Stories Beneath the Surface.

Two springs ago, I tucked a packet of ají dulce seeds into my carry-on, thinking customs in Bogotá would ignore such a humble souvenir from Santo Domingo. They didn’t. A grinning inspector waved the envelope in my face, curious why a gringo with a Dominican residency card cared about peppers that “no pican nada.” My […]

Three years ago, while chasing surfable swells from Río San Juan to Santa Marta, I realized that my Dominican residency renewal and my Colombian tourist extension would collide in the same month. I pictured myself juggling two governments, two airports, and two flavors of Caribbean Spanish in one dizzying fortnight. That madcap itinerary pushed my […]

Un domingo de despedida y el susto del “bien cuidao” La primera vez que confié a mi perro Macchiato a un pet-sitter dominicano juraba que mi nivel de español callejero era impecable. Vivía en Santiago de los Caballeros hacía ya cuatro años y me sentía más criollo que el mangú. Sin embargo, el día que […]

I still remember the first time a Dominican lawyer slid a thick manila folder across a chipped mahogany desk in Santo Domingo and asked, “¿Usted trajo la certificación vigente del título y la constancia del IPI?” I blinked like a deer in Caribbean headlights. After a decade here—and dozens of quick hops to Medellín for […]

I still remember the afternoon I tried to download my first Certificación de Ingresos from the DGII Virtual portal. I was in a tiny café in Santo Domingo’s Colonial Zone, surrounded by the aroma of fresh-ground café Santo Domingo. I hit “Entrar” with the naïve optimism of a man who’d lived here only a year. […]

Rum, Bachata, and an Unexpected Invitation I was halfway through a Friday night plate of mangu at my favorite colmado in Santo Domingo when my phone buzzed with a voice note from Juliana, a paisa friend I’d met during one of my frequent escapes to Medellín. Her cousin was getting married in Guatapé and, because […]

El banco me puso a prueba: My first Dominican loan interview I still remember the fluorescent chill of the branch on Avenida Abraham Lincoln, the way the security guard insisted on calling me “jovencito” even though I was already 23, and the nervous sweat creeping under my collar. I had marched in that afternoon convinced—naïvely—that […]

The Morning I Misread My Own Blood Work I was sitting in a Medellín café, still sweating from the hill up to Laureles, when an email pinged my phone: “Resultados de laboratorio disponibles.” Ten years in the Dominican Republic had taught me plenty of street–corner slang, but Colombian clinical Spanish still felt like a different […]

Ten years ago, on an August morning that smelled like café de greca and diesel, I walked into the Dirección General de Impuestos Internos (DGII) in Santiago holding a folder full of crumpled receipts, sweaty fingerprints, and naïve confidence. The guard greeted me with a quick “Buen día, jefe”, and I answered with the only […]

My WhatsApp vibrated at 7:42 p.m. on a muggy Thursday in Santo Domingo. Laura—my first serious Dominican date—had just sent a single 🥵. Back in Ohio, that emoji mainly meant “too hot to handle,” flirting with a side of playful arrogance. So I replied with a winky face and a confident joke in Spanish. Her […]

A Coffee Spill That Spoke Volumes Ten years ago, on my first week in Santo Domingo, I ordered a “café con leche” and tried to squeeze between two plastic chairs. My elbow knocked the waiter’s tray, the cups wobbled, and the elderly man beside me waved his fingers in a quick shoo-shoo motion I’d never […]