The night before the pig’s last day came cold and crisp. Gabi made sure to put extra wood in the cast iron stove of our bedroom so that we wouldn’t be cold. Before going to bed she pokes her head in to say, “By the way, wear clothes tomorrow that you don’t mind getting sprayed in blood. Good night!
My fascination with the Panama Canal began sometime in 7th grade social studies with Mr. Farley. Mr. Farley didn’t have his own teeth any longer, was hunched over and short of breath. There was a slackness about his frame that immediately caused sympathy to see. At least from me, I suspect other 7th graders didn’t ...
Grandma Josephine was a Morse code operator during World War II for the British Army. She worked tirelessly in a bunker for most of the war, but one special night, while at a dance, she fell in love with a dashing, young American soldier, Grandpa Alan. I had always thought their story was one of the most romantic ...
Every country has something that people will quiz you on in order to judge your experience as a tourist there. Argentina: “Is the steak really that amazing and did you learn to tango?” Spain: “Did you go to a bullfight?” Brazil: “Did you wear a thong bikini?” Spain again, “Did you go topless on the beach?” India: ...
I have always had a crush on the gauchos of Argentina. The image of wide open Pampas, patrolled by the soulful and melancholy cowboys was alluring to me. It was a dream of mine to go there one day. Shortly after arriving in Buenos Aires, I booked a weekend at an estancia and was off to fulfill ...
I was determined, upon arriving in Buenos Aires, to leave it four months later, able to comfortably claim Spanish fluency. The only problem was figuring out how to do that. I dreaded enrolling in the gringo, pre-packaged Spanish and Tango language mills, catering to obnoxious foreign partiers who were there ostensibly under the pretext of ...
Modern times had turned Viking princesses soft, but I didn’t know this as we approached them in the dim, cool light before dawn.
The infamous mustard scam flashed across my brain as I protectively swung my backpack to my hip and darted down the sidewalk taking the first right onto a side street mumbling something like “those f*ckers”. I managed to wipe away all of the applesauce with my scarf and see out of my glasses again.
Somehow I’d always thought of Ecuador as lying along the fat waistband of the earth, but hadn’t imagined that it would be so high in the sky. Since we landed in Quito we’ve been at elevation and now, as we reach our destination at the base of Cotopaxi volcano, my lungs wince at 12,000 ft. ...
We’re Bonito in the interior of Brazil. After three weeks of beaches I reluctantly decided that it was time to see a part of Brazil without sand. I was happy to check out a new ecoregion until a nice Brazilian girl I was chatting with mentioned the “sucuri” that swallowed her dad’s fishing buddy whole ...
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