The Beginning: Puerto Vallarta & Sayulita

Hi Everyone!

Thanks for visiting - this is going to be the space where I ramble and post some pictures as I travel from Mexico (where I am now) to South America to Israel to Europe over the course of the next year. I hope you find it interesting, and I hope it becomes a way we can connect over increasingly great distances.

I spent the first week of my trip in Puerto Vallarta, which was something of a quaint tourist beach town on steriods. (The sophisticated man on the left is obscuring a section of the main Puerto Vallarta parkway.) There was a sprawl of beachside resorts and timeshares - with McDonald´s and Bubba Gump´s sprinkled in amongst the streetside taco stands - yet it retained a sort of quaintness, which was helped by the fact that I stayed in a place that was directly on the beach and a few blocks away from any sort of real bustle. I came because my dear friend Dora (who I´ve been close with since my Denver School of the Arts days) invited me out to see her older sister get married, which happened last Saturday and was a blast. It was a perfect multicultural celebration: her roots are Mexican, and he lives in Germany. So a mariachi band came by and played, but not until after a German wedding tradition involving the forceful shattering of an obscene amount of plates - with the cleaning left to the new bride and groom, as a sort of symbol of the camaraderie they will embody in their union. The Germans are realistic, though: it´s also a tradition for the wedding contingent to scatter the shattered plate fragments and generally make it as difficult as possible to clean up.

I´ve been taking my siestas for the past two days in a gorgeous little beach town called Sayulita, where I´ve been staying in a rooftop bungalow with Dora and her older brother Reggie (that´s them walking down to the beach on the right). We´ll be here until the end of the week, when we will make our way to Guadalajara and hopefully have a more authentic Mexican experience. In the meantime, the warm sea and cool breeze is more than making up for the tourist-y itenirary.

Love to all! Please feel free to comment, or send me an e-mail if you´d prefer.