We might be rained in this gray October morning, but just last night I devoured my very first dragon fruit (a sweet, fuchsia bulb that looks like an egg from Alien and tastes like sorbet when chilled), giving me yet another reason to love life in Southern California. And dragon fruit in October is just one of the hundreds of treasures spotted at the Silverlake farmers market on Saturday.
Ever watch movies like Night of the Living Dead and chastise the zombies for their lack of enthusiasm? Discover redemption in flicks like 28 Days Later – where the zombies have verve, pep, and really want those brains? Now you can run away from those brain-hungry bastards in the Zombie 5 K Marathon !
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Have a love/hate relationship with Sin City? I know I do. So this is a list of all the wonderful things that don’t totally suck about Las Vegas.
If you find yourself in Bangkok and looking to start your night out on the town at 2 a.m., you ask the locals where to go. After a 15-hour plane ride from LAX to Bangkok paired with a 15-hour time change, the jet lag makes you lose your mind. I took a “nap” upon my arrival that felt more like a coma. Attempting to sleep for an hour at 6 p.m. turned into me waking up at 2 a.m!
Panicking that I was missing out on the nightlife, I asked around if anything was still happening and received a unanimous response that I should head over to Khaosan Road. Like a careful little tourist, I got specific directions from my hotel concierge and jumped into my cab, prepared to give the driver a play-by-play of how to get from point A to point B. He looked at me with a grin and said “Khaosan Road! Everyone goes there. I don’t need the map” and we were off.
If you’re in Paris and need a morning break from the Right Bank’s pomp and glamour, you needn’t go all that far. Just cross the river Seine to the tamer, quainter, bohemian Left Bank and treat yourself to a walking expedition.
Our final stop in Italy is Florence. The glamorous city is abuzz with tourism and, consequently, commerce in these Spring months.
The famous San Lorenzo leather market is bursting with colorful scarves, leather jackets and bags.
Three hours outside of Rome is Pompeii, the once-flourishing pleasure center which was famously destroyed [and preserved] by an eruption of the nearby Vesuvius volcano. Pompeii’s sudden, violent end by heat and rain of volcanic ash lent archeologists a unique perspective into life 5,000 years ago. Because the city was buried in under six hours, it became an archeological goldmine hundreds of years later, when it was first rediscovered in 1599. Amusingly, the frescoes that were first unearthed back then were considered so obscene in nature, that they were quickly buried again, to protect the strict moral codes of the time.
In the center of Rome looms the Vatican – the holy sovereign city within a city, world’s smallest state, heart of Catholicism, subject of media scrutiny, surrounded by a wall of speculation as thick as the actual stone wall surrounding it. Inside, museums filled with innumerable cultural treasures, St. Peter’s Basilica – arguably the most breathtaking Catholic church in existence, and, of course, more pope paraphernalia than you can shake a gilded staff at.
You don’t get to feel a city’s pulse until you’ve been trapped on a few of its highways. To understand what I mean, do this: wake up in the fog-dipped countryside, speed through the open space of sparsely populated fields, then past the first signs of industry – factories, pristine and painted in candy colors or splattered with graffiti, past car dealerships and low-income suburbs, until the highway is choking on traffic and you’re stopped at a toll booth, the humming city emerging at this final checkpoint. Now we’re ready to enter Rome.
When presented with the dilemma of choosing Roman wonders to stuff into one day, the simplest approach is to consult any list of Rome’s top most visited attractions. Among them, you’ll find The Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, Piazza Navona and the Roman Forum. Not that I’m suggesting to necessarily go for the obvious. Not at all! In this case, however, each of these places are areas of great personal interest, and I’m prepared to suffer the heat to see them.