Learn. Speak. Belong.

From Coconut Palms to Cables: The Morning I Needed a New Hard Drive It started as one of those déjà-vu expat moments. I had just landed in Bogotá after swapping the humid breeze of Santo Domingo for the Andean chill. My laptop, stuffed with photos of bachata nights and Colombian mountain hikes, flashed the terrifying […]

Arriving Sweaty, Ordering Clumsy: My First “Botellón” Misadventure Ten Julys ago, I had been in Santo Domingo barely long enough to memorize my new address when the Caribbean sun reminded me that the tap water is strictly for dishes, not gulps. I marched into the colmado downstairs and, with all the swagger of a new […]

Why I Ended Up in a Telco Office on a Rainy Medellín Afternoon The story begins with a downpour, the kind that turns Medellín’s green hills into watercolor streaks behind fogged-up taxi windows. After nine years in Santo Domingo and countless flights back and forth, I thought I knew every trick for wrangling telecom companies—until […]

I’ll never forget the first time I realized the phrase “la venganza de Moctezuma” isn’t only Mexican. I was in Medellín on what was supposed to be a restful long weekend, giddy from too many arepas de chócolo washed down with street-corner fruit juices. By midnight my stomach staged a coup. The next morning I […]

Rum and Accordions: My First Perico Ripiao Baptism I was twenty-three, fresh off the plane and still tasting the airport coffee when a neighbor in Santiago de los Caballeros dragged me to a colmadón. Picture plastic chairs on a cracked sidewalk, an accordion crying over a bass drum the size of a beach cooler, and […]

Un cafecito, a nervous teller, and my first big “plazo fijo” I still remember the scent of burnt espresso drifting through Banco Nacional’s marble lobby in Santiago de los Caballeros. I was twenty-three, fresh off the plane from Michigan, clutching a folder labeled “Certificate of Deposit.” The banker, a middle-aged Dominican who rolled his rs […]

I still remember the first time I tried to rent a kayak on the shimmering embalse of Guatapé. A decade of island living in the Dominican Republic had convinced me I could handle any Latin American rental counter—until a paisa grandmother running a dockside stand threw me a curveball. She waved a neon-orange chaleco salvavidas […]

Why Day-Care Drop-Offs Became My Favorite Classroom I still remember the first Monday I landed in Medellín after years of island life in the Dominican Republic. I had promised my Dominican fiancée a “relaxing” vacation, yet there I was at 7 a.m. helping her cousin register little Martín at a barrio-side jardín infantil. The director […]

The Scent of My First Feria de las Flores Ten Augusts ago, freshly arrived from Santo Domingo with more optimism than pesos, I stood in Medellín’s Jardín Botánico staring at a wall of petals stitched into dazzling silletas. I’d survived my first decade in the Caribbean, but Colombia’s annual Flower Fair felt like graduating into […]

A Sky That Surprises Even the Seasoned Expat I was sipping a tinto outside a small café in Laureles when the waitress glanced upward, muttered “Viene un palo de agua,” and hurried to pull the sidewalk tables inside. Ten minutes earlier, the sky had looked like a screensaver: postcard-blue. I had lived through countless Caribbean […]

A Brush with Color: My First Bogotá Graffiti Tour I still remember the Sunday I swapped the turquoise beaches of the Dominican Republic for the steel-blue sky over Bogotá. Ten years of island living had polished my Caribbean accent, but Colombia’s high-altitude cadence felt like a whole new track on the Latin-American playlist. After dropping […]