While I was in Cologne, three different times, strangers approached and started conversations with me — a huge surprise. Europeans just don’t do that — and certainly not Germans! I had expected that people in Cologne were friendly, open-minded and warm as that was the driving factor for wanting to visit; Europe is nice but it’s typically much harder to meet new people as an outsider. The most interesting person I met was the manager of a hotel I stayed in who was family friends with the Kennedys, spoke seven languages and was somehow curious about me. We spoke for half an hour — Mathias left an impression and I can’t help but thing the universe was urging me to stick around and explore his city further. The second most interesting person I met while in Cologne was a woman about 60 years old who had invested in Apple stock in 1999 — we were admiring an Apple computer on display from the period (inside a design museum); she told me that because of that wise decision today she’s “almost rich” — in German terms I understood it to mean that she is. Cologne felt like a great place to […]
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I had eight days that I didn’t know what to with after leaving Croatia and before Thanksgiving happened back in the USA so I decided to explore the German Rhineland for the first time. It was a great fit because Split has direct flights to Düsseldorf (one of only four cities during the off-season). Conveniently, Cologne is just 20 miles south of Düsseldorf and was the main draw to me this trip. Bonn was tacked on at the end and facilitated en route planned meetup with my friend Ben who I had seen just weeks before in Bremen. Düsseldorf was an exciting destination because I had no expectations ahead of time. As luck would have it, I arrived the night before the annual one-day Carnival celebration; while the normal Carnival celebration is in February, on November 11th each year there is a one day Carnival event with street celebrations and people partying in costumes. It’s like the precursor to what follows three months later. Imagine my surprise to unexpectedly wander into a cohort of Germany cheerleaders line dancing and throwing each other in the air in front of a local pub. I took some fun photos of the festivities across a few […]
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For the fourth time in three years I returned to Croatia to work, swim and be barefoot. The waning Indian summer of October served as a re-calibration to the internationally-remote lifestyle I had set aside during 5 months living in Denver, Colorado; as such, I focused on walking everywhere, eating healthier and undoing the harm of rigid routine staying in one place always brings me. I did do a couple of touristy things during my first week in Split — a tour of the ship building yard and an excursion to a nearby cave (click link to see photos from each). Other than that though I focused my 5+ weeks more on living a healthy, happy and comfortable life along the sea and developing the daily routine to support it. My apartment was near the beach and afforded a beautiful view of the ever-changing sky between dawn, dusk (here are some highlights). The irony of escaping Denver, only to reinvent a routine elsewhere is a funny pattern I always repeat. My Split routine is really great; in the morning I walk to the gym, only two hundred meters from my front door. Afterwards I walk down to the sea, 300 meters […]
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My friend Ben had sent me a calendar of beer festivals in Germany this autumn. Neither of us had been able to visit Oktoberfest this year and were keen for a mulligan. Ben wanted to meet me in Stuttgart for the second-largest beer festival after Oktoberfest. I had just arrived into Split, Croatia however, and was decompressing from my time in the USA and quite enjoying it — I declined the invitation. Fast-forward a few weeks and it turns out there will be a different festival happening in Bremen the last weekend of October. We booked it – my first weekend adventure for quite some time. I had never been to Hamburg or Bremen and this reconnaissance trip was shorter and easier than Havana and Mexico City in terms of logistics — two nights, 48 hours. Short trips like this afford the freedom to be picky on what you do with your time because with so little of it, you are unencumbered by standard tourist obligations; you can curate what is most convenient and “best” without being obliged to visit a museum that other people feel is important. I had not done a trip like this one for a while […]
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One of the trendiest vacation destinations for Americans completely underwhelmed me. Perhaps expectations of Cuban cigars, classic cars and a laid-back atmosphere poisoned me to the reality I immediately perceived of deep economic and social problems masked with a tourist-friendly facade; the entire impression felt as though I was watching a performance with a simultaneous eye on the happenings behind the curtain. There are a few places I never need to return to and Havana is one of them. I knew going into it that it was a place for European and American tourists and “the real Cuba” existed in the rural areas not the capital. Nevertheless I was looking forward to a four day reconnaissance trip to scope it out to see if I wanted to come back to explore the rest further. I anticipated that I would see lots of touristy stuff – vendors, solicitors, “authentic Cuban X” for display and sale; none of that was a surprise. Nor was the highly curated 4-block radius of Old Town Havana — which is delightfully cute and very clean. Musicians playing in cafes and bars, asking you for tips. The classic old American cars from the 1940s and 1950s really […]
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I shake my head recollecting the period of time I believed Mexico City to be a polluted, dirty, crowded, dangerous and ugly city not worth visiting. I’m not exactly sure why I came to believe this but it probably had something to do with an American bias that perceived things happening south of the boarder generally repugnant. This same perspective admittedly also inhibited me from choosing to learn Spanish in school as a second language (instead I chose Latin — who chooses Latin?) — a limitation I am currently working to overcome. It’s a shameful memory to remember a time when I could off-handedly intuit a city, and probably its nation, as not worthy of my interest without ever visiting. I was thankfully forced to reconsider this perspective as friends (many of them) kept relating how wonderful Mexico City was. I looked at them unconvinced — “what about all the kidnappings and murders?” — then it was my turn to be looked at strangely, “uh — it’s not like that at all.” And just like that I became one of those people I encounter all the time in the USA who are guilty of being a little out of touch […]
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After spending 5 months in Denver, Colorado I needed a change of pace so I heeded the invitations of my international friends who now call Venice Beach home and spent three nights steps from the ocean, channeling some raw creative humanity to break me out of my routine. Boy did it work. Something I have had to rediscover and reminded myself of the past few months is just how much I require transition to be the best version of myself. I thrive with the discomforts of the non-routine and find myself more myself when I seek it out. My short trip to LA could never be described as uncomfortable — everything was easily facilitated with the help of my local friends Arestia, Johnson, Derryl, Chris and Brittany. Between In-and-Out burgers, a Saturday bar crawl on electric scooters and a hip, industrial art show in downtown LA — I had so much fun mixing things up. A total jolt to my system and a needed reminder of just how important environment and wonderful people are to maintaining a healthy, happy Reid.
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I returned to my favorite city in the world for two months of living my daily routine in the grungy, bustling neighborhood of Chapinero. When I wasn’t working from cafes in the area I was exploring neighboring towns in Cundinamarca like Sopó and La Fuente. With every returning visit Bogotá feels less like a destination necessitating exploration and more like a comfortable home to live a life. As for learning Spanish – I continue to improve slowly though focus is spread among other endeavors contemporaneously which serves to limit dedicated efforts. As a historically all-or-nothing person it is an exercise in little-by-little. I was honored to host my sister and a niece and a nephew in Bogotá for a week as they celebrated their spring break with me. After hearing how much I love Colombia they were brave enough to visit; but since Bogotá is not an easy destination it required effort to show and help advocate for all the great stuff sitting beneath the trafficy, somewhat-dirty exterior. The first day of their adventure featured a stroll around grimey Chapinero, a visit to Monserrate, the historic, graffitied neighborhood of Candelaria, the Gold Museum featuring lots of artifacts from the indigenous […]
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After fleeing the United States to Bogotá for a week after San Francisco, I rendezvoused with a group of international friends living in Medellín for six days and took it as an opportunity to hang out with international people that are otherwise hard to pin down. I stayed in two different apartments in Poblado, a really nice and also touristy neighborhood of Medellín where my friends had chose to stay. I’ve only been to Medellín once before and as I wrote afterwards it wasn’t a city that I really enjoyed. I hesitate to pass further judgement this time around because I didn’t even set foot outside of Poblado — instead choosing to work and hang out with my buddies rather than venture and explore a city I already decided I dislike. Nevertheless I will pass judgement! I really dislike Poblado. Just about everything about Poblado — from the dense demographic of expats, the meandering roadways with narrow sidewalks on a single side that switch from one side of the street to the other seemingly at random necessitating that you wait for the line of passing cars to give you passage between them so you might again not walk in the road — to repeat the […]
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Back in December my sister forwarded an airline promotion email between Denver and San Francisco so I bought a flight to visit her and her family for a week in February. The intent was to inject some state-side adventure and family time as a way of self-training appreciation for what America has to offer me. It worked well in Kansas City for Christmas, Breckenridge in January; could such an ongoing strategy of regular, domestic adventures be the key to avoiding American stagnation? Is this the mode that can allow for me to live a conventional life somewhere in the USA without getting stuck in the sort of time hole that makes five or ten years of my life disappear in the blink of an eye? It’s a coping mechanism I’ve been aggressively testing in 2018. So I flew out for a week in early February to live the life my San Fran Fam lives — and it was great. My nieces and nephews are rockstars and being able to hang out with them was the highlight of my week. My sister’s family lives on the West Side of the San Francisco bay in Marin County which is really posh and […]
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