GHB has the best wi-fi I had seen in weeks so it was already great that I got there early but it became even greater when I got to help the staff sing along with all the melodramatic radio ballads before any other passengers showed up. For my layover day in Nassau I took the ferry over to Atlantis and the casinos because I couldn’t bring myself to ( Read more... )

Although not quite as ad-hoc as the last beach wedding I attended, this one was also as DIY as it was full of laughter and love. The day before the Big One was prep day at the Villa de las Palmas, a stunning beachfront property where Curtis, Evan, and myself formed Team Frond and scoured waterline of the postcard-perfect pink (!) sand beach for ( Read more... )

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Jon and Willow have plans for a wildly successful sustainable eco-hostel in the family islands so they have moved themselves and Yarrow and the cat Sophie to a cottage near Governor’s Harbour. Eleuthera (el-OO-tra) is a pirate fairy tale of an island twenty minutes flight time to the east of Nassau, a hundred miles long but only like half a mile ( Read more... )

Merry Christmas! Zoe and Victor wouldn’t hear of me spending the holiday alone so they invited me to their family dinner of lobster and tomatoes and stories. Danny’s heart would have broken at the 75-year-old great-grandfather whose eyes filled with tears as he described the VHS tapes he has of his grandchildren in Miami, his only contact with them ( Read more... )

A literal cámara oscura is a cool periscope thing that uses lenses and mirrors to show the whole city from a tower on the old square, where a tour guide works the pulleys and a parabolic canvas to manifest a kind of mechanical magic that brings all the sights in and out of focus as the mirror points different ways but the funniest thing was the ( Read more... )

Individual days become indistinct in memory but I know I spent a reasonable amount of time at all the hotels that claim to have invented a cocktail: mojitos at the Nacional, a Cuba Libre by the pool at the Cohíba Melia in Vedado. At the Hotel Nacional I decided that my new favorite song is Dos Gardenias Para Ti, as long as it is being sung by a ( Read more... )

“¡MÁS SOCIALISMO!”
--Billboards at the Havana airportI am actually absurdly proud of myself for pulling this latest one off. For Christmas 2013 I successfully arranged and executed a solo trip to Cuba, and I made it while Castro was still alive like I have always wanted. My adventure came despite several relevant life situations major and minor, ( Read more... )

(For earlier trips, see VI, VII, IX, and X. This year’s participants: Kate, Matt, Jin, Michael, Lindsay, Scott, Ethan, Elisa, Geoff, Irene)


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Camden Town is...the same as it ever was. Sex Pistols Tshirts, bong gas masks, crap takeaway from the endless identical fried-food stalls lining the canal, unhygienic-looking discount piercing parlors, and vintage-cyber-goth fashions in the Stables Market. I had a temporary mission to find a postcard saying “Camden” for Grace’s son but kept getting ( Read more... )