Mar 30, 2016

Barcelona on a Budget

On my recent 12-day trip to Barcelona, I tried to keep my spending below €300. If it hadn’t been for the vending machine that ate my money and the generous presents I bought for my friends, I could have done it. (I went over by about €7.) Despite my financial constraints, I had an amazing time and didn’t skimp on any adventures. 

Here are my tips for doing Barcelona on a budget.

t10 card

1. T-10 Metro Ticket 
The Barcelona public transit system is phenomenal, but a single journey costs €2.15! Purchase a T-10 metro card which allows for ten journeys within Zone 1 for only €9.95. It can be used by multiple people and is valid on the metro, buses, trams, and funiculars. The card also allows free transfers between lines. (Psst! You can even use the T-10 card to take the number 46 bus from Plaça Espanya to the airport.)

Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya free on Saturdays
2. Free Museums on Sundays
A lot of Barcelona’s best museums are free of charge every Sunday after 3pm.  Lines can be long, but in some cases you can get the ticket in advance.  I went to the Picasso Museum and got a free ticket at 1pm for the 3pm entrance that day.  Other free Sunday museums in Barcelona include:

  • Museu Marítim de Barcelona
  • MNAC: Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (Saturdays)
  • Museu Picasso
  • MUHBA Museu d'Història de Barcelona
  • Museu d'Història de Catalunya (First Sunday of the month)
  • Museu Frederic Marès
  • Museu de la Música
  • Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
  • Jardí Botànic


Sagrada Familia
3. Free Barcelona Audio Guides 
The audio guide at Sagrada Familia costs €7, but you can download an MP3 of the izi.TRAVEL version for free. The website offers a number of other free Barcelona city guide tours in multiple languages. Visit the izi.TRAVEL website for the full list. 

Free Walking Tour through the Mercado de La Boqueria

4. Free Walking Tour
Of course, the free walking tours aren’t necessarily free as the guides do ask for tips.  But they’re almost always entertaining and thorough.  Plus, you can get insider tips from a local on where to eat, what to see, and (most importantly) what to avoid. Free walking tours are also a great way to get a lay of the land when you first arrive in a city.




5. Montjuïc Cemetery 
Unquestionably one of the strangest places I’ve ever been, this unique cemetery is free to the public. It was built in the late 19th century to accommodate the population growth caused by Barcelona’s rapid industrialization and it contains more than one million burials and cremation ashes. It’s conveniently located on Montjuïc along with a number of other attractions and is well worth the trek.  


6. Free Accommodation  
I was able to stay in an apartment close to Plaça d'Espanya completely free of charge, on the condition that I fed a loveable cat named Arnie every morning. I found the assignment on the Trusted Housesitters website. You can also find housesitting and petsitting opportunities on Mind My House and House Carers.

cool libraries

7. Dipòsit de les Aigües Library at Pompeu Fabra University 
You can visit a 19th century reservoir that has been converted into a university library. It's a little tricky to find, so ask one of the students on campus for directions. The library is also a great place for digital nomads in Barcelona to get some work done. Heads up, you might have to sweet talk the person at reception in order to get login information for the wifi.


Palau de la Música Catalana

8. Concert at Palau de la Música Catalana 
Touring the exquisite Palau de la Música Catalana costs a whopping €18. Yikes! However, a ticket in the nosebleed section for a weeknight concert starts as low as €10. Visit the official website to purchase tickets and see the full program.


9. Souvenirs 
If you want to bring a nice bottle of cava, traditional Spanish sweets, or vacuum sealed blood sausage, don’t waste your money at the airport duty free stores. You can find all of these things markedly cheaper at any supermarket chain.

barcelona meat

10. DIY Bocadillo 
Eating out for every meal in Barcelona gets expensive quickly and cheap restaurants are hard to come by. You can save a ton of money by purchasing food at local supermarkets and preparing it yourself. Bocadillos can cost as much as €5 on the street, but you can make your own for around €1.50. Local produce is also quite affordable and is a great snack between sightseeing.

Mar 21, 2016

Barcelona Adventures

Catalan Art Museum

Last month, I spent twelve days watching a cat named Arnie in Barcelona.  I met his owner, Simon, on the Trusted Housesitters website.  A lone cat in a cosmopolitan city is like the Holy Grail of petsitting assignments, so I really lucked out.

The apartment where I stayed was located near the Plaça d'Espanya and the building itself was situated directly over the Hostafrancs metro station. Every 4-5 minutes the gentle rumble of a passing train would cause odds and ends in the house to rattle ever so slightly. It was wonderful.

The shops along the street were a repeated sequence of the butcher, the baker, and the pharmaceutical maker.  It was as though there were a city ordinance stating that citizens should never be more than a hundred meters from a blood sausage, baguette, or suppository.

Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

I started my Barcelona adventure at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, which was a total steal at only €12 for a two-day ticket. And I definitely needed two days to see everything. You can only look at so many biblical torture scenes before the threat of eternal damnation starts to lose its effect.

Xavier Gosé


While I was there, the museum had a spectacular exhibit on Catalan artist Xavier Gosé, an early 20th century Art Nouveau and Art Deco illustrator and painter. I particularly liked a placard describing the artist's humble beginnings in Paris which read, “Gosé was worn out by the heat in summer and warmed himself in winter by the smoke of cigarettes and the breath of his bohemian friends”.

Montjuic Cemetery
Montjuïc Cemetery
Before heading to England, Simon loaned me his copy of “Weird and Wonderful Barcelona”.  The small guidebook mostly made me feel like a geriatric loser for not wanting to go to the suggested underground bars and party until 7am.  Those days are behind me.  (But they did exist, for anyone who’s questioning my coolness.) Siesta > Fiesta. Anyway, it gave me some very cool recommendations not found on the “Top 20 Attractions” lists I typically read.  

For starters, it led me to the Montjuïc Cemetery, which is unquestionably one of the strangest places I’ve ever been. The cemetery was built in the late 19th century to accommodate the population growth caused by Barcelona’s rapid industrialization.  According to Wikipedia, it contains more than one million burials and cremation ashes.

Montjuic Cemetery

When I approached the cemetery, it looked more like a housing complex than a necropolis.  The rows and columns of uniform squares seemed to go on ad infinitum.  I was impressed at how well the plots were maintained.  So many of them had fresh flowers that, based on the engraved dates, could only have been placed by someone born after the occupant's passing.

Human burial rituals are fascinating to me, but also pretty bizarre.  I was planning to donate my remains to Bodies: The Exhibition (with the stipulation that they not use my artery clogged heart as an example of a poor diet), but apparently you have to be impoverished and Chinese for them to accept you.  Bummer.

Barcelona Architecture

As with all my trips, I was on a very tight budget. One way I saved money was by walking everywhere.  I also got to see a lot more of the city that way.  The metronome of skateboards on cobblestones, wind rushing through bike spokes, and children on scooters provided the soundtrack. I almost got a kink in my neck from staring up, slack-jawed, at all the gorgeous architecture.  Every hundred meters or so, I’d stop to take a photo of what I was certain was the most beautiful building in the city.

I have to applaud the waste management system in Barcelona.  The city was so clean. Whenever I saw street sweepers late at night, I wanted to salute them.  Also, do Barcelonians know how lucky they are to have level sidewalks and ample bike paths?  I love Istanbul with all my heart, but it’s definitely lacking in infrastructure. The bumpy sidewalks here are almost completely concealed by cigarette butts, most of them still ablaze.

Granted, every city has its underbelly and I’ve no doubt that there are corners of Barcelona overflowing with trash on uneven pavement.  But for the most part, I stayed well within the edges of the tourist map carefully selected by the city’s best cartographers.  I could not have been more impressed with what I saw.


Casa Batlló

On February 14th, Barcelona was my Valentine.  We had a fascinating, beautiful, and romantic date.  Well, I ended up paying for dinner and haven’t received a response to any of my clever texts, but it was undoubtedly the best Valentine’s Day ever. I visited the Picasso Museum, Gaudí's Casa Batlló, Barcelona Cathedral, and wherever else my lumbering feet lead me.

Barcelona Cathedral
Barcelona Cathedral
During my time in the city, I learned a lot about Catalonia, which for all my fellow know-nothings is an autonomous region in Spain with its own language, culture, and traditions. There's a long and complicated history between Spain and Catalonia with the Catalans often on the losing side. Under the Francoists, their language was banned for much of the 40s and 50s and they were subjected to a slew of other harsh restrictions up until Franco’s death in 1975. 

Today, Catalan (a blend of French, Spanish, and some other stuff) is the preferred language in schools. Many exhibits throughout the city had placards with descriptions printed first in bold Catalan, next English, and finally Spanish at the very bottom. I have to think the positioning was deliberate.

Sardana

Outside of Barcelona Cathedral, I saw a cobla (wind instruments band) playing Catalan music. Several circles of people performed a traditional folk dance called the Sardana, which I later learned was banned under the Franco regime.  The participants, who all seemed to be in the 60+ crowd, wore somber expressions as they moved in unison. I didn’t realize the cultural significance of the dance at the time, but the pride these people radiated was almost palpable.

I wonder if forty years from now I’ll be solemnly performing the Macarena in a public square with the rest of my generation.  I doubt it. Growing up a white middle-class secular American millennial*, I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to experience cultural oppression or forced assimilation. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful to me that people can find such immense dignity and contentment through music and movement of the past.

*I am so boring.


Sweet, sweet Arnie!
As far as felines go, Arnie is one of the best. We hung out all the time, took siestas on the couch, and he never complained about my Netflix choices. Arnie’s one flaw was that every night around 3AM, he would launch a full assault across my sleeping body. 

I don’t mean a gentle nuzzle against my face or a playful paw across my arm, but a blitzkrieg of claws and maniacal meows. At the initial onslaught, I would cocoon myself in the comforter and go limp, like someone being mauled by a bear. Arnie was undeterred. After several minutes of his unyielding attack, I would gently put him outside the bedroom, mumble a friendly "piss off", and close the door. He didn't mind.

Barcelona Streets

Spanish really is a beautiful language to listen to. The conversations I overheard in Barcelona were fast, fluid, and melodic. My nearly nonexistent Spanish speaking abilities, on the other hand, were lethargic, staccato, and monosyllabic.

Because of my background in French, I breezed through a semester of Spanish in university, but in my arrogance retained none of it.  So I was stuck with what I’d learned in the 6th grade, which consisted of colors, numbers 1-10, and whatever else was covered in the first VHS tape of Muzzy.

The thing I most remember about middle school Spanish was that our final project was to make a piñata. Throughout the semester, our teacher Señora Gibson encouraged us to get creative. I waited until the last minute to do the assignment and used a single balloon to make an Easter egg. When I turned it in, the newspaper was still wet and the hastily applied pastel paint was streaking down the sides.  My wilted egg received a generous B-.  

Lunar New Year

My time in Spain lined up with the Lunar New Year and I felt very nostalgic when I saw a handful of Korean women dressed in traditional hanbok outside of Sagrada Família. When I lived in Seoul, I spent a full week teaching myself how to say “Happy Lunar New Year” in Korean to impress my coworkers. I approached the women in Barcelona and gave a heavily accented, “새해 복 많이 받으세요!”, which was met with oohs and polite applause. It's my proudest moment to date in 2016.

Barcelona View
View from Park Güell
Set in Barcelona, the 2003 film L’Auberge Espagnole is on the top ten movie list of any American who’s passed French 102.  I used to fantasize about living in an Erasmus flat with an eccentric, but lovable amalgam of expats in the heart of a European city just like the main character.  I briefly got my wish in Istanbul, but it was actually pretty terrible and nothing like the movie.  It turns out that messy roommates and a filthy bathroom are not endearing in real life. (Not even in retrospect.)  All the same, I hoped that the film hadn’t missed the mark in its portrayal of Barcelona.

Park Guell

I headed to Park Güell, one of the filming locations, and was not disappointed. I was reminded of the kissing scene and for the first time on my trip got a little lonely.  I didn’t necessarily want to have a steamy make out sesh with a sexy Frenchie*, but I wished that there had been someone to take just one flattering photo of me on the colorful bench. And also to give a dirty look to those American exchange students who were clearly laughing at me, I just couldn’t figure out why. Despite approaching several seemingly intimidating and camera-savvy people, I had no such luck on either front. Merde.

*Mais ce serait très agréable.

Sant Sadurní d'Anoia
Sant Sadurní d'Anoia
I met up with Duncan, the Editor in Chief of Urban Travel Blog, which is the first (and only) website to publish one of my pieces. A longtime expat in Barcelona, he gave me loads of great tips for exploring the city. For example, he told me to avoid restaurants with photographs of food on the outside, which was good, because I’d been looking exclusively at those eateries. 

Duncan kindly invited me to a birthday party in Sant Sadurní d'Anoia, a small municipality an hour’s train journey from Barcelona. This quaint scenic town is the center of cava (Spanish champagne) production in Catalonia. The sunny day was a blur of endless wine, new friends, and onions.

Calçots
Grilling Calçots in Sant Sadurní d'Anoia
My time in Barcelona fortuitously coincided with Calçotada, a Catalan celebration of the harvest of a type of scallion called a calçot.  How lucky am I?  

After the onions are harvested, they’re grilled over a barbecue.  Next, you peel off the charred skin, dip it in a special salsa, tilt your head back, and inhale the scallion like an animal.  At least that’s what everyone else was doing, but we were all several cava bottles deep by that point.  

I am a monster.

The calçots salsa was so good, that when I got back to the city, I bought a jar of it and started putting it on all of my food- sandwiches, pasta, eggs, everything. I'm not sure if it was gastronomically acceptable, but I didn't care. What can I say? I’m a maverick when it comes to sauces.

Palau de la Música Catalana
Palau de la Música Catalana

Visiting the exquisite Palau de la Música Catalana was definitely on my itinerary, but it cost a whopping €18 just to visit. Yikes! However, a ticket in the nosebleed section for a weeknight concert only set me back €10. When the performer is a solitary pianist, having a front row seat is of little importance.


Hospital de Sant Pau
Modernisme architecture of the Hospital de Sant Pau

I tried to get out of the house to work as much as possible, but a lot of the cafes I went to had a 40-minute time limit on WiFi. Don’t they know that the first half hour of the workday is spent looking at Facbeook and cat videos on YouTube?

The Tradizionalia bakery next to the apartment had free unlimited internet though, so I spent a lot of time there, covered in croissant crumbs, with my laptop positioned next to a single remaining sip of cafe con leche to justify staying for several hours.  After a few days of this, I set out to find a quieter and ideally free place to work.

I read about a 19th century reservoir that had been converted into a university library in the “Weird and Wonderful Barcelona” book and decided to hunt it down.  Once I reached the campus, I actually had to use the phrase “¿Donde está la biblioteca?” multiple times.  (Gracias, Muzzy!) I went up and down numerous sets of stairs, until I ended up at a circulation desk.  Two students, who looked like they had just fallen off the Colors of Benetton runway, gave me directions in flawless English.

Dipòsit de les Aigües
Dipòsit de les Aigües Library at Pompeu Fabra University

After navigating through a rather humdrum library of college kids looking at Facebook, I finally found it. But once I unpacked my stuff, I discovered that only students and faculty could use the WiFi.  I returned to the circulation desk and explained between labored breaths, “No I’m not a student, I just really like libraries”.  The cover-worthy boy and girl conferred in Spanish with furrowed brows for a few moments before graciously giving me their login information.

Remember, kids: If you’re sweaty and pathetic enough, people might just give you what you want.  Whether it’s out of kindness or an effort to remove your stench from their presence is completely irrelevant.

Calamari Tapas
Tapas with the lovely Zsuzsanna!

The restaurant scene in Barcelona was pretty phenomenal, but as I mentioned, I was on a budget, so I prepared most of my food at home.  One of the benefits of coming from a country where people are raised on Wonder bread and Kool-Aid is that my flavor expectations are incredibly low. This meant that the cheap off-brand groceries from the supermarket, considered unpalatable by locals, tasted like gourmet delicacies to me. The cheese I bought at the SuperCor Exprés would have made a French person gag or, more likely, go on strike.

tapas
Chorizo, blood sausage, calamari, pan con tomate, and patatas bravas

In recent years, the importance of eating healthy has weighed heavy on me. (Pun intended.) I do my best to eat plant based at home and avoid sugar Monday - Friday, but I’m also not a freaking sadist. If I’m in a place that I’ve never been, I do not hesitate to unhinge my jaw and Pacman my way through town.

Barcelona Market
Meat bouquets!

So what if dairy makes me bloated? Pour me another cafe con leche, dammit. The excess meat intake is slowly shaving years off my life? Keep the chorizo coming. You say that the sheer volume of sugar consumption is setting me on the fast track to diabetes? Another churro, please. And yes, the overwhelming intake of carbs is making it increasingly difficult to zip my pants. BRING ON THE TAPAS.




For my twelve day adventure, I set a strict budget of 300.  If it hadn’t been for the vending machine that ate my money and the generous presents I bought my friends, I could have done it.

Listen, if people can brag about their kids graduating from preschool (an accomplishment which basically means that they didn't ingest a lethal amount of finger paste), I can brag about finding €1 jamón ibérico.

After tallying everything, I ended up spending exactly €310.07. This included lodging (which was free), a day trip, food, drinks, a walking tour, transportation, museums, a professional concert, and approximately one million cortados. I can show any non-believers out there my notebook, as long as they promise not to be judgmental about my chorizo consumption.  

Adios for now, Arnie! 
Photo by the very talented Simon Crinks

My time in Barcelona was truly exceptional.  If I had to choose one takeaway from the experience, it’s that I was forced to confront my ignorance again and again.  It’s refreshing to be regularly reminded that you’re an idiot. Also, the onions were tops.  I hope I can return soon to continue the expansion of my mind and my waistline.


Jan 6, 2016

Floridian Adventures


In August, I was at the family health center in my neighborhood for some routine blood tests.  As the doctor scanned the small result sheet, his eyes darting back and forth between the ideal chemical levels and mine, he asked what I was doing in Turkey.

I’ve been asked this innumerable times and can give my response (in very broken Turkish) without thinking.  And then the inevitable follow-up question comes, “Where are your parents?”

“They’re in America.”
“America?!  What about your brothers or sisters?”
“I have one older brother.  He lives in California.”
Generally speaking, Turks tend to live in closer proximity to their families than Americans do. Living on different continents seems inconceivable to some people.
“Your whole family is in America?!”
“Yes.”
“You’re alone here?  You have no family?”
“Well...I have friends here.  Great friends.”
He gave me a disapproving, tsk, tsk, tsk.
“Don’t you miss your family?”
“Of course, but there’s email and Skype.”
“Email?  Skype? That’s not the same thing. Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!
“Yes, yes. I know. I know.”



I left, pleased with my potassium levels and charmed by the doctor’s concern over my absent family.



That night, my dad called to tell me that my mom had just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

I suddenly understood what the doctor was talking about.

I decided to work from America for a couple of months*, because I wanted to have a front row seat to watch my mom kick cancer’s ass.  I’ll spare everyone the suspense and tell you now that she didn’t disappoint.  Rather than simply kick its ass, she disemboweled it, had it quartered, and maimed its cold dead remains.

What I'm trying to say is that my amazing mother is now 100% cancer free!


With the support of my infinitely kind bosses.

While I was overjoyed to spend time with my parents, eat S'mores Poptarts everyday, and watch Netflix with my dog, I was pretty unenthusiastic about returning to America. When I made the decision to move abroad five years ago, I naively proclaimed, “Twenty-two years is long enough to spend in one country.”  It's worth mentioning that while I had a decent amount of adventures in my first couple of decades, about 90% of those years were spent in Michigan.

Since then, I’ve spent the majority of my life overseas (with the exception of two prolonged unemployed stints that I’m going to go ahead and gloss over) judging my homeland from afar.  Living in Florida for two months made me see that I may have been selling my country a little short.

rob steele
Just creeping on my dad from a parking structure. This is in December!

My parents relocated from Pennsylvania to Delray Beach, Florida in July, when my dad was hired as the president and CEO of Old School Square, the local cultural arts center. This coastal city of 65,000 residents is situated in Palm Beach County about 90 minutes north of Miami. During my time there, I constantly compared everything to the Midwest.

Happy sharks!
Some of the most obvious differences were the subtropic plants and animals.  Michigan is home to a remarkable spectrum of wildlife, but it's all largely varying shades of brown which ends up as roadkill.  Seeing a scarlet cardinal or bluejay in winter is cause to summon the entire household to the window.  

In Florida, the technicolor flora and fauna were truly amazing. We have petting zoos with goats and rabbits in the Midwest. In Florida, they have shark feedings. Apparently sharks like to sleep in late on Sunday and have their brunch around 1PM like the rest of us.


captured lizard


I captured this little guy in the bathroom before relocating him to the front yard.   Lizards, big and small, were everywhere.  Whenever I walked our dog Scout around the neighborhood, scores of six-inch reptiles would scurry across our path.  I occasionally saw lizards as long as three-feet, practically dinosaurs! 

Eat your heart out, National Geographic.
One unforeseen benefit to living in America was that I immediately went down an entire size.  In Turkey, all of the clothes I buy are a snug size large. But when I arrived in Florida, I became a husky medium.  There was no change to my weight, but U.S. sizes are labeled to make all of us corn syrup guzzling Americans feel better about our waistline. I love it. How do you like my broad shoulders now, LC Waikiki?  Kiss my moderately sized American butt, DeFacto!

local avocado
Radioactive avocados!

I was surprised by the myriad of different food available in south Florida.  The local avocados were nearly quadruple the size of the ones in Michigan.  Mangoes, starfruit, and plantains, which are overpriced oddities in the Midwest, were mixed in with the affordable produce in Delray.  

After arriving, I noticed a few conch shell restaurants downtown.  The only time I’d ever heard of a conch shell was when my 10th grade English class read “Lord of the Flies” and we debated whether or not it was pronounced “Konch” or “Konk”. (It's the latter by the way.)





During Kayla’s visit from Colorado, she was happy to try some with me.
As we were leaving the house, I said, “Okay, Mom.  We’re going to eat some conch!”

“YOU’RE EATING WHAT?”, she asked horrified.

I’m not a seafood enthusiast, but I didn’t want to turn my nose up at this cultural experience.  We ordered the fried conch, which seemed like the most palatable option.  It tasted pretty chewy, but was surprisingly good, despite my face in the above photo.

My favorite person!
Kayla and I spent two perfect days at the beach. As we were basking in the sun on the second day, we heard the wails of a ten-year-old boy screaming for his mother, who was standing about 15 feet away chatting with her friends.

“MOOOOOOM!!”

After squinting, we saw that the child, who was crouched in four-inches of water, had been separated from his swim trunks, which were floating a few yards from his completely naked body.

“PLEASE, MOM!”, he begged.

I’m typing this in all caps, because this kid sent sonic waves in a one mile radius.  Beach goers pretended not to notice the shrieking stark naked youth.  The fact that the tide was going out was not to his advantage.  He sat there, immobile, knees pulled to his chest, as his bare bottom was revealed with each receding wave.

delray beach

“We are seeing the worst moment in this kid’s life”, Kayla said,  “past or future.”

She was right.  Twenty years from now, he’d be reclined on a leather couch saying, “Well, doctor, I suppose my downward spiral really began that day at the beach”.

“MOM, PLEASE!”, he howled.

His mom continued conversing with the other heartless adults.  When the screams reached 150 decibels, they gestured to his red trunks and insisted that he could get them himself.

He refused to even turn his head.

“MOOOOOOOOM!!”

In the adults’ defense, the boy could have crawled on his elbows to his salvation relatively unnoticed. In the kid’s defense, when you’re 10, completely nude on a beach surrounded by dozens of onlookers, logic and survival skills may evade you.

The skimpiest bikini I will ever own
“I HATE LIFE!!”, he bellowed.

After a full 15 minutes of this nightmare, a guy (with a killer bod) took mercy on the child and retrieved the drifting swimsuit Baywatch style.  Or perhaps, like the rest of us, he couldn’t take any more of the agony.  A few people actually clapped.

Despite his restored modesty, the kid was irate.  With his swimsuit pulled up past his belly button, the newly robed boy marched over to the negligent woman who bore him and screamed, “I LOOKED LIKE AN IDIOT!”  

He had looked like a total idiot.  Every onlooker would undoubtedly go home and recount the appalling scene to their friends and family.  But at the same time, every person there had at some point publicly looked like a total idiot.  It’s a rite of passage.

pineapple grove delray
Downtown Delray Beach

Delray Beach is the residence of the one and only Serena Williams.  Well, she has a vacation home there which she visits on occasion.  I fantasized a lot about randomly meeting Serena on the street. I would play it totally cool and say something like, “Can you believe this weather?”  She’d tell me how awesome I am and thank me for not making a big deal about her being a celebrity.  

Then she’d insist on having me over for dinner to meet Drake and they’d tell me Hollywood gossip over champagne.  The three of us would laugh, get matching tattoos, and take selfies cementing our friendship forever.  From that day on, they’d give me shoutouts in their respective acceptance speeches.

It could happen.

Tri-Rail sign explaining how to purchase tickets.

In Michigan, the only signs accommodating non-native English speakers are “Piso Mojado” and “Salida”.  Because, you know, Spanish speakers don’t know to avoid a wet floor or how to exit a building.

In South Florida, many signs and announcements are in three languages!  Delray Beach has 12.37% of the population speaking Haitian Creole and 7.02% speaking Spanish as their first language.

At the grocery store, I always heard people speaking a combination of the three.  And guess what, xenophobic people against multiculturalism?!  IT’S FINE.  It’s wonderful, in fact, that the public is making an effort to build an inclusive high-functioning society.

When an announcement is made over the Tri-Rail intercom in Creole, it’s not like native English speakers on the train collapse on the floor, writhing in pain, screaming, “NOOOOO!  MY FREEDOM!”


My family’s sole purpose is to serve our pets.  We do anything they tell us to.  My cat cries until we sit in the driveway.  We don’t have to pet her, we just need to have our lower halves on the concrete while she rolls around.  Scout, of course, gets jealous and has to join us.

My Raison d’Etre

Last year, my friends Nicole and Kate each sent me a Christmas card from America.  Both cards included a photo with their respective husbands and dogs.  I happily showed the pictures to my Turkish coworkers who were all perplexed by the canine presence in the family portraits.
“Americans are really, really crazy about their dogs”, I said almost apologetically.
And it’s true.  I see more Facebook photos of people's dogs than newborn babies.  From across the Atlantic, this started to seem strange to me.  All that changed when I was reunited with Scout.

Most of my time in Florida was consumed with covering her up so she wouldn’t get too cold in the 80 degree (28 C) weather.  I constantly berated my parents for not giving her enough attention. 
“What’s going to happen when I leave”, I moaned, “Who will give my angel the care she needs?”


My cat, Rummy, was less receptive to my arrival.  Despite me showering her with love and kitty treats for fifteen years, she ignored me for the first month I was in Florida.  I think she was punishing me for being gone for so long.  Eventually, she came around and allowed me to dote on her.

One evening, I went into the darkened guest room to retrieve a book. When I turned on the light, I saw that Rummy was sleeping on the bed, or at least she had been before I so rudely awoke her. The look she gave me was so fowl that I actually held up my hands and said, "Oh. I'm so sorry. I'll come back later. Sorry." Then I turned off the light and tiptoed out of the room with nothing to read that night.

All the way from NYC! - W4L
Chelsey and I spent a windy day at the beach.  We walked up and down the coast poking at a vibrant array of dead jellyfish with a stick Chelsey had found.  Even though their nerve nets had ceased to function, we were still wary of these fearsome beasts. I expected some sort of postmortem zap, if I got too close.

man of war jellyfish
A blueberry condom on a bed of eggplant spaghetti, AKA a Portuguese man o' war

Chelsey spotted a message in a bottle.  We were both absurdly excited and handed the empty Jack Daniels bottle back and forth trying in vain to open it, in the process, smearing our hands with an unidentified grease.  Finally, the cap came off and we fished out the damp piece of paper.

Kitesurfers were loving the weather.

I’m not sure what we hoped for- an SOS note from a castaway, a letter written by a child 50 years ago, or a haiku about the Atlantic.  We would have been happy with anything that resulted in a viral online article featuring a flattering photo of us.  Instead, we found a crumpled up piece of paper with nonsensical scribbles, undoubtedly penned by delinquents the night before.

We swore quite a bit about these miscreants, as we tried to wash our hands in the saltwater.


The night we got the good news AKA the best day of my life!

My mom is a very modest and private person, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk a little bit about her battle with cancer.  Through all this awfulness, my mom has been unfailingly positive and is constantly looking for silver linings to her situation.  

If I had to find a silver lining to this experience, it would be that I realized how exceptionally strong my mom is.  It’s not a case of her rising to the occasion in the face of misfortune, but rather striving to be her usual self while coping with chemotherapy, nasty side-effects, and a terrified family.   She’s been incredibly courageous all my life, but I was too dense to notice it before.