Learn. Speak. Belong.

My carry-on still smells faintly of mangú and guandules from the last time I flew out of Santo Domingo’s Las Américas International Airport (SDQ). Two weeks later, as I touched down at Medellín’s José María Córdova (MDE), the aroma was replaced by coffee beans and a whisper of cool Andean air. Ten years of hopping […]

El día que mi serie se congeló y empecé a vivir la aventura del router I was halfway through a Dominican crime drama, popcorn in hand, when the spinning circle of doom hijacked my screen. Ten years in Santo Domingo have made me patient with tropical power cuts, yet that night I lost my cool. […]

Three weeks ago I found myself balancing a tower of pañales tier cake in one hand and a suspiciously rattling gift bag in the other, inching through the doorway of my Colombian buddy Luisa’s baby shower. Ten years in the Dominican Republic have trained my reflexes for any fiesta, but a Medellín shower is its […]

I still remember the look on the driver’s face when I tried to ship a jar of homemade chinola-mango jam from Santo Domingo to Medellín. He lifted the jar against the tropical glare, tapped the lid, and said, “¿Eso no explotará en la carretera, papá?”—Isn’t that thing going to explode on the highway, buddy? Ten […]

When My First “Puente” Caught Me Off Guard I was still that bright-eyed, freshly relocated gringo who believed every nation’s calendar obeyed one universal rule: weekends are sacred, weekdays are work, and public holidays show up like well-behaved mile markers. Then, during my second quick hop from Santo Domingo to Medellín, my Colombian friend Paola […]

How a Night in Medellín Taught Me More Than Any Classroom I had just landed in Medellín for my semi-annual “get-me-off-the-island” vacation. After ten years of living in Santo Domingo, my brain is wired for Dominican cadence, but Medellín’s sing-songy Spanish still feels like tuning an old radio. My first evening, a paisa friend waved […]

La Primera Mordida: My First Run-In with a Cartagena Cart I still remember the exact hiss of the oil and the smell of achiote the first time I asked for an arepa de huevo on a steamy night in Cartagena. I was a wide-eyed twenty-three-year-old who had just hopped over from Santo Domingo, carrying a […]

If you had told the 23-year-old version of me—fresh off a winter flight from London to Santo Domingo—that a decade later I’d be pedaling through Bogotá’s high-altitude Ciclovía trading jokes in two varieties of Spanish with a mechanic who calls me pana, I’d have laughed hard enough to spill my first Presidente. Yet here I […]

Last September, at precisely 3:07 a.m., my Merengue-soaked dreams were pierced by a bass line so thundering I thought an earthquake had hit Santo Domingo. I rolled out of bed, clumsily rehearsing every polite phrase in my Spanish Vocabulary. Ten years of living here have taught me that the neighbor’s colmado—part corner store, part community […]

When the Lights Flicker Off: My First Santo Domingo Blackout I was mid-sentence, explaining to my Dominican landlord why my blender smelled like it wanted to ignite, when the apartment went pitch-black. Ten years ago, fresh off the plane from North Carolina, I didn’t yet realize that in the Dominican Republic the power grid sometimes […]

Ten years ago, when I first left the humidity of Santo Domingo for the brisk plateau of Bogotá, I assumed my island-conditioned lungs would handle the thin air with macho Caribbean ease. Spoiler: they didn’t. Within thirty minutes of landing at El Dorado Airport, I felt as if a toddler were sitting on my chest […]