In celebration of the one year anniversary of my blog, I decided to give out my awards to my favorite places that I’ve traveled in the world.  In each category, I will give out a gold, silver, and bronze, and also highlight somewhere I’d like to travel to in the future that I suspect might break into the top 3.  I will be revealing one category each day until December 28, the official one year mark of my blog.  Here is the schedule as well as links to the other awards:

December 20: Best Mass Transit
December 21: Best Value
December 22: Best People
December 23: Underrated City
December 24: Best Food
December 25: Best Natural Beauty
December 26: Best Small City
December 27: Best Big City
December 28: Best Country

Best Country

Gold: Spain

Out of all the awards, this was the biggest landslide winner.  I didn’t even need to think about this one for a second.  My favorite country by a significant margin is Spain.  When I made my first trip to Spain in 2005, I had relatively low expectations.  I had hung out with a lot of people on the backpacking circuit and they were beating down the doors of countries like Italy and France.  Nobody seemed to be focusing on Spain and having visited most of the best traveled spots in Europe, I think that’s a major oversight.  Something I immediately loved about Spain was the people.  The incredibly welcoming, gracious, and proud Spaniards really do their country proud.  Their cuisine again is largely overshadowed by Italy and France, but I’d rather eat in Spain 99 times out of 100.  In a way, choosing Spain as my favorite country feels like cheating as most Spaniards seem to claim their region more than the country and that local pride spreads to all who visit.  The pride and love of country is largely why I was in Spain this past summer, plan to return next summer to meet my mom , and any time I return to Europe will plan to go to Spain.  After becoming a regular at my favorite restaurant in the world, I had the thought that this is exactly how I want to retire one day and it’s become one of my biggest goals to make it so.

Silver: Taiwan

When I accepted my job to teach math for two years in Taiwan, I knew very little about the country.  However, there were two things that I was told over and over.  The first is that the people are amazing.  I concur and they ended up winning first place in my awards for their incredible generosity and sweetness.  The second thing I kept hearing about was the food and they made my top three for that as well.  Part of what has been exciting about the food is I didn’t come with many preconceived notions as there are very few Taiwanese restaurants in the United States.  Taiwan has continued to be filled with surprises and secrets from their phenomenal food to the beautiful relatively unknown spots.  I’ve fallen so in love with Taiwan that I’ve been taking lessons to learn Mandarin Chinese, one of the toughest languages in the world.  I don’t plan to leave here anytime soon.

Bronze: Slovenia

I have been laboring for days deciding which country to put in this spot.  My final nominees were England, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and Slovenia.  In the end, Slovenia was the country that pulled some of my favorite things from all of those countries.  My favorite thing about England is London’s access to many different cultures.  Slovenia is great at this as well pulling food and culture from some of the other competitors like Italy and Austria.  The best thing about Switzerland and Austria for my mind is the Alps, but Slovenia has those too.  Slovenia has a wonderful multicultural feel that is laid back and captures so much of the easy happy vibe that makes Europe such a joy to experience.  In the end, Slovenia gets this last spot for taking my love of lots of cultures and bringing them together.

Blogiversary Travel Awards: Best Country is a post from: iransofaraway.com