Photo credit: Adoramassey – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
I speak English and Spanish separately and together, as well as broken Italian, elementary French and can utter two phrases in German. Yet none of these linguistic tools are absolutely any use to me in Southern California. Every sign across every highway, and every street in every city is pronounced exactly opposite of how it naturally comes out of my mouth.
Continue reading
No matter how much of a city person you are, there is something magical that happens when you surround yourself in a lush landscape and leave the urban jungle behind. Is there a word for that? Yes!
Continue reading
By CrispyCream27 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
An hour from Los Angeles, you’ll “leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy” for about two hundred bucks and a mean sunburn.
Continue reading
It was early November and the fall season air was already brisk. Sweaters and scarves, instead of sandals and spaghetti straps, were staples of my wardrobe. A few months prior I had moved to a new city and, for the first time in my life, I was four hours away from the nearest beach, instead of my usual hard-limit of no more than 45 minutes from door to sand. I needed an escape that required sun, swimming and frosty umbrella drinks, so I looked at a weather map kept heading south until I read 85 degrees and discovered my next destination: Oranjestad.
Continue reading
I spend a lot of time writing about not being home, but if there every was a place that feels as familiar as an old sweater, a college dorm, a pot of chicken soup, and 1970’s linoleum flooring all rolled into one it’s New Orleans.
Continue reading
How it happened? I’m not sure. But I blame South Beach. Yes, I blame the entire southernmost area of the City of Miami Beach for its ridiculous double standard when it comes to women’s footwear.
Continue reading
The city of Temecula is a little under two hours away from LA, which is also the exact amount of time you’ll need to exhaust all of the culo jokes you can come up with.
Continue reading
Sure, I’ve been to places. I’ve traveled by car and plane and ship and train. I’ve experienced new cultures, tasted their food and danced to their music. But, even after visiting the most amazing cities in the world, I return to my birth place with an indescribable feeling of joy and yearning, which I keep to myself.
Continue reading
We are all on a quest for happiness. We are in search of greater fulfillment in our relationships, in our careers and our daily life. Yet, the secret to achieving this level of contentment may lie in the simplest of words: Hygge.
Continue reading
originally published June 2015
In a few weeks, I will embark on my most ambitious road trip thus far: An epic 40-hour, 2,700-mile journey from Miami to Los Angeles — in a Fiat.
Continue reading
Richard Nixon was a congressman, a senator, a two-term vice-president, a near two-term president, and an adviser to the presidents after him. He was also the first president to resign. All of these are facts I knew thanks to my seventh grade civics report on the 37th POTUS. Years later through movies, books and the Pentagon Papers, I learned that he was racist and paranoid, he held grudges and was grossly power-hungry. Basically he was tremendo H.P.
Continue reading
In 1956, Nat King Cole traveled to Cuba to perform at Tropicana, but he couldn’t stay at Hotel Nacional because of the color of his skin.
That same year, 1956, the iconic Capitol Records building was completed. A thirteen-story, earthquake-resistant tower that was the world’s first circular office building. And its nickname became “The House That Nat Built,” because it was he who put the record label on the map.
Continue reading
a little cuban goes a long way 