Surrealist Culture & Cuisine
Memorial Day weekend is the official start of summer, and what better way to celebrate than taking one of the $15 Chinatown buses to Philadelphia for two days of old-school culture and new-school cuisine. With a retrospective on Salvador Dali as the draw, the Philadelphia Museum of Art provided the cultural infusion I needed. It’s been too long since I checked out Dali’s masterful strokes.
Read MoreBye Bye Chinatown
Washington DC once had a thriving Chinatown, not NYC’s mind you, but still respectable. It was a decent Chinablock with maybe five or six square blocks of very Asian restaurants, stores, and activity centers, so Asian the police even had a Asian outreach office there, complete with Asian officers. Then Abe Polin built the MCI Center in the midst of Chinatown and the end came swift. With hordes of suburbanites headed to the Center’s shows, Chinatown was over-run by folks expecting General Tao’s Chicken, something you’d never find in a real Chinese restaurant.
Read MoreStar Wars III – Yoda is a Badass
Last night, in the midst of hype, crowds, and even a Storm Trooper from Endor, I showed my full Geek colors and stood in a two-hour line to see Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, and I have to tell you… it was good! George Lucas finally broke out of his stink bomb mode and made a decent move. Yes, it was cheesy, especially the Darth Vader Frankenstein scene which would’ve only been more over the top had he screamed ‘I am alive!’, and Lucas sucks at romance, can Anakin be more fake and Padmé more two-dimensional?, but he did recapture the spirit of the original three.
Read MoreI will be an Olympian!
Up the hill I pedal. Slowly turning the gears, my lowest, as the seemingly vertical road keeps stretching out in front of me. Up and up I go, around the curve, and still up, till finally, with thighs burning and sweat pouring, I crest the hill. Now it’s easy to pedal and I shift up quickly into my highest gear. Spinning, twisting, turning, I am now flying at maximum speed through the turns of Rock Creek Parkway’s Ross Drive, screaming with delight as I pass trees and time in a blur.
Read MoreSkipping San Diego Style
So I am out in San Diego for the weekend and it’s a high school flashback for me. More than my 2002 visit, this time out I am reminded so much why I left Vero Beach, never to return. Like my feelings for Ile de Ngor in Dakar, I love the beach, it is in my blood, but it is not my whole life now. And San Diego is all about the beach.
From a view of it at the top of every hill, to the salt in the air, to the clothes everyone wears, this is a beach town.
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