what we’re about
What this is
Living in Marginalia is a lifestyle journal about the notes you write in the margins — in food, in wellness, in travel, in the everyday. Not the headline version of a trip — the itinerary, the highlights reel, the things everyone already knows. The other stuff. The unplanned stop that becomes the story. The meal that changes how you think about a place. The moment a city does something to you that you didn't expect and can't quite explain.
The name comes from marginalia — the handwritten notes people leave in the margins of books. The personal reactions, the underlinings, the small observations that aren't part of the main text but are often the most honest part of the whole thing. That's what this is. A record of what actually happened, written by someone who believes the margins are where the interesting parts live.
"Where we differ is actually where we are most similar. Being passionate about your culture and who you are is the one thing we all share."
This blog exists to close gaps. In understanding, in perspective, in the distance between where we come from and where we find ourselves. One post at a time — through food, through wine, through long lunches and unplanned detours and the particular feeling of arriving somewhere that immediately makes sense to you, even if you've never been before.
The story behind the story
My name is Eve-Katherine Pithey. I'm San Diego based, raised in South Florida as a first-generation child — English mother, South African father, two cultures meeting in one household trying to make sense of a third. When your parents are working toward their citizenship, childhood looks a little different. It means sporadic trips to your parents' home countries that last not days but months. Long enough to become part of a place. Long enough to leave something of yourself there when you go.
It's where my passion for travel erupted. But my appreciation for it — the deeper thing — came from something else. From being a child of immigrants in a space where you look like everyone around you but don't share the same cultural nuances, the same references, the same unspoken understanding of how things work. That gap, between looking like you belong and not quite belonging, is where curiosity lives. It's where I learned to look more closely at the world.
What I found, looking closely, is that the places where we differ are actually the places where we are most similar. Every culture has its version of the long Sunday lunch. Every culture has its music that makes people cry at weddings. Every culture has something it protects and celebrates and passes down. The specifics change. The passion doesn't. That's what travel taught me — and that's what I'm still trying to show, one post at a time.
"The best things tend to happen in the space between plans. I travel with intention and without too fixed an agenda, because that's where the margin notes get written."
When I'm not travelling I work in tech and spend my weekends exploring whatever San Diego has to offer — a new restaurant, a farmers market, somewhere I haven't been yet. I have deep and abiding passions for art, food and wine, a good sunset, and the random unplanned stop that becomes the best part of any trip. I am accompanied in all of this by Clementine, my one-and-a-half year old miniature dachshund, who has strong opinions about everything and goes wherever dogs are welcome.
South Africa is where my family is from. California is where I live. Everywhere else is where I'm still figuring things out. You're welcome here.
Eve-Katherine
