I like being in Canada in December because it’s cold. The cold makes me grateful for being warm, which makes the extreme heat around the world easier to bear because I can remember those December days in Canada when I was cold. The cold has other advantages: when it’s cold outside, you feel obligated to do indoor activities like puzzles, cooking, video games, sandwiches, and Simpsons marathons. You can’t do these things on a clear conscience when it’s sunny and warm outside. December in Canada is also a great time to get into the Christmas spirit because there’s likely to be snow somewhere around, and even Christmas markets. Within Canada, Winnipeg (aka Winterpeg) is a perfect December winter destination for all of the above, and the two weeks I spent there with Marce (who could only spend a week), and I spent there The only thing that wasn’t so Christmas-spirited about Winnipeg was the arrival at the airport. Marce and I were treated like narco drug traffickers by the local immigration agents and taken into a back area after picking up our checked luggage. After 20 minutes of answering questions about my employment, proving my finances (logging into my bank […]
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This was another quick stopover in Denver for a few days. Took care of the yearly registration for the green car (my monthly storage cost has increased by 300% over the past year) and had fun showing Marce Casa Bonita and Meow Wolf. Casa Bonita is a historic family restaurant with cliff divers, a music show, face painting, and a shooting gallery (among other attractions) that was recently restored by the creators of the television show South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, at great personal expense after the original venue shut down. The original Casa Bonita had been an iconic destination restaurant during my childhood (and many other Coloradoans, including Trey Parker and Matt Stone). The new owners did an impressive job of not only restoring but surpassing the decor, spirit, and environment of the original Casa Bonita restaurant – it’s much better than it used to be, and it was fun to go there with Marce and my friend Dan, who was there for his first time. Dan didn’t join Marce and me for Meow Wolf, a multi-story art installation you can spend a few hours in. It’s a great place to take photos.
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There is a small Korean island located between South Korea and Japan, known as Jeju. After two weeks in the big cities of Busan and Seoul, I had planned a more pastoral experience on Jeju and had rented a car to explore from two different AirBnbs on the East and West sides of the island. Unfortunately, upon arrival at Jeju Airport from Seoul, I was unable to take possession of the rental car without an international driver’s license. This piece of paper is a bureaucratic requirement, apparently facilitated by a request to a US governing authority, along with a US driver’s license. South Korea, along with Japan, appears to be one of the few countries that require this. My US driver’s license, which has always been accepted in the other countries where I have rented cars (many), doesn’t work in South Korea. However, I can use my US driver’s license to obtain an international driver’s license. I got the impression, for the first time, that there were likely other things about South Korea I would find annoying as I became more familiar with how things actually work. That’s actually a fun part of learning about a foreign country, a sort […]
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Seoul feels safe, organized, clean, and efficient every time I visit. I think it must be because there are so few foreigners like me around. Every country has its challenges and discomforts, but as a short-term visitor, it really feels like this is a place I can stay and be entirely insulated from nagging annoyances that plague daily life; this isn’t typically achievable in many of the countries I visit. I suppose one risk of staying in South Korea for an extended period would be feeling isolated. I would guess it could take five years before a local approaches you to say hello. It isn’t that people here are rude or inconsiderate; quite the opposite, it’s just that you could live anonymously in Seoul without anyone ever noticing. No new surprises this time in Seoul, which was just fine for me. I was relishing revisiting my favorite neighborhoods and eating as much Korean food as I could find. I met my local friend Justin and his wife, Laura, who moved from Bogotá to Seoul while her US visa is being processed. They had met in Bogotá and then obtained a one-year visa in South Korea along with a rental apartment […]
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My body was severely deficient in Korean BBQ: it had been six years since I last traveled to South Korea. This trip, I entered the country through Busan, a coastal city and the country’s second-largest, which I hadn’t yet visited (Busan had been on my travel list since my first visit to Seoul in 2015). I stayed for 10 days and thoroughly enjoyed exploring the city, which was quite different from Seoul, as it is a coastal city, smaller, and with accessible nature on its outskirts. I was fortunate because my workload was especially low, and so I mostly avoided late-night meetings with my USA-based clients and colleagues. Busan is an ideal destination for anyone seeking to explore South Korea. It felt larger than I had anticipated, but I was never in a crowded or noisy place. Instead, the city streets and roadways seemed orderly, clean, and relaxed. You could spend weeks here without talking to anyone, owing to the local, seemingly introverted culture, which, while respectful of foreign tourists, does not seem concerned with them. Coming from Italy, it was a refreshing break not having to dodge street vendors or tourist traps. Despite obviously being a foreigner, I felt […]
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I spent ten days in the Roman suburb of San Lorenzo. From what I gathered prior, San Lorenzo is known for graffiti, university students, and dive bars, which interested me more than the sort of tourist traps I had surrounded myself with while in Palermo. For several years now, Rome has been a destination on my list; my European friends had been telling me how much they love it, which surprised me, as Rome didn’t make a positive impression on me the first time I visited, on a high school trip when I was 16 years old. However, I have traveled enough since then to understand that first impressions are just that. My first impression of Rome was how much the historic center seemed to pull everything toward it. Even a few kilometers away from the Colosseum and Forum, the city still felt centered, with a slight slope towards its core. The train station, the streets I passed through, the tourist services, stores, and restaurants, all of it angled inward, as if the whole city sloped naturally toward the tourist vortex. It’s difficult to describe, but I certainly felt a gravitational pull on the streets to where the mobs of […]
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I met my sister in Olbia, a main city on the island of Sardinia, Italy, for a five-day yoga retreat. She was leaving Paris and returning home to California, and before she did, we made time to see each other and do some yoga too. The retreat’s location was truly beautiful, situated on a private estate along the coast, and the hosts did an amazing job of making everyone feel welcome, including me, the only man in attendance. The airline lost my luggage, so I was without a change of clothes for the first two days, but it didn’t matter much; I made do with some help from my new friends. There was one other American lady in the group; the rest of the women lived in London, though their original nationalities varied. Argentina, France, Colombia, and Tunis were all represented, which made for some great dinner conversations and a lot of fun. I’m a little sad that everyone is based in London, because all these new friends I’ve made will be difficult to keep up with. I’ll try and pass through London on my way in or out of Europe the next time I can make it work; I […]
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I haven’t seen as much of Italy as I had hoped to by now. Recent visits to Tuscany, and Lake Ledro & Lake Garda, motivated me to make more of an effort to explore and learn more about the country. Increasingly, I found myself relishing Italian food, despite being the only person I know who avoids pasta and sweets (something I had always attributed to Italian cuisine). That’s just to say that I’m having a fun time figuring Italy out, bit by bit. What has kept my attention most is the regional differences. Italy feels bifurcated between north and south. In Sicily, a tour guide told me that Sicilians see themselves as Mediterranean, rather than just Italian. The divide isn’t hostile, just deeply ingrained, which might be similar to the divide in the USA between the North and South, or the East Coast and the rest of the country. This dynamic has reminded me a bit of Germany’s regional diversity with different spoken dialects (Sicily has its own regional dialect) I only had a week in Sicily before meeting my sister at a yoga retreat in Sardinia, and Palermo felt like the right place to spend it. Just enough time […]
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