This summer is off to a busy start. With house guests, trips, and another residency for NYU’s Paris Writer’s Program, I’ve been neglecting this blog, and I’m sorry. I’m currently in Paris, hearing from famous authors such as Zadie Smith and Lydia Davis and generally pinching myself each day. While I’m trying to be present […]
…Jerusalem! Surprised? Remember back when I painstakingly outlined all the pros and cons of moving to seven different cities and asked ya’ll to vote? Well, the winner, Lima, Peru, and all the rest of the places for that matter — London and Papau New Guinea among them — didn’t pan out. We were without […]
It’s not easy being a vegetarian foodie in Spain. Or at least, it’s not all that fun. In terms of veg options, most restaurants feature the same players: Tortilla, pimientos padrones, salmorejo (minus the ham), salad with goat cheese, a grilled veggie plate. These dishes are all perfectly yummy, but after the twentieth time eating […]
For quaint beauty and village-like atmospheres with the vibrancy of much larger cities, the Belgian towns of Ghent and Bruges really take the proverbial cake. In this case, the proverbial cake is a waffle. Ghent is so charming that I’ve visited it twice since I’ve lived in Europe (because I am a sucker for charm). […]
1. Have a big accomplishment right before your birthday Load your schedule in such a way that you’ll be done with a big project right before your big day. I turned in this semester’s last packet of writing for my creative writing graduate program and I had an article published on Slate about my great-grandmother’s […]
Maybe it’s my Celtic ancestry, but I adore northwest Spain. The air is clean, the grass is lush, and I just want to take deep breaths off all the crisp goodness. And I know this is controversial: But I find the terrain around the Atlantic Ocean more beautiful than that around the Mediterranean (which is […]
Three friends and I walked into a clothing boutique a few minutes before two on a Saturday afternoon. We oohed over the cute dresses in the shop, and grabbed a bunch to try on, just as the shop girl told us “Ladies, we close in three minutes.” We continued to take clothes off the rack […]
This past week, Mr. Dame in Spain and I motored down south to meet up with visiting family. (We didn’t manage to escape the gray drizzle that seems to have blanketed all of Spain for the past week). We arrived very late at night, GPS was no help at all, and I was not a […]
Recently I’ve become taken with the idea of hosting dinner parties for a bunch of strangers. There’s a new movement in “social dining.” Think AirBnB, but for dinner parties. For instance, if you’re traveling to say, Rome, instead of eating at a restaurant one night, you’d pay to go to a Roman’s apartment, eat a […]
I first noticed it at the gym. When women get changed in the locker room, they never let their bare feet touch the ground. They’ll peel off shoes and socks, stand on a towel on the ground, and then slip their feet into flip-flops and walk to the shower, One time, back when I went […]
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