If y’all didn’t know, I went on the most epic world tour this summer with my family. We started in Boston, our hometown, and then went to Britain, France, China, Japan, and LA before finally flying back home.

And of course, I have to share this trip with all of you! I will get around to posting all of the details in separate posts, but for now, I’ll share what I’ve posted on Instagram!

Let’s be real for a second here, we all know that Instagram is a place to post only the most aesthetically pleasing parts of our lives. Life according to Instagram is fake. That brunch post that you think looks hella natural? I took a billion pictures to get the right shot while standing on my chair, and everyone at the cafe thought that I was a complete freak.

So, I decided to explain the process behind taking all of these pictures: where I was, what I was doing, and how irritating I was when I took the photo. Enjoy!

First off, here are all the pictures I posted on instagram during the summer. I’ll break them up for you by country.

England

1. Big Ben, London! A huge swarm of tourists were crowded around the gate nearest the tower, so I backed up for a people-free shot.

2. Nandos, the famous British chain restaurant. I honestly had no idea how ordering in Britain worked (even though it wasn’t really so different from America) and ended up embarrassing myself when I stuttered over my order, forgot my drink, had to root around my wallet for hours to find the correct currency, and didn’t take my table number to my table. And we were the only ones in the restaurant. Awkward.

3. King’s Cross, London. As a self-proclaimed Harry Potter nerd, I absolutely had to take a pic here, and thus spent over an hour queueing in true British fashion.

4. The famous Stonehenge. Why it’s so famous, I really have no idea. After a ridiculous day long bus ride, we finally arrived. I was ridiculously carsick, and very underwhelmed by the rocks. I realize that it’s got some historical significance or something but with the nausea an all, I really couldn’t bring myself to care.

5. Cambridge University was really very pretty, although it was my mother who dragged me there to ask the admissions officers how I could get in. Thanks mom.

6. Next to London Bridge (which I didn’t actually know was different from Tower Bridge) I stopped in the middle of the street for a pic of these flowers while my family judged the heck out of me.

7. London Eye! I would’ve absolutely loved to take a ride on it, but deemed the tickets too expensive. Like I know the whole “once in a lifetime opportunity” thing, but Jesus Christ, did those tickets really have to be 30 pounds?

8. The Sherlock Museum, located on 221B Baker Street. I loved seeing all the props and momentos from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but what you’re looking at is actually the second take of this picture. The first time we posed, my mom’s picture wouldn’t crop properly into a square, so I went and did it again, this time with the square camera setting.

France

1. A ferry along the Seine at the sunset provided me with the perfect photo ops, and for once, this Instagram pic really describes the moment perfectly. I was completely in awe of Paris and the sunset, and this picture captured the beauty of it all almost perfectly.

2. A walk through the Versailles’ gardens was actually really really exhausting because that garden is huge. How on earth did the royals get around?

 4. The day I took this picture from atop the Eiffel Tower, it was approximately 40 degrees celsius outside. For my fellow Americans, that is over 100 degrees fahrenheit and I was absolutely melting.

5. Another pic of Versailles! If you didn’t know, Versailles is a palace that the royals used to live in, and was famously mobbed during the French Revolution.

6. This was taken of me and my sister at a French cafe while we ate real authentic French crepes for the first time! To say they were good would be a massive understatement. The crepes were absolutely delicious. And afterwards I realized that I’d gotten chocolate sauce on my shirt. Typical.

7. The Champs-Élysées, a famous high class street in Paris known for having stores such as Louis Vuitton and other designers on it. Clearly, I was not rich enough to buy anything, but window shopping while watching the attendants glare at me was certainly fun.

China

I only took one picture while I was here, because most of the time I spent in China was in Beijing, where it was too smoggy to really get a good photo. Like I said, Instagram is so fake. This was taken in Shenzhen, a city rather close to Hong Kong and it was boiling outside. Actually, this was one of the few days I even went outside at all, since most of the time I stayed in an AC’ed room.

Japan

1. Our first night in Tokyo we set out to find authentic Japanese cuisine. One look at the storefront for this restaurant and we were in the door, ordering some ramen.

2. At the Meiji Jingu Shrine. Since this is a hot tourist spot in Tokyo, there were plenty of people, and they just would not get out of my picture! I ended up waiting until there were minimal people in the frame and then took the shot. Afterwards I still wasn’t satisfied, so I photoshopped a woman out of the middle. Can you tell?

3. This is a close up of one of the plaques in the Meiji Shrine. Most of the wishes written on the plaques were written in simple handwriting, but this person had obviously tried a bit harder and used some kind of calligraphy.

4. A random storefront near Harajuku. I was trying to find the heart of Harajuku in Tokyo, and somehow wound up on an obscure street in the middle of nowhere. Oops.

Los Angeles

1. Taken somewhere near or along Sunset Blvd. My mom passed this street in the car and it looked so gorgeous that I made her stop and leaned as far out the window as I could to take the picture. If anyone was behind us at the time, I’m sorry.

2. I had heard plenty about Urth Caffe, and just had to go try it out, and made my mom wait a good half hour to drink her coffee so I could take a picture with it and the rest of the food.

3. Rodeo Drive, another street that I was too broke to shop at! At least I got a nice pic.

4. I spent way too long searching for these angel wings. You may think that I just happened to stumble upon them while strolling around LA, but no, I looked these up online and wandered around the intersection that these were apparently in for way too long before finding these.

5. I actually made my mom drive all the way back to Venice at sunset for the express purpose of taking this photo. And it was worth it. Seriously, it was jaw-droppingly gorgeous. And afterwards we ate from a great restaurant called Gjelina; if you’re ever in the area you absolutely must try it out.

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Is this somewhat close to how you take your Instagram pictures? What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve done for Instagram? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.