Argentina

It's easy for beach vacations to go by too quickly because everyday is a blur of beach, reading, pool, and dinner. I've experienced this in Puerto Lopez, Carlsbad, Seignosse, and Alicante. Don't get me wrong, it's great. But it also feels like time is passing too quickly and you want it to slow down. So Sandra and I had a strategy of interspersing activities into each day so we could at least have memory mileposts to demarcate different days. Feel free to skip the table, it's really more for me to remember. I also did this technique when I was in Brazil for 3 months so I have a pretty good log of how I spent those 3 months, which I can still remember the details 9 years later when I read it. AM PM Thursday 12/19 Centro Historico - Free Walking Tour con Edgar San Valentin (lunch) Cafe del Mar, Cancha Ceviche Friday 12/20 Playa Bocagrande con Carlos, Irena, y Deana La Cocina de Pepina, Plaza Trinidad Saturday 12/21 Playa Blanca con Mamalle...

My first overall impression of Cartagena is that it is freaking beautiful. It has a Spanish colonial beach town Caribbean feel. The buildings are painted in bright colors with flowery balconies. The city is one of the oldest in the Americas founded in 1533 principally serving to export precious metals to Spain and import slaves from Africa. Today the city has 1M people and lives off tourism, fishing, and a huge state-owned oil refinery (Ecopetrol). Most of the tourists appear to be domestic Colombians as you don't see than many foreigners when you're walking around. According to our tour guide, you know if someone is a tourist if they are wearing shorts not pants. The locals all wear pants even when it's in the mid-80's.  Colombia is a diverse country with roughly half the country identifying as Mestizo, or mixed, 30% as white, and 10% as African Colombian. Compare this to the US at 72% white, 16% Hispanic, 13% Black, and 5% Asian. Cartagena abolished slave...

After 2 months of living in Germany and 3 weeks of wedding related festivities with the extended family, it was nice to have 5 days with my parents and sister to debrief on everything. We arrived from Porto via a 3-hour train ride to Lisbon. It was interesting to return to a city I already knew 7 years later. Here are my impressions from 2012 . In 2012 I had to explain what AirBnb was: For Lisbon, we decided to try airbnb.com for accomodations, wherein you pay to have someone´s apartment. It´s similar to VRBO, but the minimum stays are much less and the prices are less.     How times have changed. We stayed in  an AirBnb in Lisbon again as AirBnb is now our default choice. Lisbon has transformed over these last 7 years. In 2012, it was in the middle of the Southern European economic crisis. While there are still abandoned buildings in Lisbon, it is much less than before and an Uber driver told me that the government plans to introduce a new measure fining owners of ...