SD & CDMX

The fourth-year-medical-student-already-matched-new-boyfriend impromptu trip started in San Diego.  It's a peculiar enclave of SoCal marked by a busy airspace and the coexistence of hippies and the military.  Learning San Diego was actually in the depths of "May gray, June gloom" did not stop us from achieving our goal of daily beach volleyball on a real beach.

Instead of going to Balboa Park (walking distance from our hotel) for the purpose of visiting the San Diego Zoo, we went there to play disc golf on a course with landscapes otherworldly to an East Coaster, including a true Californian offering us weed gummies for letting him play through.

We did have one classic San Diego morning of gelato and seals in La Jolla. Our nights varied from alien-themed drinks at MOTHERSHIP to stumbling into a pool bar with a live reggae band.

Representative of each neighborhood in which we stayed, we enjoyed excellent meals and Aperol Spritzes in Little Italy, a cold ocean plunge and an unplanned acro jam in Ocean Beach, and farmers' markets in both (but the kind of hip city farmers' markets where there's no vegetables but yes organic candles you can melt on your own body).

Brunch at Morning Glory

The best Type 2 Fun was waking up in the middle of the night in our hostel on the main drag of Ocean Beach realizing we'd left the car in a no overnight parking zone—and Steve getting up to move it.

The best Type 1 Fun was hiking to Black's Beach, but rather than taking the proper Ho Chi Minh Trail, accidentally forging our own path through the crevasses of sandstone.

To begin stage II of the fourth-year-medical-student-already-matched-new-boyfriend impromptu trip, we WALKED across the border to Mexico—at the Tijuana airport, just an Uber ride away from San Diego.

Going back to Mexico as an adult had me realizing what a fantastic country it is, hiding right next to the U.S.  I can envision with perfect clarity coming back to live here someday (medical practice being the only blurry spot)—a feeling that I've similarly had in Taipei and Amsterdam. We stayed in Condesa, an amazing neighborhood with tree-lined walking paths down the middle of every boulevard.

Jogging to the dream-come-true Parque México

The dog:walker ratio is a phenomenon of the upper-middle class neighborhoods of CDMX

The food was spectacular, from street tortas to Taquería Orinoco, from the Secret Donut Society to our nicest meal at Ling Ling by Hakkasan on the 56th floor of the Ritz-Carlton, where I pretended I wasn't wearing dirty Tevas.

Castillo de Chapultepec

Plaza de la Constitución

The trip peaked in the evenings with a night of barhopping from neighborhood bar to neighborhood bar, a night of salsa dancing to live music at Mama Rumba, and a night of a backroom jazz jam at Parker & Lennox. The trip allowed (forced?) me to discover within myself a love of mezcal cocktails.  It also rekindled my love of Frida Kahlo.

A gross miscalculation meant that we did not tour Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul, although we enjoyed the neighborhood of Coyoacán, whose plaza was hosting a book fair and whose side streets hosted art markets. We did successfully tour Diego and Frida's Museo Casa Estudio, a bauhaus impracticality with a catwalk connecting her room and his studio.  The surrounding old San Ángel neighborhood was also gorgeous to stroll (and do acro in).  I marked my visit to Coyoacán with flan and to San Ángel with churros--Steve to both with coffee.

Comida Colombiana

Colombia is such a large, diverse country, and the only Latin American country with a Caribbean coast and a Pacific coast.  Cartagena on the Caribbean coast had lots of fresh seafood like ceviche, whereas the mountainous areas are known for their parrilla, or grilled meats.

The Antioquia region is known for the lunchtime staple of bandeja paisa.  In Medellín, I was able to get a vegan version (on the right).  The food there was the best with tons of affordable plant-based options, probably influenced by expats and what felt like a larger young middle class.

Ajíaco soup with the traditional pairings of avocado, rice, and capers

Colombia has numerous variations on cheese-inside-fried-bread: pandebono (my favorite), empanadas, almohabana, palito de queso, carimañolas, etc.

Palito de queso

Carimañolas, made from yucca and cheese

Buñuelos, can be stuffed with arequipe (like dulce de leche) or other flavors

Chocolate completo, the cheese goes inside the hot chocolate

Tamal

Cheese with fig and arequipe or guava paste,
sold by street vendors on a thin round wafer called oblea

Chicha is a fermented, alcoholic drink, seen on the streets of Bogotá,
originally made by indigenous people chewing corn mash and spitting into an earthenware jar,
outlawed in 1949 because of neocolonialist campaigns associating it with poverty and crime

Colombia

My friend and I started the two-week trip in Cartagena.  We ate ceviche and paella outdoors, danced salsa to a live big band, danced bachata on the beach, surfed in the Caribbean, and took sunset walks on the fortified wall of the old city that's stuffed with colorful quaint houses.  What Cartagena most seems to lack is actual locals.

Acro at the Castillo San Felipe

Santuario de San Pedro Claver

Salinas de Galerazamba,
where the salinity is so high, there's salt instead of sand,
and sometimes the water turns pink

Volcan de Lodo el Totumo,
touristy but fun to float on mud at the mouth of a bottomless volcano,
then be rinsed off in the stream

We took a ferry to spend a couple nights on a remote island in Islas del Rosario.

Next stop was Minca in the mountains, where we hiked to a waterfall swim and rode motorcycles to a coffee and cacao farm.

All day hike in Tayrona Park

All day hike in Tayrona Park, I loved swimming in the waves and bright sun

Bogotá reminded me of Spain, with cobblestone streets, old buildings, grungy cafes, university neighborhoods, and overall more livability compared to Cartagena.

Plaza de Bolivar

Santuario Nuestra Señora del Carmen

Museo de Oro

Museo de Botero, loved!

Stations of the cross overlooking Bogotá from Monserrate sanctuary
We rode the gondola up the hill, but some people climb the steps on their knees

Stations of the cross and cathedral carved into a salt mine at Zipaquirá
They have to use sea water in the baptismal font so it doesn't disintegrate

Hiked to the Laguna de Guatavita, important for local indigenous culture 

Sailing nearby

Our final destination was Medellín.  A highlight was joining a local acro jam in a riverside park that comes alive at night--reminding me of Taipei.  The botanical gardens of the city reminded me of Singapore.  There's a lively nightlife scene, dominated by expats in some areas, but we also discovered a fantastic underground salsa club.

Parques del Río

Plaza Botero

Cementerio Museo San Pedro

We took a local tour of Comuna 13, a neighborhood that embodies Medellín's shedding its 1991 title of most dangerous city in the world in 1991.  What used to be a highway for drug trafficking was transformed by education, tourism, hip hop culture, and community infrastructure--most famously the escalators of Comuna 13 but also public transit cable cars connecting slums to the city center.

On a final day trip, we climbed up the Peñón de Guatape for gorgeous views of the waterways, then enjoyed a coffee in the town of Guatape before running off the side of a cliff to go paragliding.

Plaza de los Zócalos (the colorful baseboards around the town of Guatape)