So it has been a month. And although I have only been here a month, I think I have eaten enough tacos al pastor, soaked up enough sun, spoken enough Spanish, squeezed into enough subway trains, drank enough tequila and lord knows had enough hangovers to paint a decent picture of what my first month here…
I found him in a bar in Mexico City. He was hunched over a book with a creased spine. The pages swallowed him and he refused to look away as he reached for his beer, piercing through bottle and froth to the words below. He had the habit of folding his upper lip beneath the…
We saw the universe connected from the inside out. From the heart of a capital to the edge of a continent. From within the stone and steel and smog, piercing the sun, slashing across dusty hills. Dust turns to dirt, cactus to trees, hills flatten and lay calm. Maps pass between hands, wind pulls at corners,…
She was eleven, and she didn’t understand why everyone was frightened. She was eleven, and could not feel her country boiling beneath the surface. She did not understand the old men arguing on the television, or the strikes of the businessmen. She couldn’t see the increasing costs of food and fuel, but she could feel…
The sun hung lazily, suspended in the Caribbean sky, the balconies cast intricate shadows along the narrow streets below, and they walked through water. The air was a thick hot wetness, churned into a jelly by proximity to the waistline of the world. From the centre of the old city, streets of cobbled stone and…
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. – William Faulkner Something was sleeping. Dormant deep inside, coerced into slumber by complacency and the monotony of what is familiar. Like a river dammed by cold hands, energy diverted and devoted to things less beautiful, words cease to flow,…
I could barely hear the howling. There was too many people. Like a single organism squirming around in it’s own filth. A mass of warmth and bodies writhing and shuddering in an agitated sort of anticipation. Everywhere a tumult of faces and sound, a thundering drum of feet beating cement, a twisted tribal dance coaxing…
Well not really, but moving to Mexico isn’t going to be easy. It’s not moving to a new place that’s the problem, on the contrary, I couldn’t be more excited to step off that plane into the Mexican sun, no place to stay, with my entire life stuffed into a bag on my back. It’s…
He had loved her. That he knew. Fiercely at first, and humbly for the rest of his life. They had collided in a world that was brand new. They ricocheted off of one another so intensely and with such speed that the strands of their lives became intertwined immediately, so intertwined that no thread was…
mañana me chanto, pero mañana In my recent post, Gringos can’t dance salsa, I wrote about my inability to dance and referred to some superficial, cheesy, but incredibly catchy tunes that were popular in Chile during my year abroad. I am writing this post to speak about some real Spanish music. Specifically, about an awesome band and…
From out of the breakwater, erupted colour in all directions. In the midst of the harbour, brightly hued boxes separated and surrounded the cold grey, they outlined the men and machines working among them, and contrasted the squawking sea birds that circled high above. Carried by the foam and salt of the seabreeze, colour moved…
This is an apology to the woman of Mexico, and the rest of the general population for that matter. I can’t dance. Lo siento mucho. To be fair, I have been known to bust out a killer ‘crank that soulja boy’ after too many cervezas, but let’s get real, no one wants to see that.…
Usually I begin my posts with some italicized words thrown together to create a visceral account of my South American adventures, I hope to give the reader a vantage point into the thoughts and feelings that coursed through my body with every experience. I try to explain my experiences in an abstract but an emotionally…
The sun rose the same way it did every morning. The mountains stretched their lush fingers of rock and jungle high into the horizon, grasping at the sky and blocking out the sun. Unrelenting and stubborn the sun ignited the outline of the mountains and filled the spaces between with a shroud of soft light.…
I am taking a break from my regular posts chronicling past adventures through South America to talk about shoes. More specifically one pair of shoes, a pair of shoes that marched up the steps of Machu Picchu, trekked across the driest desert in the world, pounded the streets of countless cities soaked in sunshine and…
thewanderlustking 