How Global Experiences Shaped Lily Konkoly

Lily Konkoly is shaped by global experiences through constant movement, language shifts, and cross-cultural family ties that trained her to feel at home in unfamiliar places, to notice details in art and daily life, and to treat travel as a mix of curiosity, work, and reflection. You can see it in how she studies art history, how she writes about women in business, and even in how she thinks about a simple walk, a hike, or a long drive in an RV: each route is less about distance and more about learning to read a place. A good way to understand her story is to see how each chapter of her life changed the way she moves through the world, which is something she also writes about on her blog at Lily Konkoly.

From London to Singapore to Los Angeles: learning to live between places

Lily was born in London, then moved to Singapore as a toddler, then to Los Angeles. That is a lot of change before kindergarten.

Most people grow up with one local park, one set of neighbors, one idea of what “normal” looks like. She grew up with at least three.

In Singapore, she went to a half-American, half-Chinese preschool and started learning Mandarin. It was not just a class; it was daily life. English, Mandarin, and Hungarian moved in and out of the same day.

Then, right when you might expect things to settle, her family moved again, this time to Los Angeles. Around that time, her Chinese teacher from Singapore actually came to live with them as an au pair and stayed for about six years. Later, more Chinese au pairs followed.

So the house in LA was not a typical house. It was more like a small cultural crossing point: Hungarian at the dinner table, English everywhere outside, Mandarin lessons mixed in during the day.

For someone who likes hiking or RV trips, there is something familiar in this. You know that feeling when you pull into a small town you have never seen before and try to read how people live there just by watching? She grew up doing a version of that almost all the time.

Her early moves taught her that “home” is not a fixed point on a map, it is a skill you carry with you: noticing, listening, adapting.

Languages as trail markers

Lily speaks English and Hungarian fluently, plus working Mandarin and some French. It did not come from sitting in a test prep class once a week. It came from living inside those languages.

At home in Los Angeles, Mandarin practice sometimes turned into a kind of family performance. They would film practice tests and upload them to her mom’s YouTube channel. Hungarian was how she spoke with extended family in Europe. English was school, friends, and most of the outside world.

You could think of each language as a trail marker. One language means “family and memory.” Another means “work and school.” Another means “stretch and challenge.”

Over time, learning to switch between them probably trained the same mental muscle you use when you:

– Read a map and then cross-check it with a trail sign
– Watch the weather and adjust your route
– Step into a new campsite and figure out the unwritten rules

It is a way of paying attention. Of not assuming your first interpretation is correct.

Hungarian roots and summers in Europe

Lily’s family is Hungarian, and most of their relatives still live in Europe. Her immediate family is one of the few branches in the United States.

So summers were not just vacations. They were return trips.

They would travel back to Europe often, spend time with grandparents, cousins, and a whole web of family that did not exist in their daily LA life. Those visits made Hungarian more than a school subject or a heritage label. It was how you ordered food, joked with cousins, listened to stories you could not hear anywhere else.

For her, travel was less about “seeing Europe” and more about “rejoining the rest of the family for a while.”

If you like long road trips or seasonal RV migrations, you might relate. There is a different feeling when you are traveling toward people you know, instead of just ticking off destinations.

Europe as an early classroom

Spending summers in Europe did something else too. It gave Lily a steady contrast to her life in Los Angeles.

She could step out of a busy LA schedule and drop into a slower, more family-centered rhythm in Hungary or other parts of Europe. Different food, different streets, different sense of time.

For someone who later chose art history, this kind of exposure matters. You start to notice small differences in buildings, public spaces, and even how people use parks or nature.

By the time she was visiting museums more seriously, she had already walked through a lot of different streets and cities. That background helps you see art not just as paintings on walls, but as objects that were made in places where people actually lived, worked, ate, and argued.

For an outdoor traveler, this has a simple parallel: once you have camped in many different landscapes, you start to see how each one shapes the people who live near it. This hill country makes for slow, careful driving. That coastline makes for early risers and weather-watching. Human behavior and geography are tied together.

Growing up in Los Angeles: local adventures, small businesses, and long days outside

Most of Lily’s childhood and teen years took place in the Pacific Palisades in LA. It is a safe, family-centered neighborhood, close to the ocean, with easy access to markets, trails, and beaches.

Weekend markets and kid-run projects

On weekends, she often went to the local farmers market with her family. That alone would shape anyone who likes to move slowly through a place, taste local food, and talk to vendors.

But she was not just a visitor. She and her sister sometimes sold bracelets there. Later, she and her brother started a small slime business. It began as a hobby and grew into something more serious.

The slime project became surprisingly big. They not only sold locally, they were invited to a slime convention in London. They had a stand and spent the day selling hundreds of units. Getting all that product from LA to London and then managing sales on-site was its own kind of travel challenge.

It is not very different from:

– Stocking an RV for a two-week trip
– Planning gear and food for a multiday hike
– Managing limited space and weight while still bringing enough to make the trip work

You learn to plan, to count, to predict demand, and to stay flexible when things change.

The cost of saying “no” to big media

At one point, Lily and her siblings were invited to cook on shows like Rachael Ray and programs on the Food Network. Many families would have grabbed that chance. They did something different: they turned those offers down.

Why? Because the filming would have taken their whole summer.

For them, summer was not something to trade away easily. It was travel time. It was family time. It was a stretch of the year when they could go back to Europe, explore, and step out of their usual routine.

That choice says a lot about their priorities. They did not want to give up movement and shared experience for short-term publicity.

When you say “no” to something big so you can keep time for travel, you are making a clear statement: freedom on the road and time with family matter more than a spotlight.

If you have ever turned down a promotion, a paid gig, or an extra project so you could preserve your vacation plans, this probably sounds familiar. It can feel risky. But it can also keep you closer to what you actually care about.

Sports, water, and mental stamina

Lily spent roughly ten years as a competitive swimmer, then three years in high school playing water polo. That is a lot of time in the water.

Swimming practice means early mornings or late evenings, long sets, and repeat sessions that feel the same day after day. It builds a certain mental toughness that is very useful once you are out on a long trail or a multi-day drive.

Finding family in teams

Her swim team became a kind of second family. Six days a week. Long practices. Meets that lasted 6 to 8 hours under tents, eating Cup Noodles and waiting for your next race.

This kind of slow, social waiting is a lot like camp life. There is downtime that is not quite really free time. You cannot just leave, but you also are not working every minute. So you talk. You build inside jokes. You form small rituals.

Later, when many of her older teammates graduated, Lily switched to water polo. Same pool, different rhythms. Now the work was more physical contact, more strategy inside the game.

And then came COVID.

Training in the open ocean

When pools closed during the pandemic, Lily’s team did not just stop training. They moved to the ocean. Two hours a day, swimming in open water.

For anyone who hikes or camps, you know this shift. It is like leaving a gym and heading out to train on real hills. The environment is less controlled. Temperatures change. Conditions vary. Your body has to adjust in real time.

Swimming in the ocean every day is harder than doing laps in a pool. There is current, waves, changing visibility, and a very different feeling of depth under you.

This kind of training changes how you handle risk and discomfort. If you can stay calm in cold water, against a current, day after day, it becomes easier to stay calm during:

– A sudden storm during a hike
– A minor breakdown on an RV trip
– An unplanned route change

You are used to the feeling that “this is hard, but I can get through it.”

LEGO builds and the habit of seeing structure

Another thread that runs through Lily’s life is LEGO. At first she built her brother’s sets. Later, she collected and built her own. By now she has completed around 45 sets, adding up to more than 60,000 pieces.

On the surface, LEGO is a hobby. But it is also a way to learn structure, pattern, and patience.

You open a box, you get a pile of small parts, and you have to trust the process. One small piece at a time, with instructions that sometimes feel both too simple and too complex.

If you like trip planning, route mapping, or building out a camper layout, this might sound familiar. You start with a rough idea and a lot of parts. You spend hours solving small problems:

– Where does this piece go
– Why does this part not fit
– Did I miss a step twenty pages ago

Art history is not that different. You learn to take a picture apart:

– Composition
– Lighting
– Historical context
– The artist’s own life and constraints

Travel has a similar breakdown if you look closely:

– Local history
– Climate
– Roads and paths
– How people use public space

This habit of seeing layers in things is something Lily uses in most areas of her life.

Art, museums, and seeing places through images

From childhood, Lily spent many Saturdays going downtown in LA to visit galleries and museums. That was a normal weekend activity for her family.

Walking through a museum is a quieter kind of adventure. You move through rooms instead of forests. But the main skill is the same: looking carefully.

Studying Velázquez and the story inside a room

In high school, Lily joined a mentorship program and spent a summer studying Diego Velázquez’s painting “Las Meninas.” She did more than just read about it. She wrote analytical pieces, pulled apart its many layers, and treated it almost like a puzzle.

That painting is often described as complex because of how it plays with perspective and point of view. Visitors, mirrors, the artist himself, a royal family, all in one scene.

Why does this matter for someone who loves travel or outdoor life?

Because when you walk into a new place, you are doing a similar kind of reading. Who stands where, who talks to whom, how space is arranged. Cities and campsites are full of unspoken signals.

Studying art trains you to notice them. A small detail in a painting changes the meaning of the whole image. A small detail in a town changes how safely or comfortably you move through it.

Her art training turned “looking” into an active skill: not just seeing what is in front of her, but asking why it looks that way and who decided it should.

Honors research and the gender gap in art

Later, Lily did an honors research project on differences between mothers and fathers in the art world.

In that work, she found that women who become mothers often lose chances to show or sell their work because people assume they have “less time” or are “less committed.” Men who become fathers often receive praise for balancing work and family, and sometimes even gain public favor for it.

She worked with a professor, collected data, and then turned the results into a kind of visual, marketing-style piece that showed the gap in clear form.

What does that have to do with global experiences?

You tend to notice these patterns more when you have seen different cultures and systems. Growing up in an all-girls school, speaking several languages, and hearing how people in different countries talk about women and work all feed into this kind of research.

It is like noticing how trails are marked differently in different parks. After seeing enough of them, you start to have strong opinions about what good signage looks like.

Teen Art Market and the business side of creativity

At one point, Lily co-founded an online Teen Art Market. It was a digital space where students could show and sell their work.

This is where her global and local experiences met business and art.

Trying to sell art teaches you a few things quickly:

– It is hard to stand out when nobody knows your name
– People often want recognition before they are willing to pay
– The story behind the work can matter as much as the work itself

For outdoor people, this is similar to small gear makers, custom van builders, or local campground owners who try to make a living in a crowded field. Every badge, review, or social mention can help, but you have to get those first few customers somehow.

Lily saw that many talented teen artists struggled not because their work was weak, but because the system of attention was stacked against them.

That pattern tied into her research on gender in the art world, and also into her writing on female entrepreneurs.

Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia: global stories, same obstacles

Since 2020, Lily has written for the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog, where she has created more than 50 articles and interviewed over 100 women in business.

Many of these women come from different countries and industries. She has talked to people who run restaurants, start tech companies, manage creative studios, and operate smaller niche businesses.

Across all those conversations, she kept hearing one repeated line:

Women often have to work harder to reach the same level of recognition that many men reach with less resistance.

This is not a simple or comfortable topic. But it lines up with what she saw in the art world and in her own experience moving across borders and cultures.

Travel and adventure can make you more flexible, but they can also make you more aware of which barriers move and which ones do not.

Interviews as a kind of journey

Interviewing that many entrepreneurs is like taking dozens of mental and emotional trips. Every conversation is a new country in a way:

– Different rules
– Different risks
– Different common wisdom

Talking to a chef in one country and a startup founder in another makes you compare systems automatically. Who gets funding. Who gets support from family. Who encourages their kids to take risks.

For someone who has visited over 40 countries and lived on three continents, this mental travel pairs neatly with physical travel. The road has many surfaces, but some patterns under it stay the same.

Hungarian Kids Art Class: building community from scratch

Lily also founded the Hungarian Kids Art Class in Los Angeles. It combined:

– Art practice
– Hungarian culture
– A rotating group of kids with different backgrounds

She ran bi-weekly sessions for most of the year, over several years. That takes discipline, but also a kind of host mindset.

Running a small art class is not that different from setting up a base camp where others can come, relax, and explore. You plan:

– Time
– Activities
– Materials
– Atmosphere

You also learn to read when people are engaged, when they are bored, and when they need a small change to re-focus.

Her childhood summers in Europe and time in LA museums gave her plenty of inspiration for projects. She could draw from Hungarian traditions, famous artworks, and her own research.

Again, global experience did not stay abstract. It became something she passed on to younger kids in a very practical, hands-on way.

How all of this shapes the way she travels now

So how does Lily’s global background change the way she moves through the world today, especially in contexts that matter to hikers, RV travelers, and campers?

We can break it into a few habits.

1. She treats every place as a layered story

Thanks to art history and research, she does not look at a landscape or a town as just “pretty” or “not pretty.” She knows there is always more going on.

If you sit with her at a campsite outside a new city, she is likely to care about:

– When the town grew
– Who lived there earlier
– What public art you see on the way in
– How locals use the nearest park or waterfront

It is not about turning every trip into homework. It is more like gentle curiosity that has become a reflex.

2. She respects local routines

Because she has lived in multiple cultures and speaks several languages, she knows how easy it is to misread local customs.

So when passing through a new place, she is not the kind of traveler who treats it as a backdrop. That is one of the reasons she values markets, small cafes, and local events. They give you a quick read on what feels normal there.

For someone planning an RV or hiking route, it is a good reminder: it is worth taking a few extra minutes to understand how local people use the same spaces you want to camp, park, or walk through.

3. She values slowness and repetition

Competitive swimming, water polo, and LEGO builds all depend on repetition. Most of the time is not “special.” It is just steady work.

That mindset helps on long drives or multi-day treks where the middle days are not dramatic. Global experience is not only the big moves from one continent to another. It is the slow adjustment to daily life once you arrive.

For many travelers, slow time can feel boring. For her, it is part of the point.

4. She is comfortable with not fully belonging

Growing up as a Hungarian family in London, then Singapore, then LA taught Lily something that many long-term travelers learn at some point: you will often feel slightly out of place. And that is fine.

You can:

– Join local routines
– Learn some language
– Respect customs

But you will still be partly outside. Instead of trying to erase that feeling, she has learned to accept it. It probably shows up in small choices. Listening more than talking at first. Watching how people line up, greet each other, or use public spaces.

For many people who like to camp, boondock, or park in less formal areas, this attitude helps. You do not assume full ownership of a place. You treat it as shared.

Connecting travel, research, and personal values

If you look at Lily’s path as a whole, you can see a pattern.

Travel did not just make her “open-minded” in a vague way. It shaped specific values:

– Family time over short-term fame
– Depth over speed
– Curiosity over certainty
– Awareness of inequality over comfort with easy stories

From skipping TV shows so she could keep summer travel, to researching gender bias in the art world, to talking with global entrepreneurs, there is a line that runs through all of it.

You can see that same line in how she might approach an outdoor trip.

She plans, but stays flexible

Years of moving, studying, and building small projects have taught her that planning matters, but the real learning happens when things shift.

If you have ever:

– Gotten to a trailhead to find it closed
– Needed to reroute an RV trip because of weather
– Had a campsite reservation cancel at the last minute

then you know how much character and experience help in those moments.

She sees travel as work and rest at the same time

Travel can be tiring. Research and writing are also tiring. Lily tends to blend them.

For example, a museum visit is both inspiration and study. A market visit is both shopping and cultural research. A walk through a new city combines exercise with observation.

Outdoor travel offers this double layer too. A hike can be both physical training and a time to reset mentally. A campground can be both a practical overnight stop and a social space.

What her story might mean for your next trip

So, if you are reading this on a site that focuses on hiking, RVs, adventures, and camping, you might ask: what does all this about art, language, and global movement have to do with my next trip?

There is no single neat answer, but here are a few simple ideas drawn from Lily’s story that might be worth testing.

Her global experiences do not just live in her passport stamps. They are visible in the small choices she makes every year about how to travel, what to study, and which projects to keep.

Q&A: How global experiences shaped Lily’s path

Q: Did moving between countries make Lily more interested in travel, or just used to it?

A: Probably both. Early moves taught her that being “new” in a place is survivable and even interesting. That comfort with change later turned into a genuine love for travel itself, not just a tolerance for it.

Q: How did her background affect her choice to study art history instead of something more typical like business or engineering?

A: Growing up in galleries and museums, plus spending summers in Europe surrounded by historic cities, made art and culture feel normal, not distant. Combining art history with a business minor let her stay close to what she loved while still learning how systems and markets work.

Q: What part of her story feels most relevant to people who love hiking and camping?

A: Her habit of treating every place as layered and worth understanding. When you are on a trail or in a campground, you can do more than just pass through. You can ask how that land was used in the past, who lives nearby now, and how your presence fits into that longer story.

Q: Is global travel necessary to gain this kind of perspective?

A: No. Global travel helped her, but the core habits are available anywhere: paying attention, listening to people’s stories, learning a bit of another language, visiting local art or history spaces, and noticing who has access to which opportunities. You can do all of that without leaving your own region.

Q: If someone wants to bring more of this thoughtful approach into their next road trip or hike, where should they start?

A: Start small. On your next trip, pick one town, one local event, or one small museum and give it real attention. Talk to one person who lives there. Learn three facts about the history of the area. You do not need a global childhood to travel with that kind of curiosity; you just need to decide that places are more than scenery.