kind of restaurant. Upstairs they had a fancy restaurant and downstairs they had a more casual pizzeria. We opted for the pizzeria, it wasn't a bad choice at all. The pizza was really good. 

We went to a place called Hoop's Sports Bar & Grill. They had Canadian cuisine there. I was really too nervous to try other things so I stuck with wings and fries. My mom got some kind of salad with grilled shrimp and a poached pear. She said it was pretty good. Pears and I don't get along, so I didn't try it lol.

Hard Rock Cafe was downtown so we are there one night. Its the same as any other Hard rock that I've been to.

Our last night in Toronto we wen to Canteen. Its a restaurant that is about 2 blocks from where out hotel is located. The food was actually pretty good and our waiter was excellent. I would definitely go here again!

My favorite restaurant was the 360 Restaurant in the CN Tower. It started out a little shaky. I was certain some of the workers there were turning their nose up at us. But it was the day before my birthday and I was going to enjoy that meal and view no matter what. My mom and I ended up getting the same thing. Salmon with a side salad. It was really good.

Overall, the food is very different. Like I said earlier I can't describe the difference. It could just be that my taste buds are different from that of Canadians. But I would go back to Toronto. And I hear you have to go in the summer, everything is better during that time of year.

That's all for my birthday trip to Toronto, I hope y'all enjoyed it. See you soon!

Peace&Love, 
Janisha

The 6 With My Woe.

On April 10th I celebrated my 27th birthday. I spent the weekend(and some of the week) before of my birthday in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my BFF4L, my mommy! You guys have seen my mom here on my blog before, she's my fav travel buddy.

I was excited to go to Toronto because its the most popular place in Canada, at least to most Americans. We can thank Drake for that haha. But it seemed like such a beautiful city and I really wanted to go check it out for myself.

My mom is the sweetest, she took care of everything. She had us in this super fancy hotel called the Park Hyatt Toronto the first night. we would've stayed there the whole stay but they were booked. I would highly recommend this hotel.

The location was good and very clean, it was a little far from downtown BUT it was on the "richer" side of town. As you can see from my picture below they had allll the high end stores across the street from the hotel. Also there was the fancy Royal Ontario Museum(ROM) across the street as well. It was a very quiet part of town. There were lots of people because of the shopping and the museum but it didn't interfere with a good night's sleep.

We walked around and window shopped at the high end stores and we ate a little diner, for some reason I didn't take any pictures of it but I think it was called Flo's Diner. After that we called it an evening because honestly y'all it was FREEZING. And we left upper 70s weather to go to lower 40s weather. It was a mess, but that fancy hotel room made up for it!

Thursday we went to the ROM and we were able to see all the things that Ontario was proud to show off. It was very similar to your Smithsonian museum full of world history. It was cold and rainy so I had no problem spending  most of the late morning/early afternoon indoors.

This may freak someone out and, I'm sorry if it does, but how often can you see a real mummy!?

After the museum we made our way to our new hotel the Hyatt Regency Toronto. This hotel wasn't as spacious as the first hotel, it was more modern and had a boutique feel. It was downtown and much closer to all the things we wanted to do. It was walking distance to the CN Tower and other attractions. That night we went to a pizza restaurant across the street from our hotel for dinner. We opted to stay inside that night because it was freezing, so we had a quiet evening in a fancy hotel, I wouldn't have traded that for the world.

We planned to get up early Friday morning and go to the CN Tower & Ripley's Aquarium as soon as they opened. We woke up to snow flurries! Yes, snow in April. We weren't prepared for the snow so we decided to stay inside until it stopped snowing.

After the snow cleared up we hit the town running. We went to Ripley's Aquarium and spent a few hours walking around the aquarium and learning about the different species that live under the sea. I really did learn a lot, you should definitely visit your nearest aquarium if you want to learn more about marine life.

We went to Toronto Eaton Centre which i s a huge mall downtown on Yonge & Dundas. They had every store you can think of and even some stores I've never heard of before. We didn't do much shopping but we saw a lot of nice things. My mom did end up buying some things from Nordstrom but nothing too major. We spent the rest of the night there and ended up eating at Hard Rock Cafe.

On Saturday we went back downtown and bought tickets to The Bodyguard The Musical at the Ed Mirvich Theatre. We saw a live show outside and took a picture with some people who were promoting a Canadian show. After the show we needed to waste some time before The Bodyguard started so we decided to venture out to the OVO Store. After adventuring to the store we went back downtown to see The Bodyguard.

The Bodyguard was amazing! Its a British musical that they brought over to Toronto. I really hope and pray they bring it to America. I would definitely go see it again. I couldn't take videos or pictures while the play was going on but I do have some pictures of the theater(theatre is how they spell it in Canada), which was also very nice.  

The musical was over around 11pm, if my memory serves me right, so we went back to the hotel and called it a night. We learned a lot about Canadian health care, college fees and things like that from our taxi driver. It so interesting how different things are in Canada and in the US.

Sunday morning we finally made our way to the CN Tower. It was worth the wait.It takes 58 seconds to get to the top of the tower via elevator. We got to the top and looked around. We were able to see the whole city from up there. I really do like a good skyline picture, so this was amazing to see. It reminded me a lot of the Sky Deck in Chicago and I hope I can go to many more places like it.

We also had a birthday lunch/dinner at the 360 Restaurant at the CN Tower. I didn't know what to expect and we didn't have a reservation but we were lucky enough to get a table.We sat down and I realized then that the floor was moving. I thought the view from the floor below was amazing, but the view while spinning around and eating some good food was everything. Hands down, best birthday dinner ever! And now that I am looking back on it, best birthday ever.

This is my second birthday trip I've ever taken, the first one was when I was 10 years old, and this will definitely go down in the books as a great experience. During I was a little sad about the weather but I am most definitely happy that I was able to spend this time with my mom in another country. My love for travel has really inspired me to try new things and I am so happy that I stepped out on a ledge and traveled to Toronto.

I have some more pictures that I will probably put in another post, I don't want to overwhelm y'all. I will cover food in my next post. I hope you all enjoyed this and I will see you next time.


Peace&Love,
Janisha

Toronto Vlog

Hey boos! As you may or may not know I went to Toronto, ON for my birthday back in April. The post is loooong overdue and I promise its coming. But to hold you guys over until its published, I uploaded my Toronto vlog on my Youtube channel. 

Please make sure you LIKE, COMMENT & SUBSCRIBE to my channel (<is clickable). I have so much more in store for my channel. I pray you all are well and I will talk with you soon!

Peace&Love,
Janisha

Youtube & Vlogging.

Hey Loves! So I know this is going to sound CRAZY, but I started a Youtube Channel. I've had it for a while and I knew that I wanted to start posting vlogs but I kept talking myself out of it.

But not anymore! I just posted my first vlog and I wanted to share it here with you all. I know how much y'all love to read about my travels but I thought maybe y'all would like to actually see what really goes on when I'm visiting different cities. So please be sure to check it out. I hope you guys really enjoy it. And please subscribe for more vlogs in the near future. 

My Youtube Channel < Click this link to check out my channel.

Love you guys and I'll talk to you soon.

Peace&Love,

Janisha

Mardi Gras, 2017

When you think of NOLA during Mardi Gras, I'm sure you think of beads and flashing people to get beads. Listen, I did get beads but I did NOT flash anyone to get them. I did see some people flashing for beads on Bourbon St but EYE didn't partake in that mission lolol.

I didn't really know what to expect during Mardi Gras but it exceeded whatever little thoughts I may have had. It was amazing. There was soooo much to do. There was no way we were going to be able to do it all or even explore the city during Mardi Gras but we did a lot!

The first night we got in around 9pm so we stopped by a restaurant and grabbed some drinks to go, I love cities where you can drink on the go. After that we went to witness the end of a parade. This is how we racked up on our beads. Not to mention we went there with a bag of beads from a King Kake that my mom ordered. 

The next morning we had breakfast at our hotel (Spring Hill Suites) and it really helped us save some coins. After that we walked over to the Riverwalk Mall where we got our World's Famous Fat Tuesday drinks. We saw Cafe Du Monde but we decided to wait until the next day to indulge. 

We figured out how to get around on the street car, thanks to the nice guy that was operating it, and we made our way to Bourbon Street! It was really nice to ride on a street car, I have never been on one before.

We rode as close as we could to Bourbon Street and walked the rest of the way. Everything was pretty quiet and normal until we got to Bourbon Street. It was like night and day. There were so many people walking, playing music, catching/throwing beads. The street was filled with people. The balconies were filled with people. It was like something you see on TV. 

We went to Bourbon Bandstand because it was like the only bar playing Trap Music (its the only music that keeps me lit). The bar was amazing. There were so many people there, the DJ was good, the hype men on the mics were hilarious. It was such a great experience.

That night we got to witness a parade and follow the band (please excuse me if I don't use the proper terms). Following the band required A LOT of walking! But it was great music and a great atmosphere.

We woke up the next day and our first mission was to go to Cafe Du Monde. Tasha was determined for that to be our first move of the day. The line was kind of long, but it was worth it.We got to see how they made the beignets, which was really amazing! The taste was even better! It was totally worth the calories.

We went back to the French Quarter after smashing our beignets. We got something to eat at a restaurant called The Famous Gumbo Pot. It was almost like a mom and pop but on a bigger scale. You can tell the food is made with love. Our waitress was really nice and she told us that the owner spends a lot of time in the kitchen preparing the food. I was happy to hear that. 

We spent more time on Bourbon Street and hit some different bars. I didn't take many pictures or videos that day. And now that I'm writing it, my memory is escaping me. But I honestly think we spent some time on Bourbon and there was a live band playing so we were able to catch the tail end of their show. NOLA's music scene is very big and we were able to get a small glimpse into that. Later that night we went to a live concert at a local club. It was so nice to witness more live music. If y'all haven't noticed, I love music. I actually can sing, but we won't get into that too much lol.

That pretty much sums up our trip. The next day we got to the airport super early, we left on Fat Tuesday so we checked out early so that traffic, because of road closures, wouldn't hold us up from missing our flight. We ate at a restaurant in the airport to waste time before it was time to check our bags and come back home to cold Maryland. 

This post was a long overdue and I am glad I was finally able to share it. Thanks for reading and I hope its inspired you. Talk to you soon!

Peace&Love,
Janisha