A Dash of FunPaprika
Home These Days in Worcester, MA
Everyone’s got a hometown, and mine is Worcester, MA. These days I love it, especially since I don’t live there anymore and come back to visit. I just got back from one of those visits, and this trip, like the others, had a theme. I gotta see what’s closed. This time, the big shock was [...] Read More
The Louis Armstrong Museum
Visiting New York City anytime soon? Are you looking for an Authentic New York Experience – a place that embodies the Big Apple Dream? You know, the dream where you overcome your modest roots to achieve wild success and travel the world, only to go on a real estate search for a starter home that [...] Read More
Provincetown in Winter
Picture this vacation: Four nights in a fabulous one-bedroom condo for less than $80 a night. No traffic in the streets, plenty of seats in the restaurants and coffee shops, free parking at any spot in town. And since I stayed in the center of town, all that free parking was at most a five-minute [...] Read More
Three Days in Philadelphia
I love the City of Brotherly Love! I’ve had a couple of lease-signing stints there, so when a relative recently emailed me to recommend places to stay, it inspired this “36 Hours” rip-off post. My list has a half-assed geographical order to it, but you could easily skip or combine any of them into a [...] Read More
Stuck in the East Brunswick, NJ Hilton
I think I’ve driven past the Hilton Hotel on the New Jersey Turnpike near New Brunswick—you know, the one with the giant, glowing red “H” just off exit 9—at least a million times. It always emitted a roadside-misery vibe to me every time I drove past it, so I had built up a pretty strong [...] Read More
Taking the Bus to Northampton to See the Pope of Trash
“What’s your name, beautiful?” If this is how Greyhound bus drivers greet passengers as they check tickets, I’m giving up my frequent flyer miles. How to get from A to B when you have no car: my new eternal question. Back in March I bought tickets to see “A John Waters Christmas” at the Calvin Theater [...] Read More
Getting My Irish up: Irish Stick Fighting in Mississauga, Ontario
Who the hell knew Ireland had a martial arts tradition? I sure didn’t until I went on one of the wildest rides I’ve ever been on, all courtesy of a graffiti-dream Caddy that I didn’t even sit in, because it never left the hotel parking lot. Mississauga, Ontario, is about a half an hour away [...] Read More
26 Minutes of Scientology
Three hours after I landed in LA, I hopped into a Zipcar to check out LA. Wherever I travel to big cities I try to take subways to get around but this was LA and I needed to drive a bit. I was jazzed to see that the concierge gave me a route that took [...] Read More
For Lady
One of my favorite things about travel is seeing how other cultures try on random English words to use them to their advantage. My favorite? Lady. Growing up I remember my mom telling me, her tomboy little girl, to “Act like a lady” on more than one occasion, and I’m glad she did. The true [...] Read More
Siena: I’m Waiting for the Crema
Siena’s where I spent a semester abroad in college, and it’s always going to be a really special place to me. It’s where I made some of my best friends, fell in real love for the first time, and learned more about myself than I ever could have had I spent the semester stateside. It’s [...] Read More
From the Pope to Pasolini
Sciopero! No vacation in Italy is complete without a strike, and I got my fill on day 2. There was a public transportation strike on May 30, which meant that the buses and the metro weren’t running. Except for the lines that were. “Oh even when there’s a strike the Metro runs,” said the barista [...] Read More
Neorealism Memory Lane in Pigneto
Time to light up this blog with some fun vacation posts! I used some airline miles to book a last-minute trip to Rome, Florence, and some Tuscan hill towns in between. It’s all working out so far and I’m at the end of day one, in the land between exhilaration and exhaustion, making good on [...] Read More