travel
Friday, 1:54 p.m. PST – Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean We’re 30 minutes into an 11-hour flight to Tokyo and they’ve already shut down the entertainment system for a 15-minute “hard reboot.” If they can’t get Two and a Half Men to play consistently I have
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Despite the city’s deployment of the magical SUBE bus pass that obviates the need to hoard change for bus fare, there’s still a fairly major coin shortage here in Buenos Aires. Thus every transaction at the grocery store involves the following steps: 1. Cashier asks if you have
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Day 6: Shake Shake Shake. Shake Shake Shake. Shake Your Boot Camp Until I borked my shoulder playing hockey a year and a half ago I was an enthusiastic Crossfitter. For those who are unfamiliar, Crossfit is a workout program that combines weightlifting and aerobic exercise in a constantly-changing regimen
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There comes a point in every 10-hour flight when you realize yes, that baby IS going to scream for the entire 6000 miles. For me, that point was “somewhere over Ecuador.” Day 1: DFWTF? As a frequent traveler and a major nerd, I subscribe to multiple web services for automatically
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I’ve got a lot of odds and ends saved up from the trip, so here they all are jumbled up into one blog post. Today is my last full day in Spain. Tomorrow (maybe) I go home. I say “maybe” because my flight from Madrid to Portland stops at
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Note: The following post contains advanced discussion of soccer strategy. Do not operate heavy machinery after reading. When I found out that FC Barcelona would be playing a home soccer game while I was in town, I had to snap up a ticket. Barca (look at me using nicknames) is
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Here’s a little quiz for those who have been following my blog. If I were going to visit a monastery high up on a cliffside in the mountains outside Barcelona, which of the following modes of transportation would I choose: 1. A comfortable luxury tour bus driving on a
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I’m behind on my blogging due to an Influx of Fun™, so here’s a quick catch-up on what’s been happening in Barcelona since we spoke last: Saturday During my pre-travel research period (otherwise known as “Incessant Googling”) I ran across the Barcelona Improv Group, an English-language improv
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Spain is good at basketball. Really, really good. Arguably, other than the United States, they’ve been the best national team in the world over the past few years. Of course that’s like saying “Other than Facebook, MySpace has been the most popular social network over the past few
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So funny thing — after spending the better part of the last month brushing up my Spanish I managed to come to the one part of Spain where Spanish isn’t the first language. Not everyone knows this (I sound like I’m playing Wikipedia) but this region of Spain is
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By totally random coincidence, my brother and sister-in-law are in Barcelona at the same time as me. Well, maybe not that random, considering that I’ve been systematically stalking them since my company moved its headquarters to their hometown (Boulder), allowing me to randomly show up on their doorstep 4-6
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In the lead-up to my trip, I approached the impending 10-hour Portland to Amsterdam flight with the same sense of doom that one might have when assigned to life imprisonment. It would be — by several hours — the longest flight I’d ever taken, and growing up the joke in Alaska