Dominican Jazz-Club Nights: Reserving Tables & Drink Minimums
How a Missed Trumpet Solo Taught Me More Than a Year of Textbooks I still remember the night I misjudged the queue outside Santo Domingo’s storied jazz bar, Fifty Jazz & Blues. I’d promised my Colombian girlfriend we’d catch the opening set. Instead, we ended up craning our necks from the doorway, blocked by a […]
Dominican “Paseo de la Salud”: Describing Vital Signs at Health Fairs
Un sábado soleado en el Malecón: mi primera “Paseo de la Salud” La brisa salada del Caribe me acariciaba la cara mientras caminaba por el Malecón de Santo Domingo, café con leche en mano y la curiosidad encendida. Había carteles que anunciaban un “Paseo de la Salud” gratuito. Diez años en la isla no me […]
Dominican Cable Outage Calls: Ticket Numbers & Follow-Up Phrases
When the Wi-Fi Goes Dark in Paradise Last Tuesday at 8:37 p.m., right as I was streaming an old MLB game to feel closer to home, the screen froze on a batter mid-swing. The silence that followed in my Santo Domingo apartment was louder than the city’s nighttime merengue. Ten years in the Dominican Republic […]
Installing a Car Seat in Colombia: The Spanish Vocabulary Parents Didn’t Know They Needed
How a Wobbly Booster Seat Made Me Re-learn Spanish at 10,000 RPM Last July I flew from Santo Domingo to Medellín with my two-year-old, Mateo, and a suitcase full of toddler patience. The plan was simple: rent a small SUV, drive up to Guatapé, and let Mateo yell “¡Vaquita!” every time he saw a cow. […]
Wire Me In: Scheduling a Home-Security Installation in Cali—Alarm System Spanish for the Well-Traveled Expat
The Knock at Dawn: How a False Alarm Became My Real Classroom Two Tuesdays ago, at the unforgiving hour of 6:17 a.m., a delivery guy pounded on my apartment door in Cali. I jumped out of bed, halfway tangled in my sheets, convinced the thumps were gunshots. Blame a decade of Caribbean merengue nights in […]
Colombian Dry-Cleaning Tickets: The Stains, the Slips, and the Spanish Vocabulary You Never Knew You Needed
Back when I first landed in Santo Domingo a decade ago, I thought my Spanish was decent enough—until a dry-cleaner wrote “pliegues de sudor” on my ticket and handed me a numbered chip that looked suspiciously like something from a casino. A week later, in Medellín, another lavandería scribbled “mancha de salsa” with a circle […]
Dominican Open-Water Certification: Dive-Shop Spanish for Paperwork
From Lost Fins to Fluent Forms: My First Brush with Dive-Shop Bureaucracy I still remember the salty sting of embarrassment more vividly than the taste of the seawater that followed. Ten years ago, fresh off the plane and still pronouncing “cerveza” like a gringo, I walked into a modest dive shop in Bayahíbe to sign […]
Dominican “Pescadería” Etiquette: Choosing Fresh Shellfish in Spanish
From Rookie to Regular: My First Shellfish Fumble on Avenida España Ten years ago, fresh off the plane from Boston and still confusing “concha” with “concho,” I marched into a tiny pescadería tucked between a colmado and a panadería on Avenida España in Santo Domingo. The owner, Don Álvaro, eyed my flip-flops, sunburn, and hesitant […]
How a Broken Solar Panel in Bogotá Super-Charged My Spanish Vocabulary
I was halfway through my first tinto of the morning when the inverter on my recently installed rooftop solar array started flashing red like a Christmas light gone rogue. The timing could not have been worse: I had just flown in from Santo Domingo the night before, lugging four pounds of Dominican coffee and ten […]
Colombian Volunteering at Animal Shelters: Duty Rosters & Supply Lists
From a Coconut Stand in Santo Domingo to a Kennel in Medellín I still had sand between my toes when I walked into La Huella Feliz, a modest animal shelter perched on the outskirts of Medellín. A week earlier I’d been in the Dominican Republic buying coco frío and exchanging playful banter with the vendor. […]