I’d always heard there was something special about an African sunset. I wanted to catch as many as possible when I finally set foot on the continent in February. To be fair, I feel that there’s something special about all sunsets, but the ones in Cape Town were top shelf. While you aren’t required to see all five of the below during your own visit, if you don’t make an effort to see at least one, please reevaluate your travel priorities.
I didn’t expect to see a pair of monks playing music on an iPhone, but I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined the music would be a song from One Direction, of all possible options. Michael Buble, maybe; Enya, of course; but One Direction? Then again, I’d never imagined myself in Myanmar to begin with, so wasn’t this just part of the experience of being continuously and wonderfully surprised by everything around me?
Three days on the West Coast in December and my only personal plans were to see three sunsets. The first was in Venice Beach, the second was in Manhattan Beach, and the third was in Santa Monica. I’d been enjoying the peace, quiet, and crossword puzzles of my time alone there, but I was excited when I found out a friend was also randomly in Santa Monica that night. This was a friend I hadn’t seen in years, who I used to work with at a seafood restaurant in the summers when I was in college. We made arrangements to meet up later that night and I sat on the beach to catch one last sunset, which I watched while listening to Savage Garden’s Santa Monica (a seriously wonderful song) about 5 times in a row.
I live in Manhattan. And for the most part, I love this Manhattan. But sometimes it’s hard. Like when it’s February. And rainy. And the 6 train is late every. single. day. And the wind is so wild that you think your air conditioner might fall right out of your 5th-floor-walkup living room window. And you have to keep that air conditioner in the window all year round because (1) you can’t control the raging temperature of your heaters and (2) you have no room to put the air conditioner if you take it out of the window because your apartment is the size of three office cubicles.
December in New York usually stinks weather-wise, so when I had the opportunity to head to Los Angeles that month, I jumped on it. By the time my trip came around, it wasn’t that cold in New York, but I was still happy to be heading west for a few days. With all my dreams of being an actress/singer/gameshow host (without working toward these dreams AT ALL), you’d think I’d have been to LA at some point, but I’d only previously been to LAX for a few hours before flying to Hawaii.
A few photos of the Manhattan sky to reflect upon the 10-year anniversary of 9/11.
One of the items on my 27 list is to “Explore Astoria, Queens” for three main reasons:
My frousin (“it’s a family thing”) Christie just moved there
I don’t want to be one of those people who refuses to go to the other boroughs besides Manhattan (and there are plenty of people like this…)
Everyone I meet from Astoria is awesome and does something fun and creative with their lives that I wish I could do
For those of you who are unfamiliar, the High Line is a relatively new park on the west side in the Meatpacking district built on old elevated train tracks from the 1930s. Kat and I took a walk tonight. We had both actually read today that the second of three sections was opening up tomorrow, but luckily, the ribbon-cutting ceremony was actually this morning. The first section runs from Gansevoort Street to 20th and the second runs to 30th.
10 miles behind me 