St. Louis, Missouri: Gateway to the West.
I can’t say that I ever thought much about this place until a wedding landed me here for a long weekend. I think that in the past I had a vague notion that St. Louis wasn’t the nicest city in the world, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. In more recent years, when St. Louis somehow came up in conversation, there was usually somebody there to say “Ya know what—St. Louis is actually pretty ok.” And that’s about all I knew.
Well now that I’ve been here for myself, I have thoughts of my own share. And those thoughts are positive!
Columbus hasn’t historically been quite so colorful as it is today, but now that this is beginning to change, it feels natural. It feels like an actualization of the identity Columbus has always had. Some of the murals you will see in this article have been around long enough to attain “landmark status” in Columbus, but most of them are new… ish.
I had big travel plans for 2020. I was gonna spend a month in South America, but instead the furthest away from my house I got was my parents house 2 states away. Now America is in the throes of what has been a very dark winter for us as a nation, and for the world at large. There shouldn’t be any traveling going on for anybody right now, but you should have lots of time to catch up on movies and get inspired for travels in (late) 2021, pending how the vaccine rollout goes. Here’s a list of 31 of my favorite travel-related movies. These films have served as escapes and inspiration for me. I hope they can do the same for you. ❤️
loved my time in Hanoi, but it came to an end when I decided to relocate to Nashville, Tennessee to try my hand at music. I started a band called The Great Palumbo, and this project is still where I spend all my time, money, and emotional energy. I don’t know where this thing is going, but it’s on its way! And I’m very blessed to have some super talented musicians along for the ride with me.
Today, we released some new music that was inspired by the time I spent living in Hanoi. And since this is the topic that put this blog on the map, I’m sharing it here as well.
When you picture LA, what comes to mind?
I’m guessing that most of you didn’t say “mountains.” Or maybe all of you did and I’m the one who wasn’t “hip”. But the following was actually news to me: LA is actually surrounded by some formidable topography! And a lot of it is a lot closer to the city than you might think. The map below shows the terrain in 3D, and you’ll see that there are a number of different mountainous areas to be considered here, but today we’re going to be in the one highlighted in blue. Those are the Santa Monica Mountains.
I’ve gotten to the point with these street art features that I plan my trips around them. If I can get a day to myself, I’m gonna wander around with my camera all day until I find 100 murals I love. And I’m not just doing it “for the ‘gram” anymore! Seriously, these days of wandering are often what makes me feel like I have gotten to know a city at all. That is especially true for a place like Los Angeles.
In a city where most of the time spent between two points is in the back of an Uber, staring at your phone, walking the streets isn’t exactly “normal.” This is a car city. So going through the exercise of walking 10 miles in day, exploring this city street by street, looking in nooks and crannies for murals, poking around small businesses—this can really give you a feel for the DNA of Los Angeles. Of course, whatever I’ve managed to see so far is just a drop in the bucket! But it’s exposed me to a lot. And it helped me internalize the map of this city, so that I started to be able to find my way around without a map.
The observatory was/is equipped with a 12-inch Zeiss refractor telescope that you can actually go look through. Since 1935, an estimated 7 million people have looked through it to catch a glimpse of the stars, which makes it the most used telescope in history by far. In WWII the planetarium was used to train pilots in celestial navigation. Later, in the 1960s, it would be used for that same purpose as a part of the NASA space program. In 2002 this place underwent a major renovation mostly focused on its visitor-facing amenities. Now there’s a café, a gift shop, and a movie theater. I’m sorry to tell you we’re not going into much of this stuff today though. We’re here to catch the sunset!
Before I left for this trip, I asked my friend Melanie (hey girl!) if she had any dark-horse recommendations for off-the-beaten path things that I should do in Mexico City. She told me that when she visited, she had taken a lot of her cues from an Instagram account called @thecuriousmexican. The girl who runs this apparently speaks very highly of a large marketplace called Mercado Jamaica (Jamaica Market). It was supposed to be very authentic, and very off-the-beaten path, so when she (Melanie) was in Mexico City, she decided to try visiting it. Apparently when she told the cab driver where she was trying to go, the driver cautioned her that this was a very dangerous area, but she went anyway. Clearly she lived to tell the tale, so I’m following in her footsteps today.
We received no such words of caution when we stepped into our Uber, but we were also two large men. A single white female would need to be careful pretty much anywhere, whereas being male, 6-4, and ~230lb pretty much ends all of my fights before they even start. However, I will admit to a small amount of anxiety about the neighborhood. It was definitely sketchy, but once I threw myself into it, I felt totally fine. All of the interactions I had with people were extremely positive.
It was our first full day in Mexico City, and we were sitting in a coffee shop somewhere along the boundary line between Condesa and Roma trying to figure out what we should do with the rest of the time we had. I’m not great at planning my travels in advance, so these sorts of on-the-go brainstorms happen in just about every new city I visit. I wondered aloud if there was any Lucha Libre wrestling to be found here. “I mean, this is the literal center of everything Mexican, so it’s gotta be here somewhere, right?”
At that exact moment, we heard somebody say “Excuse me.” It was the man sitting next to us. He had overheard us talking. In perfect English, he proceeded to tell us everything we could have ever wanted to know about Lucha Libre wrestling in Mexico City. “It’s so fun! I go like every week!” he said emphatically.
Anyway, on the morning of my first day in Mexico City, a friend and I were taking an Uber across the city to get to the bus station, when I started to see bits and pieces of murals tucked away down alleyways, behind cars, over fences, etc. We were clearly passing through some sort of cluster, so I quickly grabbed my phone and dropped a pin on the map. Come hell or high water, I was going to come back to this spot with my camera.
The gallery that follows contains murals from all over Mexico City that we walked past as some point the week we spent there, but probably 50% of them come from that dropped pin on the map. And probably 75% of what are my favorites in this lot come from that dropped pin on the map.
