After Taiwan, I spent some time visiting my sister and her family in California. The easiest and most comfortable entry point into the USA, ever! Thank you, sister for the delicious food and hospitality, comfortable workspace, and cozy family time.
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I returned to spend Thanksgiving with my family in Kansas City. I stayed at my brother’s house and spent time with my nieces and nephew, Mom and step father. The food was great and so was having the opportunity to see everyone for my favorite holiday. I didn’t get quite enough pumpkin pie despite my attempts to relay expectations, but other than that it was an immensely fun time. Some highlights include my brother arranged two Dungeons and Dragons games for us to play along with some of his friends, me eating my favorite Kansas City foods (Winsteads Hamburgers and Minsky’s pizza), visiting Top Golf, and learning to use my Meta Ray Ban Sunglasses. These sunglasses can record videos and take photos while you wear them in addition to playing music just like headphones. I also loved going to the gym with my nephew William to workout and introduce my niece Caroline to Virtual Reality dance video games. I even accompanied my niece Olivia to school lunch where I met some of her friends and even ate for free. I should eat lunch with Olivia every day. I dropped by my close friends the Martins for a cup of afternoon […]
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Since I limit my stay in the USA to 35 days a year for tax benefits, I needed to leave the country for a week before returning for Thanksgiving. I had already spent more than three weeks stateside due to a week-long program at UC Berkeley, stopovers in Denver and Wyoming, and trips to Austin and New Orleans. It turned out to be an ideal opportunity to check a destination off of my queue, Playa Del Carmen. My friend Randy loves this place (he loves to party); however, other nomadic friends of mine are less enthusiastic about it, describing it as a typical vacation spot for Canadians and Americans, lacking a distinct identity beyond that, according to them. But I’m quite open-minded; I’ve learned not to pre-judge places I’ve never visited or carry specific expectations when I travel. Playa del Carmen is great! I could totally live here for a few months. There is a lot to do and explore, plenty of great food, accessible beaches, and friendly people. What’s not to love? I was only there for about a week, and during that time I was working constantly from my apartment. I only managed to escape to the beach […]
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People from New York might object, but my vote for America’s coolest city goes to New Orleans. It was my first time visiting, and it was only for four days, but I loved everything I saw, heard, ate, and felt while I was walking around doing stuff. The city doesn’t feel like the rest of the United States, which is a bonus—it feels like an alternative reality, a post-apocalyptic jambalaya with a French twist, in my opinion, even better than France. Now every city, especially New Orleans, has problems. But I’m going to completely ignore them here because I was a tourist and it is completely within my right to just enjoy the things I like about a place I visit and leave the rest to an NPR think piece (‘did Katrina really end?’). The little donut beignets are delightful. The chicory coffee was likewise cute (even though I couldn’t tell a difference compared to normal coffee; maybe it’s just my broken sense of taste). Cajun and Creole food — so special. There is a difference between Cajun and Creole, and I already forgot what it is — let me see if I can save you a Google search while […]
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My Brazilian friend, Valquiria, was going to speak at a conference in Austin, Texas in early November and it would be her first time in the United States so I wanted to be there to welcome her as an ambassador to the USA like she has been an ambassador to me for Brazil. I have never been to Austin before but living in Denver as an adult I met a lot of people who either love Austin, previously lived there or were hoping to return again. The city gets a huge amount of hype within the USA owing to a vibrant music, party and food scene. What once was kind of an edgy, unique and cool alternative city has blown up in the past twenty years to become a mainstream tech hub. During the pandemic people from both coasts moved to Texas to work remotely and save on paying federal income taxes and in the process engineered a sort of cultural revitalization or at least transitioning, at least from my perspective as an outsider who just heard lots of people telling me their opinions about Austin. My post-college roommate Nick back in Allston, Massachusetts and his girlfriend both went to […]
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I stopped in Denver for the first time in a long time — sometime in 2022 I think? Anyway it was time to repack my bag again after so long on the road and I wanted to visit my friends and family. I crashed in the basement of my friend Eric’s house for a few nights and then I headed north to southern Wyoming to visit my dad and his wife on our family’s property in Carbon County. Since my days in the USA are limited for tax purposes (< 35 a year) I always jam pack a lot of obligatory ToDos into a short period of time (re-registering the license plate of my car, Amazon.com orders, catching up with friends etc). This time in Denver I was really fun. I celebrated the University of Colorado’s big first-week win at a watch party in downtown Denver with a big group of alumni, and met up with four different former coworkers. By the time I arrived in Wyoming I was ready to spend time with my dad and go to sleep early. I worked from the kitchen table and had coffee with him and then we rode ATVs around the property […]
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Sayulita has been a Mexican vacation spot for Americans and tourists for a long time, and during the past ten years its popularity seems to have grown. I’ve wanted to visit ever since I saw beach and tacos photos popping up on my Instagram years ago and always had the idea that it could be a stop-over destination on the way to somewhere else or as a short vacation spot to accommodate a beach side work-style. And it did – I ended up staying in two other places as well, San Pancho, a smaller town about fifteen minutes outside of Sayulita which is a little less developed than Sayulita but still retains the same taco and beach vibes. The beach at San Pancho is better than in Sayulita and it seems a better place to stay and visit if you are in the market for a short Mexican getaway, though I also enjoyed Sayulita (and the gym that I used for a couple of days — no air conditioning, no water, 40 degrees and super sweaty). I also spent four days at the W resort in Punta Mita, Mexico which was a special splurge that was a lot of fun […]
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Banff is the sort of scenic mountain town that you might find in Colorado, USA. Big mountains, trees, rivers, lots of tourist appeal, hiking and activities to attract visitors in every season of the year. The real appeal of Banff is not the town of Banff – it’s everything outside of it. For some reason all of us tourists flock there because it gets a lot of the attention for the beauty of Alberta that surrounds it. Banff is just another hyped up touristy mountain town. Skip it if you can and enjoy all the cool stuff outside of it. There are so many hikes to do all over the place offering different views and panoramic landscapes. Morraine Lake and Mirror Lake are both famous places to see but there are some logistical stress that comes with visiting them. The national park service disallows parking or vehicle traffic to manage load, so you need to purchase ticketed reservations. The time slots sell out immediately (as within 10 seconds of them becoming available online during high season). But what you can do is rent a bike or ebike (electrical bike) and ride 9 kilometers from the rental shop to the lakes […]
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Calgary has been on my Canadian hit list for the past couple years as Canada has increasingly become a place of interest to me; it’s like the United States, but it isn’t the United States,. For a travel hipster like me, that’s a cool reason to visit. So far I have visited Montreal, Toronto and Newfoundland and Calgary has been next in queue. Part of my interest in Calgary has come from the annual Calgary Stampede which is a huge, ten day rodeo in the middle of July with many other events and activities, and always seemed similar to Cheyenne Frontier Days, a comparable event in Cheyenne, Wyoming each July for ten days. I couldn’t visit the Stampeded this year owing to my friends’ wedding in Prague at the same time, but I was able to visit in August. The people I talked to while I was in Newfoundland told me how the province of Alberta (within which Calgary is situated) is different from the other places I had visited in Canada. Alberta is more western, mountainous, scenic and rural. It’s always really fun to “discover” a new sort of mico-culture in a country, it makes you feel like an […]
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My friend David is from and lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland and I visited him for the second year in a row to stay at his house and attend the annual George Street Festival. Each year dozens of bars on George Street open their doors and people stream between them as live music bands play in the street during each of the seven nights. David was again a gracious host and we had fun exploring the streets of George Street again, though I think we only made it out about three or four times. When David goes out he likes to stay out until 4 AM which isn’t something I’m so good at handling anymore, though I am proud to say I’m pretty good at drinking David’s drink of choice, Whisky diet gingers. My favorite part about staying at David’s are the afternoon happy hours that happen outside in his back yard around his fire pit, listening to a portable speaker playing tunes while we talk about work and women. I’d fly to St. John’s just for that. The next time I see David there’s a good chance he’ll be married – he met a woman from Jersey (the island) […]
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