Say, “I’m moving to Brazil, dammit!” Find a friend who has just passed on a teaching job in the Brazilian capital, not your first choice of cities, but only 90 minutes away by air from your first choice of cities. Interview with your prospective employers via Skype from San Francisco. Respond with a resounding “yes” […]
Moving to Brazil in 21 Easy Steps Read More
You’re new to a city. You’re like Bo…you’own know Diddly. What do you do? You log onto CouchSurfing.org, that’s what you do. A social networking site that’s actually built around facilitating live-and-in-the-flesh human connection, The CouchSurfing Project puts world travelers and other worldly folk in contact with one another for interaction as benign as a
A House-Warming in Brasília -or- Why CouchSurfing is the Greatest Thing on Earth Read More
Word. A work of art. Yes, the current local time was indeed 5:34AM. Dawn in Dade County. Fatigue setting in. Uma garotinha…awwwwww. Ole Man River. The Mis’sippi ain’t got nuthin on this. Not exactly ATL. The river runs through it (the dark water on the left is from a separate tributary that merges with the
Photo Essay: Crossing the Amazon by Air Read More
New World in the Tropics is the title of a book written in the 50s on modern Brazilian culture by famed Bahian anthropologist and scholar, Gilberto Freyre. It’s also the theme under which I embark on another journey, begin another chapter in my life. I started writing this blog as my four years in another
New World in the Tropics Read More
San Francisco’s black population has declined from 13% in 1970 to 7% today. Micah sees himself as less than one-in-ten; Joanne sees herself as just one. Medicine for Melancholy explores love, race, and, to my mind, America’s most beautiful city. Watch: Then watch:
From the AV Room: Of Isolation and Melancholy Read More
Living outside of New York, it’s easy to miss entertaining, insightful, and even inspirational stage plays. Thanks to Spike Lee, the entertaining, insightful, and inspirational Passing Strange was filmed on its very last Broadway performance in 2008, capturing an amazing theatrical experience in an appropriate medium for temporal and spacial export beyond the Great White
On Monday, I announced that I’d be hitting a Grand Tour of Guatemala and Honduras next month, using frequent flier miles I’d accrued with Delta. On Tuesday, that entire scheme fell apart. See, what had happened was: Because Delta was merging the former Northwest Airlines’ computer systems information into its own, many of the functions
And Just Like That, Plans Change Read More
Back when I was in Cairo a few months ago, I had taken a taxi into the Old City to catch a free performance of the Whirling Dervishes (in Turkey, which has higher-profile dervishes, they charge admission). As soon as I got out of the cab near the market, a loquacious peddler named Ahmed approached
From the AV Room: Egyptian Papyrus Art Read More
Just this week, I had begun the preliminary planning for two weeks of volunteering this summer at an environment-focused work camp run by the NEGES Foundation in Léogâne, Haiti. Just yesterday, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake rocked the country, its epicenter only a few miles away from Léogâne, just west of the capital, Port-au-Prince. With communication
A few days ago, The New York Times published its list of the “31 Places to Go in 2010.” My former adopted country, Colombia, clocked in at number 26. Certainly, the country is worthy of inclusion on this list; the cultural and geographic diversity alone make it a stimulating visit, and it’s not any more
