I graduated high school in 1998, either (depending on which arbitrary marker you choose) the last of Gen-Xers or the first of the Millennials. Like so many of us who came of age in the 90s, Friends was a delightful, aspirational glimpse of the future. (I had no perspective to realize that my friends of […]
My writing pitches don’t get accepted often. Sometimes an editor will contact me directly, and I’ll send them a piece, and if it gets published, it may do quite well (my piece on bullying for The Washington Post was an example of that), but it rarely gets to that point. More often than not, I’ll […]
For this month’s American Expats series, our next stop is Spain. Cat Gaa, a Chicago native, moved to Seville, Spain, in 2007, and now lives in Madrid with her Spanish husband and young daughter. Here, she talks about churros, unique Spanish festivals, and walking the Camino. Cat’s background: Straight after college, I moved to Seville, […]
Portland is the largest city in Oregon, and is a place that is famous for the spectacular scenery of the area and for its vibrant and lively cultural scene, with plenty of live music and arts venues around the city. Although it is quite a large city for the region with a population of around […]
Hello, hi, yes, I would like to speak to the manager please? No, I don’t think that this is something you could help me with … okay. Okay, fine. Yes, so I’ve been shopping here for several years, and it’s always been a really positive experience. But yesterday I was walking down the freezer aisle […]
This historic Texan city is often considered to be the home of Texan liberty as it is where the Battle of the Alamo was fought. The city has grown rather a lot since it was founded in the eighteenth century, and is now the third largest city in Texas, and is among the largest cities […]
You may be stunned to read this, but after living in Germany for 4 years, I have discovered that Germans do things differently than you do in the United States and the situation with a German kitchen when you are buying or renting a house there is just one of them — but it is […]
May is yet to be upon us, but the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands already has a plethora of events on its plate. Some of these events are historically significant to the city, while others are international events that may have made its way to the annals of Netherlands. With such events coming to […]
(Pictured above: me during a far less neurotic presentation.) I am standing in front of a crowd under blinding fluorescent lights. They appear to be listening to my every word. And I am positively bombing. The room is too bright, and I can see everyone’s faces, but I am absolutely unable to read their expressions. […]
We went to Germany, and I cried. Not right away. It wasn’t until the last day that I finally did. Rand asked if I wanted to rent a car to go down to see my father’s grave. He asked me in the early hours of the morning, when jet lag had us both exhausted but […]
I was recently nominated for a James Beard Award for journalism, and statement which makes as much sense as saying “I was nominated for a Grammy for this cookie that I just ate.” The other nominees in my category are – I kid you not – The New York Times and The Atlantic. I submitted […]
Browsing through my photos of Tbilisi, Georgia, was a slightly surreal experience. Was I really in Tbilisi last summer? Did I actually spend four days in the Republic of Georgia, a tiny country located on the other side of the world? I wasn’t in Tbilisi long, but immediately, I was smitten. Georgia’s capital city is […]
I am scheduled to leave for Germany in several days. I have already told my husband that I don’t want to go, in a whining tone that stretches syllables out so far that the words they once formed are barely recognizable. As a woman nearing the aging of forty, this is how I am coping […]
I am on occasion asked for relationship advice. I often do not know how to reply. The list of things I could tell people is long and winding, may be entirely irrelevant, and varies from season to season and day to day. In summer, I learn to appreciate freckles and to not mind when the […]
Note: this post contains some content that may be upsetting for certain readers – including mention of torture and the Cambodian genocide. ————— My trip to Cambodia feels so long ago – more than five years – that I have to remind myself that I was there. I look at the photos, and see myself […]