“How much do you want to bet?”

“What?”

This 60-year-old Indian man stares at me, takes another hit of his cigarette, then repeats himself. “I arm wrestle your friend. Gamble on it. How much are you going to bet?”

I look in my wallet and see ~$120 and change.

I glance at this Indian dude. He definitely has old man strength, and, at 12:42 AM, there’s a healthy dose of nicotine and whiskey flowing through his veins. I glance at Ben. There’s more than a healthy dose of tequila flowing through his veins; we’ve been drinking non-stop for five days.

“$120, that’s all the cash I have.”

“$20?”

“No. One HUNDRED and twenty dollars.”

“How many rupees is that?”

“I don’t know, like 13,000?”

The Indian man grabs his wallet and yells “THIRTEEN THOUSAND RUPEES” and throws it on the table.“I guess I’m betting $120 on an arm wrestling match,” I think to myself. I throw my cash down too.

Day five of an Indian wedding, and I’m watching one of my best friends arm wrestle another one of my best friends’ uncles, with a dozen ~30-year-old American dudes betting against a dozen ~60-year-old Indian dudes on the outcome.

I had never, before last week, been to India. I was supposed to go to India during spring break a couple of years ago, but the start date of my last job coincided with our spring break, so my team offsite took priority. Last week, however, I got another chance when one of my best friends, Tanmaye and his girlfriend Quinn, got engaged. He’s Indian, and they were hosting the wedding in India, and I received an invite to said wedding, so I was finally able to take my first trip to the subcontinent. This was not one of those “take a month and see a new country” trips. I’m employed, plus the holidays were coming up, so it was much more of a “six days on the other side of the world” trips, with the wedding itself being a five-day celebration. And the whole thing was a blast. So fun, in fact, that it deserved a standalone travel blog.

So let's get into it.

Most weddings I have been to consist of the following order:

The wedding party arrives on Friday, and you spend the afternoon riffing with the groomsmen who you attended the bachelor party with a few weeks’ prior. You have the rehearsal and welcome dinner, catch some sleep, wake up Saturday, throw on your suit, take lots of pictures, head to the venue, sit through a pleasant, ~hour-long ceremony, head to dinner, listen to anywhere from 2-4 speeches of varying quality, some of which are genuinely heartfelt, but most of which are compilations of unnecessarily-forced inside jokes (most inside jokes are not great wedding speech fodder, FYI), tear up the dance floor, and then, if you’re feeling crazy, hit the town after, before smoking a cigarette at 3 AM and calling it a night. 36 hours of fun, then back to reality.

The itinerary of this wedding was, well, a bit different.

Take a Monday evening flight from New York to New Delhi, land Tuesday night. Wednesday night brings a welcome party in New Delhi. Thursday: Welcome lunch in New Delhi. Friday AM: fly to Jodhpur. Welcome lunch at the Umaid Bhawan Palace. That night? Sangeet party at Fort Mehrangarh with an after party that follows. Saturday: Haldi at the Umaid Bhawan Palace, Baraat that afternoon, wedding in the courtyard that evening, after party inside at 2 AM, and we run it back on Sunday with a Bahu Swagat the following afternoon before a Christian wedding that evening at the palace. Oh, and, yes, one more after party because why not? An aggressive week.

After spending Monday hurriedly washing my clothes and packing, I ubered to JFK for our 14 hour flight to Delhi. I am, normally, a carry-on-only maximalist. For this? I had to make an exception. I needed a suit. No, two suits. Because I don’t want to wear the same suit twice. And what shoes do I wear? Well, I don’t know. Let’s pack cowboy boots. And oxfords. Running shoes, but also some dressier sneakers, too. Loafers, because they look cleaner with Indian fits, right? Dress shirts. Linen shirts. A tie or two. A jacket, sweater, and hoodie, and anything else you might need for Christmas since you’re headed straight from India to Georgia for Christmas.

So, yes, I had to check a bag.

Head to the airport. JFK is New York’s disgrace compared to La Guardia. Get to the gate. Run into a couple of Israeli founders I met in Tel Aviv in May. Confusedly ask them, “Headed to India..?” No, of course not. They’re headed to San Francisco, and had stopped through New York on the way. Obviously.

Run into a couple of friends at the gate: Ben, a day one from business school referenced in the opening paragraph, Landon, and Ben’s new girlfriend, Claudia. Initial read: we’re Claudia fans. She also selflessly provided me with some performance enhancing sleeping medicine. I’m not a great sleeper on red eyes, but if I didn’t catch eight hours on this 14 hour monstrosity, I knew I was cooked. Grab a glass of wine from the bar by the terminal. It tastes like stale grape juice, but it serves its purpose. Board the flight; seat 24J. I really thought I had done something smart by landing the exit row, but, actually, I played myself! Because this was a large, long-haul plane, there are three seat sections per row in economy (cattle class) where I was sitting. I was in the section to the right. A fun trick about the front row of economy on long-haul flights: families can book the entire middle section because the wall in front of those seats doubles as a support for bassinets to put babies in. Directly to my left, I find a family of four: two parents who either lacked the ability or desire to exercise any level of authority over their 2- and 4-year-old children. Dad is holding the younger kid who is competing with the jet engine to see who can maintain 100 decibels the longest. Mom is staring at the older kid: she keeps trying to eat the safety manual.

“Ah! Ah! Ah!”

I hear someone giggling behind me as my seat gets kicked. I turn around. A three-year-old is slumped in her seat kicking her feet against the seatback table. Her mom mouths, “Sorry!” to me. I don’t think it’s a Herculean effort to stop your kid from taking out their ADHD on the back of some stranger’s seat, but here we are. I take a sleeping pill. “Please work.”

Engine accelerates. Flight takes off. I close my eyes. Hear a gasp. Open my eyes. The four year old to my left projectile vomited all over the wall in front of their seat, and now they’re crying. It smells horrible. Awesome, I’m seated in the crossfire of the worst toddlers on the planet.

A few minutes later, before the sleeping pill kicks in but after the fasten seatbelt sign comes off, I head back to row 33 where Ben and Claudia are, so I can take a brief break from the scent of partially digested baby peas and tell my friends about my great fortune. Ben is seated in the aisle, Claudia in the middle. To her right, I see a 12-year-old kid, iPad out, completely barefoot with his right leg crossed over his left, bottom of his foot a few inches from Claudia, giving himself a toe massage. “Incredible, we all won the flight lottery.”

I consider bribing the kid to switch seats with me and sit in kiddie crossfire. I restrain myself and head back to my seat. Sleeping pill is kicking in. Goodnight, world.

I shoot awake, sweating. Four hours until landing; that sleeping pill worked wonders. It also amplified my dreams: seconds earlier, I dreamt we had just flown into one of the Himalayas. I’m pretty sure the kid kicking my seat caused my dream realm to simulate a plane crash. Whatever, we’re nearly there.

Land in New Delhi. First thought, it’s foggy. Check the weather app. Air quality is so bad that the radar just shows dark red. Apparently Delhi in winter time has the worst air pollution on planet earth. Reconvene with Ben, Landon, and Claudia. The foot kid apparently passed out for the entirety of the flight. Never put his socks back on.

We receive a Whatsapp message from the wedding coordinator telling us to head outside and look for a sign saying, “Tanmaye and Quinn wedding.” We grab our bags, head outside, and are greeted by drivers with said signs. They have a list of names. We’re on it. I’m in a different hotel from the others, the Leela, so I walk to a cab with one of the drivers. Everyone in the parking lot is smoking cigarettes, which doesn’t bug me, because the entire biome feels like a cigarette. We get in a car, exit the airport, head down the highway. The roadways had no lanes, so the vehicles, like osmosis, quickly filled any loose space that might help them reach their final destination even one millisecond faster. We weave left, right, accelerate past bicycles with carriages attached to the back, people appearing out of nowhere to cross the highway on foot, and other taxi drivers dodging pedestrians. Somehow, no one hits anyone. Everyone navigating Indian roadways is operating in some sort of collective flow state. It’s impressive. I get to the hotel, and the guards open the hood and the trunk. I realize a few days later that this is routine for all taxis entering nice hotels. Every car gets searched. We pull up to the hotel. The driver gets out, gives me a slight bow. A hotel attendant walks up, gives me a slight bow. Grabs my bags. I walk through a metal detector and enter the hotel. The clerk gives me a slight bow, escorts me to the front desk. The reception gives me a slight bow, checks me in. I get my room key and head upstairs. There’s a knock on my door. The bag guy gives me a slight bow, drops off my bags.

I hit the gym to work up a sweat after sitting for 16 hours, then shower to wash off the gym sweat before hitting the bar for a bite to eat. I grab a beer and some chicken wings before hopping on a work call with a dude in Thailand. He was chill.

At this point, it’s around 1 AM, and I read for a bit before calling it a night.

In the morning, I once again hit the gym before testing out the hotel breakfast. The Leela breakfast was phenomenal. Waffles, omelettes, yogurt, granola, and a random assortment of spicy Indian breakfast foods were waiting for me, plus a cappuccino. I consume all of it, then head to the Taj hotel to meet up with my boys Brody and Lawrence. The three of us will be roommates for the final three nights of the trip, and we need to get fresh fits for the Indian festivities. Namely: kurtas (shirt/gowns), sherwanis (formal coats), and jackets/vests. I grab a coffee at their hotel, Brody says, “I know a place,” and we hop in a $2 Uber.

Traffic was, once again, a free-for-all. We drove past a park with hundreds of people laying in the grass, but it wasn’t a “hot girl in LA laying out” kind of laying in the grass as much as a “I was walking and just decided to cease movement in this particular spot” kind of laying in the grass. Lots of dogs all over the place. All sorts of bicycle-like vehicles with anywhere from 1-4 people on them.

Brody takes us to what must be the nicest shopping area in New Delhi. We enter this boujee, white-washed complex with a Ralph Lauren store near the entrance and walk into a traditional Indian clothing store. The manager of the store, who was quite metrosexual (he would have fit right in in Brooklyn), immediately starts taking kurtas off the hangers for us to try on.

None of them fit.

He assured us that the could adjust the kurtas and have them delivered the next day to our hotels before our flights.

Maybe.

These clothes were very, very nice, and they absolutely did not fit. Except one kurta, which I quite liked, that fit quite well. I took it to the counter. He showed me the price. I checked the exchange rate: “$800.”

“No way,” I thought to myself. I glanced at Brody and Lawrence. They shook their heads. I said, “Don’t think I’m going to be able to swing this for something I need to wear once.”

We leave.

Next we head head downtown, to Khan Market, which is basically a mix of Canal Street and Soho in New York. A bunch of narrow winding alley ways that are simultaneously dirty yet filled with interesting retail stores + bars and restaurants. Smog is still, pretty much, everywhere, so whenever you’re outside it’s like walking through a smoking lounge. Slight burn in your lungs.

We ran into Jacob, one of Tanmaye’s friends from Northwestern, and Laura, his wife / one of Quinn’s friends in one of the 27 clothing stores in this Delhian alley. Jacob was already fitted in Indian apparel. We weren’t huge fans of store number one, so we kept walking until we found a tailor: B. Rai Son’s. This was the right store.

Apparently, half of our crew had already been to this same spot, and we were all looking for the same thing: a sherwani. It was a must-have item for the Indian wedding in a few days, and, like a good suit, we needed to get them tailored. The boys at B Rai Son’s pulled out some fabrics for us to choose from (I chose a navy blue base with lighter blue patterns), took our measurements, then bartered with us until we agreed to a price. I think I was ~$500 all-in for the sherwani, some tailored pants, and a nice yellow kurta. Then we headed to a more casual store for kurtas, jackets, and scarves. I copped a red and a navy kurta, as well as a red/black scarf.

I headed back to my hotel to shower and change, then I grabbed a cab to the welcome party on the outskirts of New Delhi. Dress attire for night one was western suits, so I threw on a navy suit and tried my best not to fall asleep in the cab. 10 hour time change isn’t for the weak. Looking out the window, it felt like the opening scene to a B-list thriller film: thick fog with 8 feet of visibility, strangers appearing out of nowhere walking across the street, cars weaving all over the road. My driver was chill. We exchanged a total of 9 words.

After 45 minutes, I arrived at the “welcome dinner,” which was more grandiose than most weddings I’ve attended. Red carpet rolled out at the entrance with servers waiting with glasses of champagne, then I walked down the hallway into a massive, circular room with a round bar in the center, a stage at the front, and an outdoor dining area to the left with everything from a sit-down omakase station, to a massive grill covered with an assortment of meats, to a dessert bar that would have made Willy Wonka jealous.

This was also my first time seeing the rest of my crew attending the wedding. There were ~20 or so of us from Columbia in town, with about ~10, specifically, of my closer guy friends. Among those 10, the split of single vs. relationship guys was approximately 50/50, which is the ideal split of relationship status at a wedding. Having been on both sides of that equation at different points in my life, the relationship guys are guaranteed to have a good time (assuming, of course, that the party is good), while the single guys tend to experience more volatility somewhat dependent on their successes at both identifying, and wooing, any of the single girls in attendance. Their efforts, of course, serve the broader entertainment of everyone in the friend group. This is the underlying side plot of any wedding, particularly a destination wedding. Who finds love that wasn’t predestined when the invites were sent out?

At this particular wedding, I was one of the single guys.

I grab a drink (gin and tonic?) and start making the rounds saying my hello’s to everyone, and, as the last paragraph would suggest, keeping an eye out for anyone who might fall into the “single girls in attendance” category. My crew had flown in from all over the place: the majority live in New York, but we had friends from Guatemala, Argentina, and France as well. Tanmaye’s friends were largely split between graduate school (Columbia) and undergrad (Northwestern).

I walk over to say what’s up to some of the Northwestern guys, when I recognize one girl from Raya. “Traveling to New Delhi” was a telltale sign of someone else at the same wedding. I said hello. I made very little traction with that conversation.

Then the bride and groom arrive, and they look stunning, which was, as it should be, the common theme of the weekend. Tanmaye, to his credit, really pulled himself together for his wedding week, Quinn looked like a princess. We all say hey to them, and I chat with his dad and uncle for a few minutes. I had met them once, at our graduation party a year and a half ago. Tanmaye’s dad is a 6’ 5 giant of a man with an incredibly dry sense of humor, and his uncle Bobby is exactly the type of Indian uncle you would want at your 5 day wedding extravaganza: life of the party perpetually tearing up the dance floor.

Dinner time; I grab a table with Marcos, Nana, Pierce, Maite, Guille, Rafa, Toni, Clem, Lucas, and Brody(more Columbia friends). Then time for dessert. I turn to walk over the dessert area, where I see Sebo and Antonio chatting with a group of girls near the espresso bar. Zero time wasted for the Latin folks. DJ comes on, back to the dance floor.

Again, I would like to highlight that this was a welcome dinner, but it was more extravagant than most weddings I had attended. Two hours later, my whole crew was dancing on stage to Indo-English jams, and two hours after that, Lawrence, Brody, and I finally made our way outside to grab cabs home. 3:52 AM.

At this point, our visibility had declined from 8 feet to 4, and the ride home felt more like a fever dream than reality. I genuinely have no idea how these drivers can navigate New Delhi smog like this; it’s like they have a 6^th sense.

Back in the hotel, I pass out at 4:30, but not before setting my alarm for 10:45; we have lunch at 12:30.

I grimace and roll over to grab my phone.

“5:37.”

“Did I only sleep an hour?” I think to myself.

I open my phone. Four missed calls. Brody: “Yo where are you?”

Turns out it was 5:37 PM. I had missed an entire day, and it was already dark again. So much for adjusting my sleep schedule. I roll out of bed, throw on some shorts, and hit the gym, before showering and heading to the hotel restaurant. At this point, I resigned myself to staying up til ~midnight then trying to catch 6-7 hours of sleep before our flight to Jodhpur in the morning.

My mistake, at dinner, was ordering a lamb burger. I like lamb. It’s typically a delectable meat, particularly in burger form. At least at Israeli restaurants. But, in hindsight, I think this specific burger was undercooked. I was, going into this trip, incredibly wary of “Delhi belly.” Don’t, under any circumstances, drink the tap water. I rinsed my toothbrush with water bottles. There was no chance I was going to risk a stomach bug in India. And yet, I got sick anyway.

That evening, after a couple of work calls, I was unwinding for bed, when I started to feel awful. Or, like, “pre-awful.” That feeling where you know you’ll probably throw up in like 2 hours but you haven’t yet. I spend the next 90 minutes on and off the toilet, before getting back in bed for ~30 minutes, then running to the shower and projectile vomiting everywhere for another 30 minutes.

Lamb.

Disgusted both in myself and the murder scene around my feet, I rinse out the shower, take a shower myself, brush my teeth, throw away that tooth brush, and look at my phone again.

3 AM.

“Great,” I thought to myself. My alarm was set for 7 AM.

I try to go to sleep, but at this point, there was no chance I was falling asleep. Waking up at 5:37 PM makes it pretty difficult to fall asleep just 10 hours later. So, at 5:30, I made the only reasonable decision to make after blowing up your sleep schedule then puking your guts out for 90 minutes: practice the following evening’s dance routine.

One of the funnier parts of this wedding was that all of the Columbia and Northwestern boys had to perform a 20-something-man synchronized dance routine Friday night at the Sangeet. You may have seen one of the classic viral videos on TikTok of a bunch of American dudes crushing a synchronized dance routine to an Indian beat. That was us. We had, hilariously, practiced it twice over Zoom, but the results were mixed. I myself am not a particularly natural dancer. I’m good at a few things, and fine at many things, but serviceable at best on a dance floor. And I didn’t at all have this one memorized. So, I went back to the bathroom, put my laptop on the sink, and spend the next hour going through the dance routine in front of the mirror, shirtless and sweating, before showering again and heading to the airport.

The wedding coordinator communicated with all of us via Whatsapp, so I got a message saying my ride would be there at 7 AM. I thought I was running late when I walked out of the hotel at 7:17. I arrived at the airport at 7:43. First one there for our 10:30 AM flight.

Navigating the intricacies of flying domestic in India with an overweight bag on no sleep is a bottom-3 life experience. I had to wait in line to enter the airport as they checked my passport and ticket. Fine. Then I get inside. I went to print my boarding pass so I could go through the self-bag drop. Couldn’t print boarding pass because we were a group reservation. Fine. I get in line. 10 minutes go by. 20. 30. We’ve progressed, maybe, 12 people total in the line. It feels like each time a new traveler reaches Indigo’s desk, it’s the worker’s first time checking someone into a flight. I’m nearing the front of the line, and the rest of my party begins to arrive. Landon says “I think we have a dedicated check-in desk.” I get out of line.

This was a mistake.

The critical mass of our party is now here, and Tanmaye talks to an airline worker off to the side. We have our own check-in desk. Good. They have no idea how to check us in. Bad. No one gets checked in for 30 minutes. It’s now 9:45 AM. Our flight leaves at 10:30 AM. No one is checked in. No one has gone through security. I haven’t slept since 5:30 PM the previous day and feel as though I lost half of my body weight via oral expulsion around 3 AM. Not great!

I get back in line with Antonio, Lawrence, Ben, and Claudia. Borderline delirious. The issue, I now realize, is that it takes approximately 8 minutes to process a payment for an overweight bag, and the weight limit for a bag is quite light: 15 kgs. So, naturally, most suitcases getting checked come in over that weight. One person goes up. Bag overweight. 10 minute check-in. Maybe longer. We saw some folks from our party stand at the desk for 30+ minutes before checking in. Nightmare fuel.

45 minutes later, I finally get my boarding pass. It’s 10:42. Our flight was scheduled to leave 7 minutes ago. Luckily, we were 95% of the seats on this flight, so they pushed back takeoff instead. I grab some snacks and make my way to the gate. 12:35 PM, we finally take off. My snacks suck. I eat them anyway. At 1:42 PM, we land in Jodhpur.

Jodhpur was refreshing, quite literally, because it didn’t suffer from the same smog overhang as New Delhi. A smaller city, it was best-known for the Umaid Bhawan Palace and Fort Mehrangarh, which we would soon party at for the next three evenings. When the flight landed, we left our bags with the transportation staff and took cabs to Umaid for lunch.

The scene was when we rolled up to this palace was insane. Driving through town, it’s like a slightly nicer, but directionally-similar, New Delhi. Cars all over the place. Slightly nicer infrastructure, but still a plethora of 3-people-piled-on-homemade-bicycles cruising down the road. Then we take this winding path up to the palace, the gate opens, and BOOM: Trumpets. Camels. Red carpet rolled out. More champagne. I walk upstairs into the palace, and this thing is just glorious. One of the more impressive buildings that I’ve ever seen, filled with portraits of impressive-looking mustached, turban-wearing men adorn the walls. We have lunch in the courtyard. I eat as quickly as possible to expedite my path to my bed for a few hours. Family and some friends stayed in the palace. Most of my crew was at the Ajit hotel down the road.

I Uber there, and Lawrence had beat me to the spot (he skipped lunch). This hotel was villa-style, spread out across a dozen-or-so buildings. Our room and patio overlooked the pool. We had a “suite” with a big, L-shaped couch at the front of the room, then a corridor to the bedroom with a queen bed. Three of us were sharing a room with one bed, so we ordered an extra cot. I passed out for three hours. At this point, I was delirious.

Wake up at 6. Brody can’t find his backpack. Don’t have time to look; time to get dressed for the Sangeet. Lawrence and I practice our dance routine again in the hotel. Brody lays in bed doomscrolling on his phone. We throw on some kurtas (I’m wearing red with a black vest that Lawrence scooped for me), then we Uber to Fort Mehrangarh. We thought we were 30 minutes late. We were still 30 minutes early.

We pull up at the fort, and massive spotlights are painting its wall with a wedding logo. More camels. More trumpets. A bar outside; more champagne.

Tanmaye and Quinn arrive, the gates open, and they lead us on an ~hour pilgrimage to the top of the fort, where the first party in Jodhpur will take place. The walk through the fort felt like Alice in Wonderland meets Aladdin. As we reached higher elevation, we would peer from the ramparts toward the interior to watch exotic dancers move their bodies to hypnotic music. A half-dozen fire breathers performed a show. Two women in what must have been ~20-foot-tall stilts swayed back and forth to a rhythmic beat. And a few guys dressed as monkeys sprinted around on all fours, hiding in the castle walls before jumping out to intimidate guests. I said I wasn’t going to drink after my stomach issues. This was not an event to experience sober. I took imodium and hammered my third cocktail of the evening.

Those monkeys were just nuts, man.

Finally, we make it to the top. An interior courtyard of the castle that had been retrofitted with a massive stage, several bars, and yet another insane spread of foods, most of which I couldn’t begin to pronounce. We head first to the bar, then to the buffet station. I try, with the food at least, to take it easy on my stomach. Three different groups perform interpretive dances on the stage. Everyone cheers. Suddenly, “Boys, you’re up!”

Shit. Our turn. Heart rate starts to accelerate. It’s like gearing up for a football game again. We, literally, huddle up and start the “we ready” chant that you see in every Hallmark sports movie, then, “It’s time!” We hit the stage. Crush it. All of that anxiety, for nothing. 10 / 10 performance.

Everyone daps everyone up. We’re just glad to be done. Here’s the YouTube video if you want to watch:

Then Tanmaye and the men in his family have a dance routine. They rush. There’s two other dance routines. They crush. Everyone crushed their respective routines. Go back for another bite to eat. A DJ comes on, we all hit the dance floor. Two hour dance-fest commences. I try to spit game with another girl from the wedding. Vibes seem strong. We chat for 20 minutes. I go back to my crew. Crack some jokes. More dancing. Servers are walking around with shots, I grab a couple. I walk back to the girl. “Here, let’s take these.”

We take the shots. She says, “That was pretty weak.”

Sensing a layup, I say, “Want to get something stronger at the bar?”

She smirks and says, “I’m good.” and walks off.

“Well, I definitely need something stronger.” I go back to the bar. Brody grabs a drink with me instead. I tell him the story. He laughs. I laugh. Back to the dance floor. 1:30 AM. I’m exhausted. I head to the bathroom, which is in the previous courtyard before we entered the party area. I want to leave. I see most of my crew hanging out chatting near the bathroom. I wait til they’re distracted and make my way to the exit. 2 AM. Taxi home. Pass out.

Half wake up to Brody and Lawrence. Are they staring at me? I don’t care. Back to sleep. I wake up. 10:30 AM. “Finally, rested,” I think. I grab breakfast, it’s pretty solid. More omelettes. More waffles. I head to the gym. My stomach is finally cooperating; Larry walks in too. I hit back squats, then pull ups and and ab circuit. Feeling good. I jump in the pool. It’s frigid. I can feel my manhood hide inside myself for warmth. Marcos jumps in. Then Toni. I think he’s going to get hypothermia. Ben jumps in.

“INU. WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE ROCKBAND?”

My friends call my Inu. It’s Japanese for “dog.” Like, “shiba inu.” long story.

“rock band?”

“Yeah! a rockband came on… did you… leave before the rock band?”

“I mean, I guess.”

“You left at 12:30??”

Lawrence pipes up, “That rock band didn’t come on til like 2:45!”

I think to myself, “how did a whole other band come on… at 2:45?”

Ben said, “Damn. I guess I was there til 4.”

Go back to the room. Brody still can’t find his backpack; he heads to the airport. It isn’t there either. He comes back. We shower and get ready for the next thing: Haldi.

We head back to the palace, where workers were busy constructing a massive stage for what I assumed to be the Indian wedding that night. I was directed down and to the right through a series of hedges to another bar and dining area near a nice pool. I was wearing a yellow, shiny kurta. Brody, Lawrence and I stopped to take some pictures and aura farm.

Then to the pool. Then to the bar by the pool. I had what I think was a Corona mixed with a bloody mary. It was fine. For lunch, I had a fat plate of Indo-Mexican cuisine. Indian and Mexican food are directionally similar, so the hybrid was delicious. Back to the pool. Jacob and Laura gave speeches. Then Jonah, one of Tanmaye’s friends, and Maya, his sister / one of Quinn’s friends, gave speeches. We all cheered. Another corona-mary cocktail. More pictures. This “party” was a bit more casual, so I posted up at a table with my Columbia friends and just riffed for 30 minutes. Then music started. We walk back to the pool. Tanmaye’s dad is laughing and dumping a basket of what appears to be a mixture of flour and yellow feathers on the couple. Jacob pours soda on their heads.

I have no idea what’s going on. We all get on the stage. We all start dumping stuff on them. Then we start dumping stuff on each other. I’m throwing feather/flour clumps at Brody. Ben hits me in the face with a massive mound of this unidentified substance. Everyone jumps in the pool. The pool had been roped off the whole time, like you shouldn’t jump in. But they can’t stop 15 people from jumping in.

Back to the hotel. Brody finds his backpack: another guy had accidentally grabbed it thinking it was his, and didn’t check until a day later. Trip = saved.

Tonight is wedding #1: the Indian wedding. But first! The baraat. I have no idea what a “baraat” is, but apparently it’s like a “last journey” that the groom takes before meeting the bride, where he rides on a horse or vintage car to the wedding venue. This is not a solemn journey, it’s a banger. The irony is that we’re supposed to “delay” his arrival via dancing in front of the car. Apparently, every culture has an undertone of “don’t do it!” Regarding a man getting married.

We throw on our sherwanis and head back to the palace, where our drivers drop us off on the bottom of the road. He lets us out in front of a marching band standing at the ready. The tuba players start right as we get out of the car, meaning that they’re playing directly in our ears.

Tinnitus.

There’s a small stage set up, plus two bars and some food stations. There’s also three seats next to a couple of mirrors, where I see someone having a turban tied to their head. I grab a blue cloth and sit down. An Indian dude twists part of the cloth and says “hold.” I hold. Over the next five minutes, he twists this cloth around my head an impossible number of times. Ben is snickering taking pictures. I look in the mirror. I like the turban look. “Maybe I’ll make this my new Linkedin photo," I think to myself. I grab a tea. Then a beer. Everyone else gets their turbans. We take photos and crack jokes. Then Tanmaye takes the stage for what would be an hour-long ceremony in which he got a gold turban and lots of jewelry. Back to the street.

Tanmaye gets on a horse. It’s wearing more jewelry than him. Music starts. He’s moving at a speed of less than 1 foot per hour. The band is crushing it. We all start dancing. A truck pulls up. The trailer behind it is filled with beers and cocktails enclosed in water bottles. Basically, advanced High Noons. I grab a couple. More dancing. Tanmaye’s horse makes it 17 feet after an hour. He is then moved to a Rolls Royce. His childhood driver, who hasn’t stopped smiling in 3 days, is driving. He regularly stops driving to get out of the car and dance. Or get on top of the car, dancing. Their top speed never surpasses 1 mph.

Indian Pit Bull shows up. I have no idea who he was but that’s the best description I have. He arrives on a massive, two-story trailer covered in speakers, standing on the second floor. He starts playing what must be Indian bangers, because all of the locals went nuts when the music started. We caught onto the beat and started throwing down. Tanmaye’s uncle Bobby appears out of nowhere with a bottle of liquor.

“you drink! you drink! you drink!”

We all follow orders.

The symbols from the band are so, so loud. I linger in the back. More tinnitus.

We approach the palace. Bobby grabs us. “Dance in front of the car! Stop the car!” We all lay on the ground in “protest” while we continue to dance. The car stops. The palace is gorgeous. We aura farm in front of it. More pictures. Finally, we can go inside.

Someone steals a shoe. Apparently, there’s a tradition at Indian weddings called “Jotta Chupai,” or “shoe hiding,” where the bride’s female relatives steal the groom’s shoes as he arrives, hiding them and demanding a ransom for their return. Someone apparently asked for $200,000, then a $40,000 safari, taking it a bit too far. I think they ended up with $2k. I have no idea if the shoe(s) were ever returned.

We walk downstairs behind the palace. Construction was complete, I was looking at a scene from Star Wars or Dune. Walk down the red carpet on the stairs to a stage with a spotlight on it, waiting for the couple of the evening. Two bars, in elevated buildings, to the right and left, with red carpets leading to them as well. Seats facing the stage in front of me, then more seats, further back, facing a newly-constructed temple, which I presumed would hold the evening’s ceremony. Brody and I grab seats in the bar/building construct on the left. We wait. And wait. And drink. And wait. Suddenly, the most intense music of the weekend kicks off. I mean it was like the movie 300. Tanmaye takes the stage. Then Quinn is escorted down, her head covered by some sort of cover carried by her family. Drones are flying around at 50 mph recording from all angles. Fireworks explode to my left and they take the stage to my right. I notice a dining area further behind the temple to my left. Brody and I walk over.

We grab a drink, then grab dinner plates. I strike up a conversation with another girl. She and one of her friends had largely been traveling in a four-person pack with a gay couple. Brody and I grab a table with them. I try to talk to the girl. Again, zero traction. End up spending more time talking to the gay couple. They’re chill. The girl I had chatted with at the previous evening’s events sits down next to Brody. They appear to hit it off. Gay couple leaves. Girl I was attempting to wine and dine leaves. I’m inadvertently third-wheeling, I leave. I link up with Lawrence and say, “Don’t interrupt Brody.” We then watch, in a mixture of amusement and horror, as Ben and Toni walk by, glance at each other, snicker, then sit at Brody’s table, fulling blowing up his spot. Lawrence and I walk back over there as well.

There’s nothing worse than attempting to be suave with a girl, then a bunch of your boys pull up on your spot. Just an all-time poor situation. Brody and the girl eventually go to the bar. Brody eventually walks back, with one less girl, a few minutes later. Lawrence and I glance at Ben and Toni and say, “What was that for?”

They play dumb. “What are you talking about?”

We all laugh. More drinks. It’s 11 PM. Now midnight. Ceremony still hasn’t started. Finally, music begins to play. We take our seats. I’m hanging out with Lawrence, Sebo, and some of the Northwestern guys. Tanmaye and Quinn are in the temple in the back of the courtyard. About half of the crowd is watching attentively. Half is floating back and forth to the bar. Eventually, after 45 minutes, I take one more loop to the bar as well. 2 AM. 2:15. Ceremony over. We go back to the palace. After party in the front room, + more food in the courtyard where we had the first lunch. There’s a glowing, spinning cheetah statue in the middle of the floor. The walls are covered in mounted animals. DJ plays too many Indian beats; at this time of the night, if you want to keep the crowd rolling, you have to rip top 50 dance tracks. I’m there til the lights come on. Back to the hotel with Brody and Lawrence. Good night world.

Wake up at 10:45, make breakfast right at close. End up sharing a table with the dude who bid $200k on the shoes; he’s hysterical. He also stole Brody’s backpack. Chat with a couple of Quinn’s friends as well. We all look terrible. Someone’s mother was in the restaurant; she found my jokes to be funny. Take another dive in the pool (cold plunge, Huberman would be proud). Then throw on a linen shirt and scarf for the Bahu Swagat. Hit the bar, grab a drink and some food. The band is playing. Turns out, I know half of the band. Toni, Sebo, and Ben are on the drums. “Not bad,” I think. I run back to the room. Come back down. Eight men from the wedding are in all black holding rifles. “These ceremonies are insane,” I think. Post up on a bench with Brody, Ben, and Lawrence. I’m exhausted; it’s been a long wedding. Stand up to watch Quinn’s parents dance. Then Quinn dances. It’s all beautiful. I grab ice cream. Lawrence tells me, “ice cream is a kid’s food.”

I don’t apologize for using my free will.

Back to the room; one more event: the Christian wedding. I grab my other suit: a new gray one I’d gotten over the summer; still hadn’t worn it. Shower, suit, tie. Back to the palace, yet again. We’re greeted with champagne (again). Every time mine is half-empty, a server pours more in. I explore a few of the palace hallways. More mustaches on impressive-looking men. We head to the room across the hall from the after party room from the night before; it’s been set up to resemble a Christian chapel. The pastor, Sean, is straight out of every Protestant service I’ve ever attended, including the couple of quick, witty, G-rated jokes he dropped before the service began. It felt like home.

Tanmaye walks in, then the wedding party, then Quinn. The service was concise but incredibly sweet, even I teared up a bit as they exchanged their vows. After the service, Lawrence and I explored the premises for more photo ops, where we found Tanmaye’s driver upstairs taking mirror selfies. We joined him.

Then, back outside for the dinner (and, you guessed it: another party). I hit the buffet with Brody and grabbed a seat with our Columbia friends. There was a stage in the part of this courtyard a bit closer to the palace, where a band started playing; the dining area was further back. We started working our way to the stage. Then, siblings and friends gave speeches, with Toni and Ben representing the Columbia boys. Not bad, though I do have respect for people who can roll into a speech, no notes. Band plays a few more songs, it’s approaching midnight as they say, “This is our last one of the night!” (before the obvious, ‘one last song!’ that always occurs after).

“Early night,” I think.

Nope! Another after party. I head to the outdoor bar for another drink before the after party. Espresso martini; I need caffeine. A new girl, who I handed seen before, walks up. “Get two of those?” She asks (demands). I oblige. She tells me she’s from the states but lives in Italy. I tell her I’ve been to Italy a few times, once eating 20 pizzas in 13 days. She’s both confused and amused. I figure this is a decent chance do lean into the ‘writer’ side of me, as she mentioned she studied the classics, so I said, “I’m a writer.” “Where do you write?” “Substack.”

She’s not impressed.

“I’m writing a book.”

Still not impressed. “Do you have a publisher?”

“Penguin.”

Impressed. Funny how that works. We start chatting with a couple of Indian guys who had walked up; one was a CBS alumnus as well. I go to the party. This DJ understood the assignment. American bangers. Maybe, in hindsight, it’s because it was after the Christian wedding and not Indian. Idk. Another drink. Dance floor. Tie comes off. Ben grabs me. “We need to go outside, now.” He seems serious. We head to the courtyard. A bunch of older Indian men are there.

“How much do you want to bet?”

“What?”

This 60-year-old Indian man stares at me, takes another hit of his cigarette, then repeats himself. “I arm wrestle your friend. Gamble on it. How much are you going to bet?”

Ah. Apparently, Ben had orchestrated an arm wrestling ring to take place the final night of the wedding.

I look in my wallet and see ~$120 and change.

I glance at this Indian dude. He definitely has old man strength, and, at 12:42 AM, there’s a healthy dose of nicotine and whiskey flowing through his veins. I glance at Ben. There’s more than a healthy dose of tequila flowing through his veins; we’ve been drinking non-stop for five days.

“$120, that’s all the cash I have.”

“$20?”

“No. One HUNDRED and twenty dollars.”

“How many rupees is that?”

“I don’t know, like 13,000?”

The Indian man grabs his wallet and yells “THIRTEEN THOUSAND RUPEES” and throws it on the table.“I guess I’m betting $120 on an arm wrestling match,” I think to myself. I throw my cash down too.

Day five of an Indian wedding, and I’m watching one of my best friends arm wrestle another one of my best friends’ uncles, with a dozen ~30-year-old American dudes betting against a dozen ~60-year-old Indian dudes on the outcome.

Ben looks like he’s going to lose. I worry that I’ll lose my money. Given their seating, his arm is closest to the edge of the table, sliding off. The match pauses; we grab a smaller round table they can stand on opposite sides of, so neither has a leverage advantage. Match commences. Ben smokes the old man. USA chant breaks out. I get my 13,000 rupees. Happy Inu. A celebratory cigarette. Then back to the dance floor. Another drink. Someone’s scarf is now a limbo pole. Sebo wows the crowd by going full 90 degree bend. I don’t even think about attempting it. Two hour rave commences.

I step out to the courtyard to grab some pizza. Italy girl from earlier steps out. I engage in what can only be described as a 90-minute conversational vortex in which I quoted and described countless references of the Greek and Roman classics that were either entirely fabricated and/or extrapolated far beyond the reaches of my actual knowledge for the sake of an engaging conversation. That’s fine. I fully endorse keeping conversations fun at all costs. I thought everyone had left. Lights were coming on. I was facing the dance floor and saw little activity in there. Girl goes to the bathroom. I glance behind me. Half of my crew was still there at a table 15 feet behind me. Classic. Party’s over. Time to go home. Brody, Lawrence, and I grab a cab. Get back to the room. Our door is cracked open. Not great. We cut on the lights; a shadowy shape darts from the couch back to the bedroom. A few seconds later, it comes flying back through the corridor to the door, looking for a way out. Lawrence yells and jumps out of the way.

The cat sprints full speed out the door, meowing at the top of it’s lungs.

“Okay, we need to go to bed,” I think.

Next morning. I feel like a human cigarette. Shuffle to breakfast, feeling horrible. Sit with Nana and Marcos. Breakfast is the only thing giving me the strength to get through what will soon be the longest travel day of my life. We fly back to Delhi at ~12, then don’t have our flights back to the US til 11:30 PM. Eat food. Drink coffee. Back to the room. Pack. Lawrence, Brody, and I are the last cab to the airport. The Jodhpur airport is, for lack of a better term… lackluster. Security takes an hour. We survive. Back on the plane. I’m seated next to Larry. Commence cracking a dozen inside jokes that have no business being on Substack. We get to the Delhi airport. I grab a Krispy Kreme donut; first taste of America in a week. Now we have 12 hours to kill. What to do, what to do.

I book a room at an airport hotel. The “Roseate.” We split it eight ways. Me, Landon, Brody, Lawrence, Claudia, Jules, Ben, Sebo. I grab a cab to the hotel. The concierge asks me how many nights. I say “8 hours.” He is confused but asks no questions. We all drop our bags in the room and hit the restaurant for lunch. I get two sushi rolls and a chocolate shake. Why not? Free will.

Back to the room, I write the first half of this blog while half the crew naps; Brody, Lawrence, and Sebo left on earlier flights. Then back to the airport, and, finally, 16-hour flight home. Not a bad week.

Will I ever go to India again? I have no idea. But if you do have a chance to go to an Indian wedding, you should probably do it. Just avoid the lamb burgers.

And congratulations again to Tanmaye and Quinn, I wish you both a lifetime of love and happiness.

- Jack

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I don’t know what the worst thing is that you could hear on a Sunday morning Wizz Air flight from London to Tel Aviv. Actually, that’s not true. The worst thing you could hear is either someone screaming “I’ve got a bomb!” from seat 4A, or the pilot announcing “Brace for impact!” as a surface-to-air missile bears down on your Boeing.

Both of those would suck.

Fortunately, my Sunday morning Wizz Air flight from London to Tel Aviv didn’t include either of these announcements. But it did include a not-so-great announcement.

After waking up at 4:30 AM for an hour-long Uber to the Stansted airport and spending the next five hours in seat 1C listening to an Orthodox Jewish man from Brooklyn explain, in excruciating detail, how modern Jewish rabbis have leveraged technology to streamline the kosher slaughter of cows (look up the tech behind kosher slaughterhouses. It’s fascinating how 21^st century technology can be applied to Old Testament codes of conduct), I was 25 minutes out from Tel Aviv, in mid-descent, when the nose of the plane jerked up, the engines re-accelerated, and the pilot called over the speaker, “I apologize, ladies and gentlemen, but there has been an incident at the Ben Gurion Airport. We are headed back to London.”

A few minutes later, that announcement was followed up by the only message that could possibly be worse than” I’ve got a bomb.”

“We don’t have enough fuel to get back to London, so we’ll be landing in Serbia.”

(I promise you that no one en route from London (a great city) to Tel Aviv (another great city) has ever thought, “You know what? I’d rather be in the Balkans.” Luckily, the Serbians wouldn’t let us land there, so we ultimately refueled in Budapest, which is a solid backup to Tel Aviv.)

The funny thing about flying on Wizz Air, which, for my fellow Americans, is the Spirit Airlines of Europe, is that Wizz Air doesn’t have WiFi. So, after our ominous message from the cockpit, my new Orthodox friend and I spent the next hour and a half wondering what “an incident at the Ben Gurion Airport” might mean. Bomb? Missile strike? Some other, different, third thing? Who knows! As the only Gentile on the flight, I was amused to see that my Israeli counterparts couldn’t have cared less about this “incident.”

“There’s always an ‘incident,’ it’s Israel. Just go to Tel Aviv,” I heard a few people grumble. When your country is perpetually at war, I guess you get used to incidents.

Once we landed in Budapest, I googled, “ben gurion airport incident” and saw footage of a smoldering crater in the road about 300 meters from the airport. It turns out that the one Houthi missile the Iron Dome failed to intercept in Q2 2025 hit right as my plane entered Israeli airspace. I’m glad that I was able to kick off my trip with an authentic Israeli experience.

Despite the unforeseen difficulties, I did, ultimately, make it to Tel Aviv. But it wasn’t a simple journey. Most airlines, in response to a missile hitting an airport, cancel their flights for a few days. That makes sense. It’s probably bad for business if a missile hits a plane? And even worse for business if a missile hits a plane with passengers on it?

But it’s also very good for business if you are one of a few opportunistic airlines who maintains, or even expands your flight offerings in the face of conflict. Your pricing power is infinite. So, I rebooked a Budapest to Tel Aviv flight for 11 PM, with a 6 AM layover in Dubai, on a 3^rd-tier Middle Eastern budget airline called “FlyDubai,” fully accepting that I would deal with a post-red eye morning from hell upon arrival, before, at the last minute, changing to a Wizz Air flight to Tirana, Albania, to catch an 8 AM Sundor flight to Tel Aviv the following day.

I got to visit the Balkans after all.

(Sundor is a subsidiary of El Al, the flagship airline of Israel. Fun fact: El Al’s flights have missile defense systems. For their new planes, anyway. There’s not a chance my Sundor flight from Tirana had flairs. Another fun fact: El Al’s stock price jumped 7% after the airport got hit. Again: missile strikes are good for the airline business if 1) you are the one airline not scared to fly in the wake of a missile strike, and 2) your customer base is also largely undeterred by missile strikes. God bless Israel, and God bless the Israeli aviation sector.)

So, I flew to Tirana at 9 PM. Tirana, or at least the area of Tirana immediately surrounding the airport, felt like the architectural equivalent of a cigarette. Which makes sense: society is nothing but a collection of individuals, and everyone around the airport was smoking cigarettes. The guy who checked me in at the hotel made a point to note that my room had a balcony, in case, you know, I wanted to smoke cigarettes.

I didn’t want to smoke cigarettes; I had done that on the flight. I’m kidding, of course. But if Albania has an airline, I bet they’ll let you smoke cigarettes on it.

Anyway, after four hours of sleep, I woke up, drank an Albanian coffee (which I imagine would *hit* if you followed it up with a cigarette), and flew to Tel Aviv. For what it’s worth, the day after a missile hits an airport is probably the safest day to fly to that airport. The Iron Dome isn’t going to miss twice in a week.

And that, my friends, was my introduction to Israel.

Why go to Israel? Well, I’d always wanted to go to Israel. As a good Southern Baptist boy who, at the age of 4, disproved my pastor’s claim that “there aren’t flying horses in Heaven,” (Elijah was taken to heaven in chariots pulled by flaming horses. Check mate, Brother Wayne), I was fascinated by the country that dominated the origin story of my religion.

I was supposed to go to Israel in May 2024 with some friends from graduate school, but we cancelled that trip after October 7th. And I was supposed to go for a wedding in February 2025, but I had a wedding in Guatemala the weekend before, and I was moving to San Francisco the weekend after, and there aren’t many good flight routes from New York to Guatemala to Tel Aviv to San Francisco.

But in May 2025, I had an opportunity to go for work. And, despite my predator missile-induced delay, Tel Aviv was sick. And Jerusalem is too. So, I want to share my 28-year-old-Gentile’s perspective of Israel.

From the moment I walked through customs, it was obvious that the whole country was on high alert. No surprises there: when a country in your region that’s 10x your size would love to wipe you off the planet, your airport security checks are going to take a bit longer. The customs agents ask you detailed questions about your travel plans, and they don’t stamp your passport because several MENA nations will block entry for any traveler with an Israel stamp on their passport.

But then you leave the airport, and you Uber into the city, and a highway through the desert gives way to this coastal city that is a blend of Barcelona, San Francisco, and New York. Tel Aviv’s boardwalk is this gorgeous, multi-mile expansion on the beach dotted by bars, restaurants, and outdoor gyms, and the sunset over the Mediterranean horizon is just gorgeous.

Silicon Valley is a fairly “small” world in that a lot of founders and investors are, at most, one degree of separation apart, but the Tel Aviv tech sector is even smaller: pretty much every founder served in the military together at some point, and the offices aren’t just in the same metropolitan area, or even the same city, but the same neighborhood: it’s basically a requirement that if you manage at least $100 million or raise at least $5 million, you open an office in Sarona Market. Half of the VC offices in Tel Aviv were former Knights Templar buildings.

And on Thursday and Friday evenings, every bar and club on Rothschild Boulevard was slammed until four in the morning.

This is not to ignore, of course, that there was a literal war going on. Walls near the city center were plastered with posters of missing persons kidnapped by Hamas, and signs around the city marked the nearest bunker if you hear sirens. But, despite the constant threat of missiles and such, everyone I met in my week there 1) was incredibly kind and welcoming and 2) maintained a dry, if not quirky, sense of humor. I spoke to a couple of founders who casually mentioned, “Yeah, our Q1 numbers were a bit off because our CTO was fighting in the war, but now…” like it was just a normal part of life. Because it was.

Oh, and everyone was attractive. Like, without a doubt, Tel Aviv had the most attractive general population I’ve ever seen. Forced military service, the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation, and a Mediterranean climate with near-perfect weather year-round is the perfect combination for muscle tone and a sharp sense of humor, I suppose.

I would probably rank Tel Aviv as my second favorite city in the world, after the section of Manhattan that resides below 14^th street and excludes Canal Street. If I was Jewish, Tel Aviv might be number 1.

I stayed at the Mayor House hotel near Dizengoff Square (highly recommend. The rooms are great, staff is very nice, and there’s a beautiful rooftop pool), which was a 10-minute walk from the beach, and I started the next three mornings with a run through town, looping back up the beach, before breakfast. I don’t run much, besides the occasional two-mile stroll down the Westside Highway in Manhattan, but I do think if I were more of a runner, Tel Aviv’s boardwalk would be my favorite run?

I was in Tel Aviv for work, and the first thing I noticed was that everyone, quite literally everyone, knows everyone. Especially in the technology / VC sectors. We hosted a happy hour for founders and investors when I was in town, and I sent out probably ~30 invites to the happy hour asking guests to “Invite interesting folks you know.”

Around 150 people showed up a few weeks later.

It was remarkably easy to meet people, and several of my friends / acquaintances with ties to Israel introduced me to their founder and investor friends in the area, with a few of those folks becoming friends themselves (hello, Orri and Rachel!) I met with founders building everything from higher conversation e-com landing pages to AI-enabled wearable technology, and because literally everyone works near Sarona Market, I spent the better part of two days just walking laps around the neighborhood, drinking one coffee at a time.

I also received more restaurant and night life recs than I could possibly explore in six days (though I tried my best to dabble in as much of the local cuisine as possible. Considering that I lived above one of NYC’s premier Israeli restaurants for two years, I’ve had my fair share of shashuka).

I did not, for what it’s worth, get all that much time to check out the nightlife: the whole missile strike thing limited the flights out of Tel Aviv, and I had to catch a Friday AM flight to Athens to get back to America, but ideally, I’ll stick around a bit longer next time.

The contrast between the Israel I had seen on television and online versus the Israel I saw in person was sharp. Judging from Twitter, I thought I would be constantly fearing for my life, and yet, while I was there, it was remarkably chill. I may as well have been in Barcelona or Buenos Aires (frankly, Israelis, Argentinians, and Catalans have somewhat ambiguous aesthetics). People seemed generally happy and jovial, and, like anywhere else, they wanted to eat and drink with their friends, hang by the beach, and just have fun. I mean, sure, had a siren gone off, I would have been shuffled to a basement bunker with 100 strangers in minutes, but the day-to-day was no different than the day-to-day anywhere else, other than the median attractiveness was a point or two higher.

And the locals seemed largely grateful to meet Americans willing to visit Tel Aviv. Camaraderie comes easy when your “welcome to Israel!” story involved get re-routed through Albania by a missile on your way to host a happy hour in Israel.

I also spent a day visiting Jerusalem, which, if you ever visit Tel Aviv, you need to include on your visit. The entire country is the size of New Jersey, and the train from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem only takes about 30 minutes. And Jerusalem is just… fascinating. On one hand, the infrastructure is cutting edge: Jerusalem’s train station is this modern, glass and stone behemoth that stretches hundreds of feet underground (every building in Israel is basically a nuclear bomb shelter), there’s an efficient light rail tram that runs from the outskirts of the city to the Old City, and glossy shopping centers with Rolex stores sit a 10 minute walk outside of the Damascus Gate.

But then you enter the old city, and you see hundreds of Muslims entering and leaving the Dome of the Rock (I wasn’t able to enter; entry times to the Temple Mount are strictly guarded), hundreds of Orthodox Jews pray by the Western Wall, and hundreds of Christians worship in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus was believed to have been resurrected.

Steps away from three of the holiest landmarks of the three Abrahamic religions, street vendors shill knockoff iPhones and other gimmicks you would find in Times Square. It’s this wild juxtaposition of history and modernity in a city where countless religions, nations, and cultures have fought for thousands of years.

And now you can walk across the street and pickup your mobile-ordered Big Mac.

I spent most of my last full day in Israel just exploring Jerusalem’s Old City before making the ~45 minute walk back to the train station, and I stopped in the Mahaneh Yehudah market for dinner on the way back to Tel Aviv. And, while 24-year-old me would have FOMO’d into checking out the nightlife, staying out all night, and having a miserable travel day on Friday, 28-year-old me was terrified of missing one of the few available flights back to the US, and I passed out at a (somewhat) reasonable hour.

I haven’t written a new travel blog post in a while. That’s primarily because I haven’t done any crazy international travels in a while. One reason for the downtick in travel is that I spend more time in the “real-world” now than I did at 24. Shocker how that works! Responsibilities and such. But external factors are the only cause of this shift: I also just don’t have the same wanderlust that I did at 24.

Four years ago, my desire to see the world felt existential. I felt that staying in one place was killing me, and if I didn’t see as many new places as possible as quickly as possible, I was going to go insane. It’s one of those sensations that, if you’ve experienced it, you know what I mean. It’s irrational, but like any emotional experience, it’s all-consuming.

At 28, I’ve sobered up a bit. Maybe it’s a self-confidence thing, maybe I’m just washed. I don’t know. You get drunk in enough foreign countries and chase enough thrills with strangers and you realize that no single location has a monopoly on dopamine (though New York probably sits at the top of the leaderboard?) I know which places I like, and which places I don’t, and that existential dread of “not seeing the world” has dissipated.

But wanderlust or not, Tel Aviv is one place that I am very, very glad to have visited, and I hope to go again soon. Ideally on El Al, not Wizz Air. You know, because of the missile defense systems.

- Jack

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This blog is a bit different. Last week, instead of taking off to Tokyo or Buenos Aires, I flew to Salt Lake City with 7 friends, where we spent 8 days living out of a 38-foot RV. Was it a blast? Yes. Will I ever do this again? Probably not. Did it go better than expected? Honestly, yeah. For the most part.

Vamos.

Friday, October 13th

I was supposed to fly out with most of my crew around 6:30 AM Friday morning. Then the former Hamas chief made a global call for Jihad on Friday the 13th, so I decided that flying out the night of the 12th wouldn’t be the worst idea ever.

I stand by that decision, all things considered.

So I landed in Salt Lake City around 10 PM the night before, spent the night at a particularly mid Comfort Inn and Suites near the airport, and passed out.

I realized the next morning that I probably overthought the whole thing, but at least I got decent sleep. I missed hotel breakfast (what kind of airport hotel ends breakfast at 9 AM?), so I walked to a Carl’s Jr. down the road. Unlike New York, where I have become accustomed to walking everywhere, Salt Lake City (and especially the area near the airport) was a suburban sprawl, so I basically walked next to the highway, passing a questionable-looking couple camped out below an underpass on my way to my breakfast burrito.

The burrito was mid, just like my hotel.

After breakfast, I headed back, grabbed my stuff, and ubered to the airport to link with my crew (Brody, Ben, Tanmaye, Guillermo, Marcos, and Toni). We called two Ubers from there to pick up our RV from a neighborhood 20 minutes to the north.

Apparently, we were supposed to watch a 90-minute video about the RV that covered everything from how to drive/park it to letting out the sides, hooking up water and power, etc.

No one had watched it.

When we arrived at the RV, the owner, Weston (his name was something like that. We’ll go with Weston) asked who was driving first. Everyone sort of looked at me, so I volunteered.

Weston: Want to take the jacks up?

Me: crickets

Weston: …Do you know what the jacks are?

Ben and I glance at each other

Me: I could use a refresher.

Weston: Hit this button. Make sure whenever you park it, you redeploy the jacks, but don’t forget to retract them before driving.

Apparently, the jacks stabilized the RV. I had no idea.

Luckily, Brody had left his phone in his Uber, and we couldn’t leave yet, so we had a chance to watch part of the instruction video before taking off.

The video in question.

After Brody got his phone, we hit the road.

I felt like I was driving a school bus. This RV was 38 feet long and had a king bedroom with its own bathroom, a set of bunk beds, another bathroom, a table with two booths that folded into a bed, a pull-out couch that became a queen bed, a full kitchen, an in-unit washer/dryer, and a cot above the driver seat. It was ridiculous.

The views from the front were also insane, because the windshield took up the whole front of the RV.

After stopping at a supermarket to load up on food and drinks, we hit the highway for our ~5-hour trip to Moab. 30 minutes in, I had gotten a decent feel for the RV, and it was smooth sailing the rest of the way.

Brody took a nap in the back, which benefited me as we were always roommates on these trips, and his siesta basically gave us first claim on the king bed. Meanwhile, Tanmaye helped me navigate while the rest of the crew did homework.

One of the pleasant surprises of this first leg of the trip was Marcos being a phenomenal DJ; once he hopped on the aux, the vibes were immaculate.

Toni eventually took over as navigator, then Guillermo joined me as we neared Moab. Guille made us miss a turn, but our u-turn had us facing an insane sunset, so the 15-minute delay created one of the trip’s best photo ops.

Love Generation by Bob Sinclar really set the mood as well.

When we arrived in Moab, we parked the RV in a park a mile outside of town. The guys watched enough of the video to figure out how to set up the RV, so Toni and Guille, the self-proclaimed heads of sanitation, hooked up our water and power.

RV set up in Moab

We had one rule on the RV: no pooping in the RV bathrooms. We actually managed to make it 8 days without this rule being violated, thanks to decent park facilities and frequent restroom breaks while on the road.

The Moab park had surprisingly nice showers and public restrooms, so we showered and then headed to town for dinner. There was one Uber driver with a red jeep who made multiple loops to scoop us, and we celebrated Guille’s (now known as Señor Treinta) 30th birthday before heading to Woody’s Tavern, a local dive bar, for a taste of the nightlife.

Utah nightlife is pretty weird, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering half of the state abstains from alcohol (shout out to the Mormons), and Moab nightlife was doubly weird.

Everyone looked like a tourist, a misfit, or a wanna-be biker.

We kicked it there for a few hours, listening to live music and playing foosball (where Ben and I got waxed like 5 times) before heading back and calling it a night.

Saturday, October 14th

Around 5 AM, I was woken up to the worst news possible.

Brody: Yoo, our bathroom is flooded.

I snapped awake, put on my glasses, and saw that the toilet had overflowed, the bathroom was soaked, and the water was spilling into the main bedroom, soaking all of my stuff on the floor.

I still don’t really know how this happened. At first, I thought it was my fault, because I had last used the restroom around 3 AM, and it was fine then. However, we had another flooding later in the week, so I think the issue was really that we didn’t turn the external water supply off at night.

Who knows.

It was freezing outside, but we threw on some shoes, snuck around everyone asleep in the front of the RV, and cut off the water before climbing back on to dry the floors with towels. I got my laptop and other electronics out of my now-damp backpack and dried them off, and thought to myself, “This is about to be the longest week of my life.”

Luckily, this was the worst thing that happened on the trip.

In the morning, I set out most of my clothes to dry outside while everyone else got ready for the day. No one else seemed to care about the previous night’s flooding, for better or worse.

The guys sleeping in the front almost died from frostbite, because we accidentally left the A/C on instead of flipping to heat. We didn’t make this mistake again.

Ben had booked what we thought was “white water rafting,” but it was really a chill raft ride down the river. I excused myself from the trip to work on stuff while the rest of the crew partook in the activity. I spent most of the day being as productive as I could from a phone hotspot on an RV, and the rest of the group circled back around 3:45.

We wanted to hit Arches National Park, and after realizing that we couldn’t really Uber to the hiking trail (the trails were about 10 miles into the park, and Ubers couldn’t get past the entrance), we decided to drive the RV in.

The drive up to the park was insane: I was winding a 38 ft RV back and forth around hairpin turns scaling the side of a plateau, but we made it a couple of hours before sunset.

We hiked for an hour or so from the parking lot to reach some of the park’s infamous arches, where Toni, our in-house photographer, befriended an Italian photographer who snapped some group pics of our crew.

We took a few more pics questionably close to the edge of the canyon before booking it back to the RV to beat the sunset.

We returned to the park to see that RV 2 had arrived.

4 Argentinians: Sebo, JC, Manu, and Agustin (aka, The Baby), as well as Vince were on a similar trip as us.

When we got back, Brody set up his Nintendo Switch (we played a ridiculous amount of Nintendo on this RV), and we played a little bit of drunk Mario Kart (you have to set the can down while you drive) before ripping an hour of Mario Party and calling it a night.

No plumbing issues this time!

Sunday, October 15th

By Sunday morning, factions had started developing in the RV. Marcos and Toni began referring to themselves as the “Middle Men” (super creative, they slept in the middle section of the RV), while the guys at the front referred to themselves as Frontiersmen. Brody and I attempted to call ourselves the King’s Guard, a Game of Thrones reference that was fitting, considering our room guarded the porcelain throne in the back, but everyone else called us Dingus 1 and Dingus 2.

Whatever. The Dingi got a sick bed, they can have their nicknames.

Tanmaye, Ben, Marcos, Sebo, Agustin, and Vince hit a ~50 mile bike ride, while the rest of us rented UTVs to drive through the desert. Guille and I split a 2-seater Polaris Rzr, while Manu, JC, Brody, and Toni were in a 4-seater vehicle.

Guille and I grabbed breakfast at a nearby cafe, then grabbed our Rzr and headed to the trails.

I assumed that the 2-seater would be both more fun and more versatile, but I was entirely wrong. While Guille and I got more driving time per person, the 4-person car had larger, wider tires and a lower center of gravity, so it was virtually unflippable and it could climb over anything.

Guille and I spent an hour climbing rocks and racing through sand-covered paths before meeting the other crew at a river overlook point on Hell’s Revenge. After Brody snapped some drone photos, we hopped back in our vehicles, and I got to witness just how much better the other UTV was.

JC was driving, and after skiing with him last year, I knew he had a propensity for going fast. What I didn’t realize was that he would rip their UTV full speed on 50-degree inclines and around hairpin turns. They blasted past us within 30 seconds, and we didn’t see them again until we exited the park.

We cut through town to another offroad area, which offered smoother, wider dirt paths that allowed us to go full speed. The 4-seater UTV had to turn back to refuel before us, and Guille and I drove for an hour and a half, hugging the edge of a canyon overlooking a river. We stopped for a few photo ops before turning around, and we grabbed pizza and beers in town before walking back to the RV.

On the way back, I noticed that a cop car parked on the side of the street was occupied by not a police officer, but a human-sized teddy bear in police clothing. Honestly, an impressive setup to get folks to slow down without having to station a cop there.

When we got back to the RV, we found out that the other RV had gotten booted from the premises. Apparently, while we had our parking spot for three nights, they were supposed to move theirs to another spot by 11 AM on day 2.

Their whole group was biking/UTVing, so the park manager got in their unlocked RV and drove it out of the park. When the boys got back, he refused to let them park there again, so they had to find a new spot.

After the RV 1 crew showered, Brody pulled up a montage that he had made from our Japan trip last spring. Shout out Polar Productions.

After the video, we played Smash Bros before bed.

Monday, October 16th

The boys packed the RV, the sanitation crew dumped our grey water tanks, and we set sail for the Grand Canyon. I drove again for the majority of this leg, as the rest of the boys did homework and mid-terms in the back. Marcos joined me as co-pilot, where we chatted about career stuff as he curated a diverse playlist of bangers.

We stopped at a gas station for a restroom/refuel break, the restrooms were out of order, and the boys dispersed to the nearby Taco Bell and McDonald’s, where we acquired sustenance for the rest of our trip.

As we approached the Grand Canyon, the time zones got funky. The GC is in Arizona, which, for some reason, doesn’t acknowledge Daylight Saving Time. However, the Navajo Nation, which is largely in Arizona, does acknowledge Daylight Saving Time. So we alternated between gaining and losing an hour as we crossed through Arizona.

Most photos of the Grand Canyon depict a dry, arid crack in the earth, so I was picturing a larger version of Death Valley. The canyon is actually surprisingly green, and the road through the greater Grand Canyon area was surrounded by trees.

We stopped 20 minutes shy of our campground for a photo op, and the views were insane. It’s impossible to convey just how big this thing is without seeing it yourself.

Marcos and I hopped the fence and climbed down to a little mesa for more pics, then we hopped back on the RV and headed to park 2.

This park was way worse than the first. While there was a market, bar, and restaurant within a 15-minute walk of our parking spot, the restrooms were dirtier and the showers were half a mile away, and they weren’t free.

A couple of guys showered on the RV, then we headed to the park restaurant for dinner. Lawrence (aka Larry) met us here. Larry had flown into God-Knows-Where, Arizona from a wedding in CDMX, and he managed to get the one Lyft driver in his area to drive him 90 minutes to our campsite.

After dinner, we headed back to the RV and gamed for a bit before drinking some beers by the fire. The RV was now pretty tight with 8 of us here, and Larry took over the fold-down table bed while Tanmaye doubled up with Ben on the couch.

Tuesday, October 17th

Today was a massive hike day: we were going to take the South Kaibab Trail down the side of the Grand Canyon to Skeleton Point. The guys had a pretty sluggish start, and we met near the market at 10:30. In our rush, we accidentally took the wrong shuttle bus at first (my bad), and it took us an hour to get from our campsite to the visitor center to the trailhead.

Around lunchtime, we began our descent down the canyon. The hike was beautiful: we had an insane, expansive view of the canyon all the way down. It was also pretty steep, and my 2-year-old On Clouds didn’t provide the most traction.

The trail was also covered with mule poop, as ranchers would move supplies up and down the canyon via mule caravans.

We stopped at a halfway point, snapped some pics (thanks Toni), passed a few mules, and made our way to Skeleton Point an hour later, where we had a beautiful view of the river. The crew was split at this point, as Tanmaye and Ben wanted to keep going (Tanmaye’s desire to defeat nature was a recurring theme on this trip), Brody and I wanted to turn back, and everyone else was torn.

The other 6 guys hiked another 15 minutes before turning back, while Brody and I hung out with a middle-aged couple from Berkeley, then we all headed back up. 10 minutes into our ascent, we ran into the RV 2 crew, where we chatted for a bit before continuing back to the top.

The hike back sucked. We were hungry and thirsty, the sun was way too hot, and the stairs felt extra steep. Despite the trials and tribulations, we managed to make record time on our way back.

We took the shuttle back to our camp, and we ordered burgers and beers at the onsite bar. An elk was strolling through the middle of the road, holding up traffic, and Toni got some way-too-close pics of it.

Another group of CBS folks, primarily the Brazilian representatives + Juanma and Majo (Colombian, but I think they speak Portuguese if they were traveling with the Brazilians?) were on an RV trip as well, and they joined us for dinner.

Afterward, our crew headed back to shower on the RV, and we played beer die (the greatest afternoon pastime known to man) until it got dark, then we lit a fire and kicked it outside for a few hours.

Wednesday, October 18th

On the road again, this time to Zion National Park. I woke up, grabbed coffee and cinnamon rolls #ForTheBoys, had a staring contest with an elk, then headed back to the RV.

We loaded up, the sanitation boys dumped the tanks, and we headed north to Zion. I drove the first leg while Ben and Guillermo finished some homework, and we made a pitstop at another park called Antelope. Everyone in our RV, plus the RV 2 crew, went on a 90-minute guided tour while I finished up some work.

When they returned, Ben took over as driver, and I was able to enjoy my first RV beer. RVs are cool because open container laws don’t apply to anyone sitting behind the cabin area, and we had a slew of Pacificos, Arnold Palmers, and White Claws.

An hour later, as I caught my first (and only) RV buzz, we pulled off the highway to stop again at a beach on Lake Powell. I stripped down to my boxers and jumped in the lake, and we set up chairs and the world’s smallest beer die table by the water.

We kicked it on the coast for an hour or so, then the boys got on top of our RVs for a drone photo shoot (shout out Brody).

Between the photographers and the writers, we do have a creative bunch.

We got back on the road after an hour, with Captain Levine continuing in the driver’s seat as Brody, Marcos, Lawrence, and I did the opposite of driving in the back.

Several adult beverages later, we dropped Guillermo off at a bus stop somewhere in Utah. Guille had to catch a shuttle to Vegas to catch a flight to Panama to catch a flight to Colombia for his best friend’s wedding, and we certainly didn’t want to be the reason that he missed that.

An hour later, we arrived in Zion. Ben pulled the RV into a restaurant, and we had our first real meal of the day (for me, a quesadilla and a spicy marg). I tried to direct him out of the parking lot when we went to leave, but I was probably more of a nuisance than a help in my current state.

I hadn’t been paying attention as we approached the restaurant, but the RV park was actually right next to where we were eating. We checked in, parked the RV, and Larry and Toni took over sanitation duties with Guille gone.

Up until this point, Larry had been on door patrol, yelling at us to shut the door when we were getting on and off the RV to keep flies from getting in, but he soon realized it was pointless. By this leg of the trip, windows were left open, people kept forgetting to close the door, and flies were taking residence in our mobile home.

We hung out by the fire for a bit, then got ready for bed. Big hike in the AM. This was also, unfortunately, the night that Tanmaye and Ben displaced Brody and I, kicking us to the front of the RV. Brody snagged the pullout couch while I slept in Guille’s loft. It had a weight limit of 200 pounds, but it managed to support me at 225.

Thursday, October 18th

Today was, by far, the coolest hike of the trip. We were going to explore the Narrows in Zion National Park.

The Narrows, as the name suggests, are a series of narrow canyons. What makes them unique is that they are filled with constantly flowing water. The area is susceptible to flash floods, but the forecast was clear today, and the water would range from knee to waist-high in different sections.

We rented waterproof overalls and water-resistant boots and made our way to the bus stop. The lady renting us the gear said that XLs were “5’5 to 5’10”, which seemed ridiculous. We tried them on and they fit fine (which means that either we are collectively lying about our height or her recommendations were seriously off-base.)

At the last second, most of us went back and grabbed walking sticks as well. I’ve never thought much about walking sticks, in fact, I thought they were just for old folks and hard-o’s, but my stick probably saved me from slipping at least a dozen times.

We shuttled to the entrance of the Narrows and walked a mile down a path before entering the water.

I knew we would be walking through some level of water, but I was not expecting to spend a few hours with my legs submerged. Ben, Tanmaye, Marcos, and the baby trotted ahead of everyone, and I spent most of the first hour kicking it with JC.

We got caught up on our respective job stuff (he’s been a ghost this semester!), and then Vince and I made a urination pitstop on one of the few patches of dry land. About 10 minutes after we resumed the trek, I slipped on a rock and went all the way under the water.

Cold is an understatement. The canyon is filled with shade, and in late October, the temperatures were freezing. The worst part was that my bag got soaked as well, and I was worried that my phone was toast. Luckily it was fine.

It took me 10 seconds of unathletic floundering to stand back up, and I resumed my now miserably cold trek onward.

Luckily, we hit a few patches of sunlight, and my upper half dried off (my lower half, sadly, stayed drenched inside my pants until we returned to camp).

After another hour or so, we caught up to Toni, JC, Sebo, and Manu. They were approaching a steep climb to a deeper part of the canyon. Vince and I decided, after the 2.5-hour hike we had just completed, that this was a good time to turn around.

20 minutes into our return, we heard a “Hey guys!”

Brody was chilling by himself on a big rock off to the side of the water.

I hadn’t seen him all day, and figured he was ahead with Ben and Tanmaye. He had actually fallen behind, as a combination of a bathroom break and his subpar footwear (they didn’t have size 16 hiking boots, so he was rocking his normal boots with worse grip). He joined Vince and me on the return hike.

The water level was lower on the way back, which meant 50% of our hike was now on bare rock. This should have been easier because our footing was more visible, but it was also more perilous because falling on open stones hurts 10x than falling in water.

Brody caught a loose rock and took a pretty tough fall. To his credit, he bounced back quickly, but all three of us knew that he was going to be sore in the morning.

After another hour or so, we neared the mile-long trail that took us back to the bus stop. JC and Sebo had caught up to us, and the five of us headed back to town. We dropped off our gear, I bought some more waters (and an ice cream) from the market, and then we showered and set off for dinner.

Toni, who got back around the same time as us, had found a dank burger spot 15 minutes away. All of us except Ben, Tanmaye, Marcos, and the baby (who had, as far as we knew, decided to spend the night in the canyon just to prove they could) grabbed burgers and beers.

The baby showed up 45 minutes later and grabbed a burger right before close. He told us that they nearly made it to the very end, and they actually hit a patch where they had to swim 50 or so feet without being able to touch the ground.

It sounded sketch.

Ultimately, they decided that it was getting too late, and they turned back about 45 minutes before reaching the end.

As we were finishing up our dinners, an elk walked through the restaurant’s patio, leaned over a short brick wall near our table, then scampered off across the street.

National parks are weird.

As we walked back to the RV, we discussed logistics for the next day. The RV 2 crew (Vince, JC, Manu, Sebo, and the baby) were headed to Vegas in the morning for a day of gambling and a night watching U2 in The Sphere, and my crew was going to drop their RV off in Provo on the way back before our flights on Saturday.

However, Tanmaye, Toni, Marcos, Brody, and I had 2 PM flights (originally it was just Tanmaye and Toni, but after Mr. Maye mentioned how much nicer a 9 PM arrival would be than a midnight arrival, we changed our flights too), while Ben and Larry had 5 PM flights, and we were 5 hours from Salt Lake City.

A 6 AM wake up Saturday morning, + the logistical hurdles of returning an RV in Provo and ubering an hour to the SLC airport, sounded awful, so Brody and I booked a hotel room in SLC for Friday night, and we planned to drive RV 2 to Provo a day early.

This decision wasn’t necessarily popular with the group, largely because the group wasn’t consulted on the decision (I didn’t want to leave it up for a debate, tbh. I was not down for a 6 AM wake-up). However, it all worked out, and the rest of the crew planned to ride with Ben in an early Saturday trip back.

We spent the rest of Thursday night chilling by the fire, then I called it a night.

Friday, October 20th

I woke up around 9, and instead of entertaining a potential hike, I headed to the one wifi-enabled coffee shop in town to finish up on some school work. I spent most of the day in the coffee shop, where Ben, Toni, and Marcos walked by on their way to hike number 19354674 of the trip, and Lawrence, Tanmaye, and Brody joined me that afternoon as well.

At 4, we headed back to the RV to clean up, then Brody and I packed up, hopped in RV 2 (which was much easier to steer than RV 1!), and set sail for Provo.

We split our driving time around 2 hours each, stopping once for gas and Burger King on the way. We arrived in Provo around 10 PM to meet the RV owner, John.

John was an interesting cat, to say the least. In our 15 minutes of awkwardly waiting for our Uber at his house, John offered us local beers, told us how he met his Canadian wife (who he now has 2 kids with) over a mobile video game during the pandemic, explained the logistics of driving to the Montana border to chill with his e-girlfriend-turned-wife-and-mother-of-two in 2020 (I’m impressed by the speed at which he turned a mobile game encounter with a Canadian woman into a loving Utahan mother of two, tbh), and went down a rabbit hole of his life as an ex-Mormon.

Nice guy, but man, it was a weird story.

Anyway, Brody and I got our Uber around 10:20, reached the hotel in downtown Salt Lake City at 11, and enjoyed a nice, relaxing, air-conditioned 10 hours of sleep just a few miles from the airport. Not a bad way to conclude the trip.

Catch you guys later.

- Jack

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Five years ago, I was lucky enough to spend a weekend on the mythical Mediterranean Island of Ibiza. As a 21-year-old fraternity president who played Levels by Avicii (and its remixes) no less than 500 times at various pregames, darties, and disgustingly unsanitary parties over the previous few years, I needed to see for myself why Mike Posner took that pill.

Unfortunately, I didn’t account for jet lag ruining my initial experience, and I spent the first ~36 hours or so as a sleep-deprived zombie.

Fortunately, I’m now a 26-year-old with a fully-developed frontal lobe (though some have their doubts), and I was prescient enough to spend a few days acclimating to the new time zone by deleting tapas, espressos, and an aperol spritz or 12 in Barcelona before heading to Ibiza.

With a lineup featuring names such as Calvin Harris, Diplo, and Kygo, it was an excellent weekend to run it back on Spain’s finest party island, and I would have the pleasure of being joined by 40 of my closest business school friends, whose names won’t be mentioned should any affiliation with me, at a later date, lead to them unfairly being part of an extended criminal investigation into my past.

Not that I did anything particularly illegal in Ibiza (other than smoking a cigarette in a venue, which may not be 100% legal, but it’s Europe so who cares? It’s still objectively cooler than hitting a vape).

I also don’t feel like leading off a blog post with 40 names of my associates like a genealogical record from the Gospel of Matthew. Ian, my roommate on the trip, will be the lone exception.

The flight to Ibiza from Barcelona was only 30 minutes or so, and on arrival, we headed to the hotel to hopefully check-in (we couldn’t).

I was hit by a nostalgia bomb upon arrival when I realized that this was the exact same hotel I had stayed in 5 years ago. The tattoo parlor in the lobby was a dead giveaway.

Ian, being a meathead in the best possible way, found a kick-ass gym 5 minutes down the road, so we headed there to pass time by pumping iron (shirtless) until we got closer to check-in.

I will never do deadlifts with Ian again. 5x10 straight bar deadlift is actually psychotic.

After getting our room keys, we headed up, showered, and changed for the day. The plan for the night was to rip a Calvin Harris concert at Ushuaia (not to be confused with the southern-most city in Argentina, which we were quite far away from), so I grabbed dinner and then headed back to the hotel to pregame.

Our hotel felt like a mixture between a freshman dorm and summer camp, as ~25 of us were all in the same hall, girls running around comparing outfit choices and guys hopping from room to room with cheap bottles of vodka and tequila.

I headed to the show around 8:30, arriving fashionably late (but still plenty early for the headline act). There was a conveniently located bar to the right of the stage that provided an excellent line of sight to Mr. Harris, and I spent ~$250 at that bar over the course of the show.

Hell hath no fury like evaluating one’s credit card transactions after a weekend in the Panama City Beach of Europe.

Photographic evidence appears to confirm that I did, in fact, shut the concert down, and after failing to hail a cab, I managed to run into my broader group at a Mexican restaurant on the walk home.

Not a terrible way to start the weekend, no?

The following day started similar to the previous: with Ian saying, “Wake up, let’s go to the gym.”

My first thought was, “Respectfully, I’d rather bash my head into a wall,” but my next thought was, “You’re drinking too much to not go to the gym and your body is going to degrade like a melting ice cream cone.”

Vanity, not discipline, is the key to making it to the gym every day, in my experience.

After a much less productive pump session than the previous day (I was in and out in approximately 45 minutes), I headed back to the hotel to delete a calorie-rich, flavor-deficient wannabe full English breakfast before crawling back into my cave of a room to hibernate for hours.

I emerged a new man, ready to take on the world once again, and went to the pool to drink a cervecita. Today, we had a booze cruise around the island (like the hotel we were staying in, I had done this exact same cruise 5 years ago. I also went to Ushuaia 5 years ago, but I think I saw Steve Aoki, not Calvin Harris), so I walked over with a group of the guys to check-in.

The “cruise” was a weird setup. The bottom floor had a bar, but it was also filled with regular ferry seats and no music other than what drifted through the ceiling from the DJ above.

Upstairs was more lively, with a past-his-prime DJ desperately attempting to rally the crowd, but 2/3 of the upstairs deck was filled with tables and chairs that had to be reserved, and most of these slots were occupied by interesting characters such as a group of 3 British dudes, adorned in matching green onesies, lighting their parents’ money on fire.

I spent the first half of the boat downstairs, mainly on the outer deck, before my buzz reached a level sufficient for me to engage in the upstairs activities. Someone in our crew bit the bullet and copped a table, and I leaned into the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

After the boat tour, I kicked by the pool with a few of the guys for a bit, realized that I had completely missed the group Uber to dinner at a restaurant in the Ibiza Castle, called my own Uber, chatted up my Colombian Uber driver in his native tongue (gotta get my reps in when I can), and rolled up just in time to down a touristy cocktail known as a “Pornstar Boob”, which was served in a perky, breast-shaped cup.

Again, Ibiza is like Panama City Beach, but with a castle instead of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

Post dinner, we headed further up the castle to a chill bar near the top, where we took cool pics on the ramparts and ordered espresso martinis.

While I had a ticket to a show starting at 1 AM that night, I had low-key planned for today to be a chill day. Between the booze cruise in the afternoon and the Kygo show coming up tomorrow, it would have been responsible to simply go to sleep.

But we were still at the bar as it closed at 1 AM, which made for a very convenient opportunity to “pop by” the club for a bit. Had it been 100% up to me, I probably go to sleep at this point. But I am an easily impressionable young man under specific circumstances.

So, naturally, I found myself ripping a cig before a Diplo concert at 1:45 AM. When in Ibiza, do Ibiza things. What’s more Ibiza than that?

That being said, on my current trajectory of bi-decade Ibiza trips, I’ll probably be back at the same hotel going to the same concerts as a 31-year-old in summer 2028. If anyone reading this sees “Travel Blog 275: Headed back to Ibiza,” please get me some help.

Sunday was the day that I was looking forward to most, because we had a Kygo concert that afternoon. Kygo has been my go-to snow-skiing playlist for the last several years, so an opportunity to see him in concert was a no-brainer.

I spent most of the day doing frivolous work activities (such things are, unfortunately, play an important role in me affording to go to the Panama City of Europe with my friends), alternating between Coronas and espressos as I attempted my best Hemingway impression, before grabbing a light dinner at a café nearby.

I also managed to break a bed during a pre-game.

I’ve broken two beds in my life, neither of which were sexual in manner. The first happened in Gulf Shores, Alabama in March 2016, when a wrestling match broke out between several of my friends and I, and our combined mass broke a bed frame.

I was the best man at my best friend’s wedding in February, and his dad interrupted my heartfelt speech to reference that particular damaged bed incident.

In this second incident, I simply sat down on a bed that a girl was already sitting on, and the bed collapsed. There’s likely a venue for me to file an emotional damage lawsuit against the hotel, considering that, while surrounded by 9 girls, my sheer mass was enough to buckle a hotel bed.

What if I have body issues now? What if I’m perpetually worried that people think I’m fat? These things matter!

Anyway, I shook off my party foul with the opposite of grace, and we ubered back to Ushuaia for Kygo. My night started with a mysterious blue beverage before I regressed to the mean (tequila sodas). At one point, I almost put my 6’7 friend Henry on my shoulders, but that felt a bit hazardous (though I totally could have pulled it off. I hit 365 for a triple on back squat the other day. This would have been nothing).

Post-concert, I once again returned to the hallowed Mexican restaurant from Friday night, ending the trip how it began: chowing down on burritos and coronas after a night in Ushuaia.

Mallorca

However much fun Sunday was, Monday wasn’t.

I was flying out around lunchtime, so I woke up at 9:15, grabbed breakfast, gathered my things, and headed to the airport.

I’ve never been to the Middle East, and besides Israel, I don’t particularly care to go to the Middle East any time soon. But the Ibiza Airport after a weekend of debauchery is the closest thing I’ve seen to a refugee camp.

Thousands of zombie-like Brits and Germans, dopamine depleted after a 72-hour ketamine-induced bender, sprawled out on the floor, sweaty and disgusting, dreading their return to the real world.

I blended in well (minus the ketamine. I told myself going into this trip that anything I hadn’t done by age 26 shouldn’t be done for the first time at 26. Ketamine is one of such things that I haven’t done. Cigs are fine though).

After a weekend in Ibiza, I was happy to head to the beautiful island of Mallorca with my good friend Toni. Toni and I were coming off similar trips. He’d been in Mykonos for a bachelor party with his college friends.

This Mallorca trip was not a “going out” trip. Quite the opposite, it was a honeymoon in a small Mediterranean beach town, except instead of newly-wed lovers, we were hungover grad school friends.

Toni had rented a comically small Fiat 500 for us to whip around the island, and we were staying in the port of Sóller, a small beach town 45 minutes from the island’s largest city, Palma.

When it was time to board my flight, I walked to the gate to see that I would be on a twin-propeller jet operated by Iberia. I didn’t know “real” airlines used propeller planes, and I also didn’t expect to be seated facing two other passengers, and the first row turned around to face the second, but the flight was fine.

30 minutes after I landed, Toni arrived, voice completely hoarse, ready to whip our clown car across the island.

I consider myself a good planner. I know how to find great lodging, from hotels to Airbnbs to hostels. I speak functional Spanish, I can avoid touristy spots (and lean into them, as needed), I figure out the best bars and clubs ahead of time, and I’m generally good at befriending folks wherever I go.

That being said, Toni crushed this trip in a way that I simply wouldn’t have pulled off.

I never would have found Sóller, but it was perfect. The port was built around a near-circular bay, with hotels, bars, restaurants, and shops circling ~300 degrees around the water, before a gap between two cliffs opened up to the Mediterranean Sea. I was the only American in town, as everyone else was British, German, Spanish, and Dutch (and Colombian, including Toni). A small train carried passengers a few miles from the port into the proper town, and hungry diners enjoyed rosé and tapas at various eateries near the water.

It was the perfect European summer getaway. Certainly more wholesome that the previous 3 days.

Upon arrival, we parked the car, checked in, and chilled in the room for a bit before taking a stroll around town. While Toni often acts like an over-sized 12-year-old with a caffeine addiction, the kid does have good taste in wine and food (while I, on the other hand, thought until a few weeks ago that a “sommelier” was a pirate-infested country in northeastern Africa), and he took charge of our dietary plans for the trip.

We dined at a Spanish restaurant near the harbor, sharing paella negra. Afterwards, we enjoyed a much-needed 10-hour slumber.

The next day, I headed to town for coffee and a pastry, and then we jumped in the car and drove to a small town 45 minutes away. Toni had found an old, abandoned fishing village on the water, and we wanted to go see it.

Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that you couldn’t really drive to the village. It was a hilly ~1.5 mile walk, and we were in flipflops. We stopped at the one restaurant in this tiny town relatively close to our target destination and enjoyed coffee, beers, and a brief lunch, then we made our way to the village.

It was HOT, and I was sweating so much that my shirt changed colors entirely within 10 minutes.

Along the way, we passed a family of wild donkeys, and we were a bit worried that they were going to get aggressive with us (we soon realized a baby donkey was nearby, and they were just being protective), and we saw some insane cribs on the mountainside in the middle of nowhere.

Finally, we began our descent towards the water. I was growing nervous, as we had only passed one other group at the beginning of our trek, but we soon reached this weird compound built into the mountain near the water. I thought it was abandoned, but I heard a generator running and peaked in a window to see an older man eating some bread in one of the rooms.

I guess he lived there? Idk.

At the bottom of the compound, there were boat ramps and private boat storage ramps leading the water, and two women in their ~40s were hanging out on a rock near the compound.

Toni and I threw off our shirts and swam around the little inlet. After a few minutes, I asked if his legs were burning. I thought maybe I was having an allergic reaction to the algae in the water, but he said he felt fine.

We climbed on top of a rock, and I noticed that the entire left side of my right knee was beginning to blister up.

“It’s probably a jellyfish,” Toni said.

I swam back to shore and posted up with my book, trying to ignore the itching pain on my knee that was growing stronger and stronger. After ~30 minutes, it peaked, and my knee looked like I had pressed it against a hot stove.

We walked back to the car after another hour (and we passed a sign inscribed with jellyfish drawings, which made sense), and we stopped at a small mountain town on the way back to explore a bit. We grabbed dinner at a restaurant on a hill, and the food was incredible (shout out Toni once again). It was four large pieces of toasted bread, topped with different varieties of cooked pork. Absolutely delicious.

When we got back to the hotel, I realized that I had left the windows down on the car. Somehow, the steering wheel got locked and we couldn’t get the key to turn. Toni Facetimed one of his boys (also, ironically, named Jack) who was apparently a car wizard, he helped us get it working again, and then we showered and headed out for gelato.

On Wednesday morning, we had plans to meet with one of Toni’s Colombian friends, José Maria, and his wife. They happened to be in Spain for a wedding and came to Mallorca to vacation for a few days, so we rented a boat, they picked up paella, and we spent the day on the water.

José Maria was a big Litquidity fan and appreciated my work.

We spent the afternoon riding around to various beaches and caves, stopping for 30 minutes at a time to swim around and explore. Caves have always been a combination of fascinating and terrifying to me. I feel like people, and especially boys, have an intrinsic desire to explore stuff. If you see a big rock, you think, “I wanna climb that.” Same goes for caves.

We also stopped at the same location where I got stung the day before. No stings this time, thankfully (thought I did see a big boy jellyfish floating around near the boat).

We returned to the port later in the afternoon, and Toni had a work call while I set up in the hotel bar/café to work for a bit (once again drinking espresso after espresso. I love America, but European coffee is leagues ahead of the stuff back home).

That night we had what was probably my best meal in Spain (well, this or a steak at Nacional Barcelona. That steak was incredible). Toni and I split a bottle wine and had grilled octopus and potatoes for an appetizer, then they brought out the best fish of my life. Once again, the kid knows his foods.

After dinner, we headed back to the hotel to get some sleep. Had to be up at 4:30 AM for a flight, not great! Toni was headed to London to meet up with his girlfriend, I was headed to Málaga to meet up with a few of the rugby boys at one of their grandparents’ houses in Marbella.

Marbella

4:30 came way-too-early, and we rolled out of that room like the walking dead. We reached the airport at ~5:30, parted ways, and then I grabbed some food and headed to my gate. I had a layover in Barca for an hour, and then I sat down at the Málaga airport for a couple of hours to finish some work before ubering to Marbella.

One of my business school friends, Andrew, has a house in Marbella. His family is South African, and his grandparents spend a few months each year at their Spain residence. Six of us were hanging here for a few days: Henry, Ned, Chris, Ian, Andrew, and myself, and the place was incredible. I unpacked and threw my clothes in the washing machine (first time doing laundry in 10 days, much needed), and then we dug into a massive lunch spread.

Afterwards, we ubered to a small canyon/stream thing a couple of miles from the house.

We jumped off some rocks into the water, and swam/walked/crawled/fell for the next hour as we made our way down the stream. I’m pretty sure I rolled my ankle, and I almost got wrecked at the tail end of the journey trying to slowly climb down a 20 ft decline while holding a rope.

We then headed back to the house to nap and rest up before dinner.

Dinner consisted of pizza at the house, and we hung out with Andrew’s grandparents (who were hysterical) for a bit until they went to bed. We pregamed around the pool until midnight before heading to the port to go out.

We bar-hopped a bit, and then found ourselves at a night club around 1. I accidentally shattered a beer (which happened to be Henry’s, unfortunately) as I tried to set my beer down on the bar without looking and managed to slam it down directly on top of Henry’s beer.

Oops.

At this point I was exhausted, running on 4.5 hours of sleep and failing to nap earlier. Ned called me out for yawning, I accepted that I’m now washed up, and I grabbed Andrew’s keys and headed home.

I woke up at 9:30 the next morning, drank a coffee, and updated the world’s most important daily financial newsletter before crawling back in bed for like 3 hours. Still hadn’t caught up on sleep.

I woke up again around 1, and we made plans to go to the beach Initially, we were planning to hit a beach club, but morale was low and we instead chose to get a casual lunch and hang out in the sand for a few hours. We strolled around the waterfront, stopping somewhere for coffee, then headed back to Andrew’s house.

We chilled in the pool for most of the afternoon, before tuning into a Rugby World Cup match at 8. While there was an initial push to go out that night, everyone was pretty wiped and Ned and I had to fly out in the morning, so we drank around the pool until 1:45 and called it a night.

Now I’m headed to Budapest with a decent night’s sleep and some clean clothes. Not a bad way to end my August in Spain.

Catch you guys later.

- Jack

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Tuesday, May 16^th

There was a real musical chairs-esque reshuffling of sleeping arrangements last night amongst the Guatemala boys that led to Antonio, Tanmaye, Marcos, and Ben all in Ben and Maye’s room around 4 AM watching a very mid movie: The Witch, and five hours later, I woke up next to the human energizer bunny himself, Antonio Calderon.

Not that I’m complaining. Somehow, Toni, who had a room to himself, had two double beds, while Brody and I had two twin beds. This is also the third night in a row that I slept in a room that was booked under Toni’s name.

We were supposed to catch a 9 AM bus to Comuna 13 for a tour, but we also woke up at 9:02, so as you can guess, we missed that bus. Toni and I finally got up at 10, and he ubered over with Juanma and Majo while I scooped Brody and did the same. We got there as the main group was finishing their tour, and we caught the second half of a street performance on a basketball court at the base of Comuna 13.

After the main group headed back to the hotels, Hannah and Osbert joined Brody and me on our walk up the neighborhood. Comuna 13 used to be the most dangerous neighborhood in Medellin, but since the government cleaned up the area, it has become a major tourist attraction full of history, graffiti art, and beautiful views of the city.

We made our way to the top in ~20 minutes (shout out to the escalators), watched a hip-hop show, grabbed some coffee, then headed back down. We passed another 10 or so people from our group who also arrived late on the way down.

Hannah called a two-stop Uber to take her and Osbert to a restaurant in the city center and Brody and me back to El Poblado, but the location glitched on the driver’s app after stop 1, so Brody and I got another car.

We met up with Tanmaye and Ben (read: I tracked Tanmaye’s location and we stalked them) at a sushi bar in town, we chowed down on some fire sushi, then Brody and I took a fat two-hour nap.

Brody and I got up at five and ubered to town to hit the gym (Ben chose the mall over the gym, which says a lot about his priorities smh). We went to Ultra Gym in the middle of El Poblado, a super nice spot on the 20^th floor of a skyscraper, where I worked out the last time I was here. To my entertainment, Brody happened to a be big “dance between sets” guy in the gym.

After the gym, we showered, I updated a newsletter, and we headed to Colosal, a restaurant 20 minutes away with a view of the city, for our 150-person dinner reservation courtesy of Ryan. I sat by Toni, Ben, Marcos, Juanma, Tanmaye, and Brody, and Juanma and I made tentative plans to get a crew together for a UGA football game in the fall.

We have all of these cultural trips to other countries, but one big piece of US culture that most of the LatAm crew hasn’t experienced is a college football Saturday in the south. A tailgate is really just an asado times 100.

A bunch of people from my cluster were sitting at the table across from me, and Maite, my favorite Brazilian whose dog, Olivia, has proven to be a valuable asset to my Hinge profile, accused me of not hanging with her enough and spending too much time with the boys.

It was a valid accusation, but also, have you met the boys? Come on, they’re sick. Still, I told her I would do the Guatape trip with her and company in the morning.

Our dinner came with two glasses of wine (which ended up being far more than two), and two beers (which could also be gamed by jumping tables to say hey to people, as I did with my star English student, JC), and the food was a lineup of fire tacos, fire entrees, and fire desserts.

After the main course, I recounted the previous night’s antics with Guillermo, and he informed me that at one point, he asked me three times “Me compras una cerveza?” Will you buy me a beer?” to which I finally replied something along the lines of “I’m on my last brain cell, estoy borracho, use English.”

I blame Guillermo and Toni, who had both weaponized bottles of Aguardiente and poured them down my throat like they were filling a Ford F-250’s 40-gallon gas tank.

After dinner, I jumped in Tanmaye’s Uber back to the hotel, got ready for bed, and headed to Toni’s room to hang with the boys, where I joined a homoerotic Ben and Brody sandwich in the bed that I’d slept in the night before. Then I figured, “Might as well just sleep here again, it’s more comfortable than my bed.”

Toni unsuccessfully tried to reenact some TikTok video that Guille had sent, then I tucked him in, read him a bedtime story, and called it a night.

Don’t worry Cote, I’ve been taking care of your boy.

Wednesday, May 17th

Today, we’re headed to the town of Guatapé to scale the massive rock known as El Peñon.

Guatapé is a cute little town a couple of hours from Medellín, and this massive stone has made it quite the tourist attraction. I grabbed breakfast with my girl R Kelly, headed back upstairs to grab some water bottles and my Miller Lite tank top, and jumped on the next bus out. I landed a seat to myself across from Amanda, who made for a good bus buddy on our two-hour trip.

We left around 8 and arrived in Guatapé around 10, where we spent the next 45 minutes or so exploring the town. Guatapé is super pretty, with its brick and stone alleys covered by colorful umbrellas. Its streets are also lined with shops selling all sorts of knick-knacks and accessories, and in one particular store, I encountered the greatest piece of clothing of my life: A wolf poncho.

This poncho was an instant no-brainer purchase, and I wore it around for the rest of the morning. It was also a hit with the LatAm crew, who said I had now graduated from being “El Perrito,” or “the puppy,” to “El Lobo.”

Manu has unsuccessfully tried to get folks to call him “El Lobo” all year. The key is to simply buy a poncho with a wolf on it.

On my way back to the bus, I walked past Mr. West also purchasing a similar wolf poncho. It appears that great minds think alike.

I took the poncho off when we got back to the bus, because Colombia is really hot and not at all conducive to wearing an alpaca poncho in May, and we headed to the big-ass rock.

I hiked up said big-ass rock with Jen, Ben, Guillermo, Adam, and Bhavin, and after a sweaty 25 minutes, we reached the peak. The views from the top were insane, with hills, lakes, and miniature islands surrounding us in every direction.

Benny boy and I tried to grab ice cream at the top, but it was cash only, and we were card only.

We made our way back to the bottom, where we took the buses to a restaurant ~five minutes away. We were greeted with cold beers and bowls of rice, veggies, and chicken, and I posted up with Ray and Sophia (previous London travel companions).

After lunch, I made the rounds, showing off my wolf poncho (Caro, my concerned mother, said that I should take it off because it had to be hot. What she didn’t realize is that steez doesn’t care about humidity).

I then went downstairs to play beer pong (A US cultural import to remote Colombia) where Jack Sheridan and I promptly got our asses kicked by Ben and Jack Gorman (It was a Jack-centric game).

We hopped back on the bus back to Medellín, where I tried to write for a bit before succumbing to the bumpy roads and took a nap instead.

When I got back and showered, I realized that I got wrecked by the sun during the hike, and I had an insane tank top tan line.

Oh well.

We had rented out Medellín’s Botanical Garden that night, and the crew grabbed an 8 PM shuttle downtown for dinner. Downtown Medellín is a bit rough, but much like the mythical Camelot, the Botanical Gardens were a utopia in the eye of the storm.

The venue was beautiful, and I grabbed a seat with Laura and Manu, where I ended up being the token gringo in the middle of the LatAm crew. After dinner, the Colombians took the stage, welcoming all of us to their country, and then the DJ kicked the party off with a series of back-to-back-to-back bangers.

The Botanical Gardens party was 10/10, but it was going to wind down at 2, and some of Medellín’s premier nightlife spots stay open til 4 on Wednesdays. One of said spots is Perro Negro, the location of Monday night’s fiasco.

Emma and I grabbed an Uber back to El Poblado, and on the way back we were pulled over by the local police. Medellín has a real drug and prostitution problem right now, and the police have been using routine traffic stops to crack down on the issue.

Our driver got patted down, then Emma’s purse got searched, then I got pulled out of the car and interrogated. Thankfully, I speak functional Spanish, and much like flirting with a girl, the key to gracefully handling any cop situation is making him laugh.

He started going through the contents of my wallet, asking what was inside.

“Cosas normales,” I said. “Tarjetas, dinero, etc.”

He glanced at me and asked, “Drogas?”

I replied, “Drogas? No hoy.” (Not today.)

He started to chuckle (at this point it was so over).

He asked, “De dónde eres?”

“Nueva York.”

“Nueva York? Por qué tu tarjeta muestra Georgia?”

“Porque viví en Georgia antes de Nueva York.”

He then asked, “Y quien es?” glancing at Emma.

“Mi hermana, obviamente.”

“Hermana?”

“Jaja no, una compañera de clase.”

“Y a dondé vas?”

“La discoteca.”

“Por qué?”

“Por qué? Porque quiero bailar y tomar. Por qué otra cosa?”

At this point, he could tell that I was stupid, but not dangerous, and he wished us a good night. Here’s a photo of me chatting with the cop, peep my sunburn:

After the brief delay, Emma and I finally made it to Perro Negro around 1:45. I texted the boys that it was bumping, and we hit the bar in the back. Unfortunately, the boys were at some mid techno-club that was not-at-all bumping.

Oh well, we had a good time at Perro Negro, anyway.

Thursday, May 18th

Another day, another flight. This time, to Cartagena. Yesterday, Ben had tried, unsuccessfully, to get the boys to sign up for a 9 AM coffee farm tour today. Throwing on sleeves and long pants to tour a humid-ass coffee farm while hungover sounded pretty miserable, so I respectfully declined that offer. Instead, Brody and I packed up, checked out of our room, stored our bags, and headed back to town to hit the gym. Only one more day to get shredded before the beach party 😤

After a solid pump and gym shower, we strolled around town in search of some food. We ran into like three different groups of girls from our crew on the way to 37 Park, our restaurant of choice. I got an insane brunch: An egg skillet with chorizo and rice, a side of sausage, cheese, and tortillas, and French toast with fruit and vanilla ice cream.

God-tier post-workout grub.

After lunch, we headed back to the hotel to catch our shuttle to the airport. The shuttle itself was uneventful, but I got hosed when we reached the Avianca check-in counter. The Wonder Group reps handed out our tickets, and I noticed that mine said “Jack Raines.” In most circumstances, “Jack Raines” is a very normal thing to call me. I prefer that, even. But when I’m trying to board a plane, anything other than “John Raines” is problematic.

When we signed up for this trip, we listed our legal and preferred names on the website. Whoever booked these tickets got a few of the names backwards (my ticket from Bogotá to Medellín said John, btw), and I figured I was about to be screwed.

The Avianca employee said it wouldn’t be a problem, and I should just go to security. Having previously missed a flight from Edinburgh to Copenhagen because I put the wrong name, I knew that this was definitely going to be a problem, but I tried going through security anyway. I almosttt made it, but the worker showed her supervisor my ticket, and he ripped off the barcode stub and made me go to the ticket desk to get a name change.

I grabbed one of the Wonder guys, explained the situation, and he walked to the desk with me to try and clear up the situation. As it turns out, misery loves company, and another girl, Cherry, was in the same boat as me.

The Avianca ticket salesperson looked at our tickets and told us she couldn’t do anything, we’d have to buy another ticket. That’s actually pretty ridiculous because you can literally just print another ticket on the computer, but she wouldn’t do it.

So I had to buy another ticket (Wonder did pay for it, thank goodness), but the only flights available had a Bogotá layover, and I had to take an aisle seat in the back for both flights. Avianca is infamous for its minimal legroom and terrible service, and they certainly lived up to that reputation today!

I realized, too late, that if I had bought the new ticket without trying to go through security first, I could have gone through security with the new one and boarded the first flight with my original, because they weren’t checking passports at the gate, just scanning tickets. But I didn’t have my barcode anymore.

I tried to “dumb American” my way onto my original flight anyway, because it was leaving 15 minutes before my new one, but the Avianca reps politely told me to go kick rocks.

I then tagged Avianca in a very, very heated tweet, to which they replied that you can only change up to 3 letters on a ticket. That’s pretty funny, because “Jack” to “John” is exactly 3 letters, but no one helped me out. So thank you, Avianca, for solidifying your status as the least customer-friendly airline on the planet. Seriously, you make Spirit look like SpaceX.

Four hours, two flights, and a couple of Bogotá airport IPAs later, Cherry and I did make it to Cartagena, and we did secure an Uber to the hotel. I showered quickly and headed to the Old Town, the walled-in part of the city, to meet up with Brody and company at a bar. It was my roommate’s last night in town because he had to leave for a wedding the next afternoon, and we were going to send it.

I linked with Brody, Marcos, Guille, and Matt West at Alquimico, and we hit another spot across the street after. We headed back to the hotel around 1:45, big day on the water tomorrow, had to get our beauty sleep!

Friday, May 19th

Our shuttle to the pier was leaving at ~9:30, so I said adios to Brody (he didn’t want to go downstairs and catch mega FOMO) and headed to the restaurant for breakfast at 8:45. I grubbed with Manu, Laura, and Toni, then we lingered in the back to make sure we could all get on the same boat to the beach.

Our boat had several LatAm’s finest, but we had to spread out to even the weight distribution for the ride. I ended up in the back with Ben, Amanda, Jen, David, Bree and Caro (so we did get one LatAm rep), while the front was all Colombia/Argentina/Guatemala, plus Tanmaye.

The boat ride over was a vibe, but I was terrified of getting more fried after neglecting to use sunscreen on the hike on Wednesday. Thankfully Jen’s a real sweetheart and she did an ample job of covering my back ❤️

I hung out with Caro for the first part of the ride til she ditched us for the front of the boat, then Ben and I worked on our tans for a bit on the back.

When we pulled up to the beach an hour later, the scene was insane. Just beyond the sand was a massive dance floor with a DJ booth to the front, a bar to one side, couches to the right, and an elevated platform with more seats in the back. This whole setup sat under a two-story-tall beach cabin, which was supported by 20 ft high stilts. A brief self-guided (and somewhat off-limits) tour of the cabin upon arrival confirmed that this would be a 10/10 place to rent out with 40 friends.

While the water in Cartagena was murky, the water off the coast of our beach destination was crystal clear. The beach was lined with hammocks, and off to the left of the cabin was a large, covered patio and bar.

So yeah, sick setup.

I applied my 28th layer of sunscreen before grabbing a beer and hitting the water with Vince and company. About 45 minutes after we arrived, the DJ fired up the speakers, and a few heads started bobbing on the dance floor. An hour and a half later, after everyone had eaten lunch and consumed a few several more adult beverages, the place became an all-out rager.

Aguardiente bottles were being passed around like candy, and Toni (now with his girlfriend, Cote, in tow) was going nuts, spraying the crowd with water. NOT A BAD AFTERNOON.

Bienvenidos a mi blog, Cote (back right)

After three hours of grooving on the beach, we stumbled back to the buses to shuttle home. This was also when I realized that we weren’t on an island, just further down the mainland.

This particular bus ride took nearly two hours because of traffic, and my bus didn’t have a bathroom. This presented a bit of a problem for me, as I had to pee pretty bad about one hour in. But I couldn’t expect the bus driver to stop in the middle of the highway for one person. So I made the only logical decision: relieve myself out the bus window.

Relax, we were in the far right lane. No one was in the splash zone.

Once we got back to the hotel, Steph texted me and Ben to see if we wanted to join her and some girls for a dinner reservation. I said, “Sure, anything to ditch Tanmaye,” but I’m pretty sure Ben was KO’d for the night. A few minutes later, Agustin aka Bebé Normal showed up at my door asking if I wanted to go out. I informed him of the dinner invite, he happily took Ben’s spot, and we called an Uber after deleting the hotel beers.

We arrived at the restaurant in Old Town, and there was a bit of a wait for our table, so we hit the restaurant bar while we were waiting. I didn’t realize it until after the fact, but I had quite a buzz going from our day on the beach, and I kept the party rolling by hitting espresso martini after espresso martini (I was merely following Steph’s lead). I spent most of dinner chatting with Kristina and Agustin about God-knows-what, and after dinner Agustin and I tried to rally the troops to go out.

Dinner with Bebé

Morale was pretty low, but Steph, Emma, and I think Veronica headed back to Alquimico, the bar from the night before, with us. Agustin disappeared (and later sent me a selfie from bed, I guess the bebé got tired), and Steph and Veronica tried to get on the roof (No idea if they succeeded, the bouncer was a real asshole to us guys about it the night before) while Emma and I grabbed drinks.

We headed to the second floor, where like 15 people from Emma’s cluster were hanging out, and kicked it by the balcony for a bit before calling it a night around 2.

Saturday, May 20th

I was initially supposed to fly home on Sunday, but a few days ago, after talking to Tanmaye and Amanda in Medellín, I realized that 1) getting home at 9 PM on Sunday would be tragic and 2) I was probably going to be ready to bounce after the boat party.

Combine that with the fact that JetBlue gave me a $500 flight credit to switch from Sunday to Saturday and it was a no-brainer.

I got up around 9 and headed down for breakfast with Antonio and Cote, and after breakfast, we headed into the Old Town to explore a bit with Ben and Maye. Old Town Cartagena is so pretty during the day: it’s a quintessential colonial city: vibrant, colorful buildings separated by narrow alleys and cobblestone streets, all surrounded by a large stone wall.

We popped in and out of different stores, and I got a milkshake at a local gelato spot (Nina paid for it, finally getting even on our debt from when she rekt my drink night one in Bogotá). The boys had a silly little photoshoot, a mime tried to follow Toni until he realized that Toni was actually Colombian and not another dumb American, and we visited a super cool shop with homemade pottery, furniture, and jewelry.

We made one final stop in a clothing store where we ran into Jen and Caro, and Tanmaye and I said our goodbyes to everyone before heading back to the hotel to scoop our bags and hit the airport.

So yeah, that’s about it. Fun little trip to Colombia with Columbia, but it’s good to be back on my NYC couch for a few days. Stay tuned for what’s next 👀

- Jack

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For a brief recap, we left off with me feeling like death, preparing for a flight from Guatemala to Bogotá to kick off a week in South America. Night one was supposed to be a welcome party hosted by Guillermo’s family at his house before the “real trip” began on Saturday. I was supposed to stay with Guille Friday night, but I booked a solo hotel room at the Regency to hopefully sleep off this Guatemalan affliction.

This was originally going to be one long blog post, but 7,800 words later, I decided to split it up. Catch the sequel in your inbox tomorrow afternoon.

Without further ado, let’s dive in.

Friday, May 12^th

Pardon my French, but I woke up feeling like shit. Cold chills, body aches, the whole 9. On a scale of 1-10, I was feeling a -3 about this flight. We ate a small breakfast at the Zedan house, said bye to Marcos’s mom, then headed to the airport.

The one good thing about this flight was that I had a front-row seat. A subpar seat on an Avianca flight would have been a kiss of death. Mr. Maye and I were seated at the front right with Brody behind us, and I alternated between reading, writing, and semi-sleeping while Maye was engulfed in a Bill O’Reilly book. I think Brody was working on some internship prep stuff behind us.

We caught an Uber to the Regency Hotel, where the other guys had also booked a large shared suite, and I slumped in the front seat, hoping the ride would go by quickly.

It didn’t.

Bogotá has some of the worst traffic in the world, and it took us a good hour to make it across town. If you’ve ever met me in real life, you know that I’m always doing one of two things: talking or eating. If there’s no food in my mouth, and I’m hardly saying a word, it’s a tell-tale sign that I’m down horrendous.

I was, at this point, down horrendous.

We got to the hotel and checked in, and I set out in search of a pharmaceutical cocktail that would alleviate my ailments. I called Guillermo and he recommended Dolex (the Spanish word for pain is dolor, so this was named appropriately). I grabbed two packs of Dolex, 3 Pedialytes, 3 waters, and some Vitamin-C tabs, then headed to the Mecca of fast food: McDonald’s.

In hindsight, it was obvious why I was sick: I forgot to test out Guatemalan Mickey D’s. After a double cheeseburger and a sweet, sweet McDonald’s Sprite, I headed back to the hotel. Unfortunately, I got dumped on by rain on the way back, and I felt like a wet dog when I finally stumbled back into the lobby around 4.

I headed to my room, hung my now-soaked hoodie up to dry, took some painkillers, and passed out.

I didn’t set an alarm, and I half-expected to sleep until the next morning, but I woke up at 6:45 feeling surprisingly refreshed.

“Damn, I guess I’m back,” I thought. After I showered, I decided to stop by Guillermo’s and at least show face for a bit. I called an Uber, and 10 minutes later, I was walking into the Campos residence.

Views from the Guille crib

Guille’s family has a beautiful apartment with a view of the city, and 25 or so of my classmates were hanging out on the patio when I arrived. I wasn’t planning on drinking, but one of the servers greeted me with a mystery cocktail, and it would have been rude to refuse. I said what’s up to the Guatemala squad and made my rounds talking to all of my other friends before Guille introduced me to his parents and sister.

I also met Guille’s dog, Ben, who will play dead if you point a finger gun at him and yell “PEW PEW PEW.”

Papa Campos was cooking up a fat spread of meat for the crew, and JC and I were the first to sample some of the ribs as they came off the grill. They were gas. Brody, who was also feeling pretty bleh, and I wanted to watch the Lakers game and get a good night’s sleep, so we called an Uber home around 10.

Brody’s TV wasn’t working (This “Regency” was not a Hyatt Regency. I think they just stole the 2nd part of the name), but mine was, so I watched Lebron wreck the Warriors before I passed out.

Saturday, May 13th

Today was the first official day of the Colombia trip, and pretty much everyone that wasn’t at Guille’s the night before was en route to Bogotá. I grabbed breakfast in the hotel restaurant with Ben and Tanmaye, packed my bags, and prepared to Uber to the Hilton.

We would be spending the next two nights in Bogotá before three nights in both Medellín and Cartagena, and our travel group had arranged blocks of rooms in 2-3 hotels per city.

Brody and I were roommates on the trip (or at least we were supposed to be roommates), but I noticed that Antonio had a solo room for the whole trip. The thing is, Toni flew back to NYC for his girlfriend’s graduation when we flew to Bogotá, and he was planning to meet us in Medellín on Monday, but he still had a room reserved for himself in Bogotá.

Me, being the savvy, observant young man that I am, called him up and asked if I could scoop his room. He didn’t even know he had a room in Bogotá, and he gave me his blessing.

I got to the hotel early to make sure I wouldn’t have any issues with the room change. Nacho, the director of Wonder (our tour group), happened to be one of Toni’s boys, and he handled everything with the front desk folks. I hung out with Ani in the lobby for a minute, then headed to my room, took a fat bath (the tub was insane) with a new book, and passed out for a couple of hours.

Hola Ani

When I woke up, I headed to the basement to get a workout in at the gym. This may have been the best hotel gym that I’ve ever seen: it literally had a full bench press with free weights. I got a solid pump in, then headed upstairs to shower before dinner.

We were taking shuttles to a place called “Andrés Carne de Res,” located an hour north of our hotel, for dinner. Andrés was a wild place: it consisted of two massive buildings: the first was very open with tons of tables for dinner patrons, as well as 3-4 (?) different bars with a massive dance floor in the middle. Across the street, the other half also had some condensed dining areas, as well as multiple dance floor areas more secluded from the rest of the establishment.

Slumped pre-dinner

I hung out with Bhavin, Adam, and Brody on the bus ride to the restaurant before making the rounds to say what’s up to everyone once we arrived. Adam and I grabbed a table with Vince, and then we hit the bar for drinks. I was starting to get over my plague infection, and I knew I was a few cervezas and Aguardiente shots away from freedom.

Dinner with Adam and Vince

We sat back down for round after round of meats and fried breads, Adam and I reminisced about our favorite digital marketing class that we loved so much, I said hey to Steph, my favorite class and cluster president, and then I headed back to the bar to continue my self-medicating spiral.

I ran into Ellie and JC (now officially dating ❤️❤️) and Ellie informed me that I needed to quit force-feeding JC a steady diet of Gen-Z vocabulary words, because he kept telling her to “take the L.”

I will continue to feed my favorite Córdoba chico a steady diet of low-IQ vocab terms, no cap.

I hopped in the drink line with Kevin, Jack (Gorman, there were three Jacks on this trip), and Emma (who I decided to hit on shortly thereafter), and I informed Kevin that he would indeed be included in this travel blog addition because he had grabbed Aguardiente shots for the squad.

Welcome to the blog, Kevin.

Emma and I grabbed another drink (well, we tried to grab a drink and a shot, but they gave us two mixed drinks, which made us look like double-fisting alcoholics, but everyone knows you can’t actually be an alcoholic in college) because grabbing another drink is kind of what you do when you’re hitting on someone, and then I continued on my journey to say “what’s up” to every single acquaintance I had in this bar.

Around this time, exotic dancers came out in colorful costumes, and I swear that some of them were twirling torches/flames, but also, I could have completely imagined the whole “fire” thing in my Dolex/Aguardiente-filled state of being.

I said “Hola” to Caro, my favorite Puerto Rican, and linked back up with the Guatemala boys to head to the other part of the bar across the street. In here, on the dance floor, Nina Falcon-punched (accidentally!) my near-full tequila soda out of my hand, and we embarked on a failed mission for her to grab me a replacement (a week later, she made up for this transgression by buying me a milkshake at a cash-only ice cream place).

The party at Andrés raged until well after two, but Ben texted me that he, Ryan, Chrisa, Rachel, and Adam had gone to some club called Kaput a few blocks from the hotel, so Emma and I linked up with them there.

This club felt like it was straight out of Berlin: it looked grungy as hell, and the downstairs rooms were blaring heavy techno and house music. However, as we walked around, we realized that the venue was freaking massive. We eventually posted up in a disco room for a bit (the DJ was playing bangers) before linking with Ben and company on the rooftop. Ryan gave me one of the more interesting compliments I’ve ever received, saying that he thought I would be “the man” when I was 30 (thank you, Ryan).

Disco szn

We kicked it at Kaput until 3-something, then I dropped Emma off at her hotel so she wouldn’t become the latest white girl to disappear in a solo-Uber-gone-wrong story from South America, and I headed back to my hotel to get into some shenanigans with Tanmaye and Ben.

Sunday, May 14^th

I was supposed to go horseback riding today. However, I woke up feeling terrible, probably because of a night of heavy Aguardiente consumption on the tail end of a bug, and literally nothing sounded worse than horseback riding. Combine that with the fact that Ben and Tanmaye had flipped their tickets and Brody wasn’t going in the first place, and I really didn’t want to go.

I am completely incapable of thinking for myself and always succumb to groupthink. Obviously.

So I went to breakfast, where I was joined by my favorite English student JC. While we were having another vocab lesson, someone informed me that Steph was looking for a horseback riding ticket. The timing couldn’t have been better. Ticket: sold. Jack: happy.

After breakfast, I got a brief workout in, then headed upstairs to chill in the tub with a book, again.

I had also decided that Bogotá would be a good time for me to get ahead on all of my work for the week so I could go full-send in Medellín and Cartagena, as we had an action-packed week planned, so I spent most of the afternoon typing away on my computer.

I did take a stroll around the neighborhood, stopping to grab a rather interesting burger at one point.

Later that afternoon, Juanma texted us about buying tickets to a fútbol game in the city that night. Having not done anything all day, I was 100% in on a sporting event.

I was supposed to head to a dinner with Tanmaye and co later, but I skipped it to finish up some stuff. I did, however, finish in time to grab a drink with them, but when I walked outside to meet them, I ran into Krishna and Paula, who were hopping in an Uber to the stadium. They told me to just ride with them to the game, so I just headed straight to the stadium as well.

We were sitting near mid-field, when Krishna and I decided to grab some drinks. It was cash only, so we got two beers for us and a water for Paula. The rest of the fútbol crew arrived about 10 minutes after the game started, and we linked with them.

We decided to grab more beers, but at the concession stand, I came to a shocking realization: these were non-alcoholic beers. What a waste of a stadium beer. Apparently, Colombians get too rowdy when they’re drunk, so they banned booze in the stadiums. Thank God I realized it after 1 drink, because Ben and Brody were going to try to gaslight me into drinking 10 to see if I acted drunk.

The home team waxed the floor with the visitors, and we decided to leave with 10 minutes left. While we were waiting on an Uber, one of the security guards started chatting with me to practice his English. I obliged and started whipping some Spanish.

Once we got back to the hotel, I passed tf out.

Monday, May 15^th

After a pretty chill Sunday, I woke up at 9 and headed down for a hotel breakfast. I sat with Adam and Chandler, who were about to hike Montserrat, then headed back up to my room to pack/knock out the rest of this week’s blog. Trying to clear out the schedule for a big week in Medellin and Cartegena!

But before the blog, I hopped in the tub and read another chapter of my new book (Don’t Trust Your Gut, for those curious). Reading in the tub has been a decade-long guilty pleasure of mine. Huge, unashamed bath fan here, if you can’t tell. It’s like having a hot tub adjacent to your bedroom.

Checkout was at 12, so I took my stuff downstairs and posted up in the hotel coffee shop until we headed out at 2. The shuttle back to the airport was much, much faster than our Uber into town on Friday, and we made it to the terminal in 30 minutes. Because all transportation for the rest of the trip was booked through Wonder (our travel group), I had no idea where my seat would be on the Avianca flight to Medellín.

I ended up in 29E, a middle seat in the back. (Luckily, our total airtime was 25 minutes, and my man Alex, who was supposed to be in the window seat next to me, just took the middle and let me scoot over to his seat. A man of the people. I also sat behind Ben, who I pestered for the entirety of the flight.)

I grabbed a crepe and some ice cream for lunch in the airport, ate them in the reverse order of how I just listed them, then boarded the plane. After the shortest flight of my life, we were touching down in Medellín. The sun had set by the time we boarded our bus to the hotel, and the views of the city were beautiful from the road down the mountain.

Brody and I were off the bus quick, hitting the front of the line for the hotel check-in. This was our savviest move of the trip: the hotel check-in was moving at a snail’s pace.

We showered, changed, then headed to the lobby to hang with everyone. We played a quick game of Harmon Killabrew, I changed pants after JC beer-tapped my Corona causing it to spew everywhere, and then JC, Alex, Tyler, Brody, and Agustin (aka Bebé Normal, as opposed to me, Bebé Grande and/or Bebé Gigante) headed to town for dinner.

I said we could just walk to El Poblado (the neighborhood where we planned to dine), but I didn’t realize the first 10 minutes of the walk would be on a sidewalk running parallel to a highway.

Oh well.

We strolled around El Poblado until we found a spot that looked decent, where we ordered rounds of chicken fingers, cheese sticks, and empanadas to go with our cocktails. Super healthy, classy food choices here. This is health.

The tour group had given us braided wristbands for identification purposes, but mine was completely frayed and looked like a Chia Pet gone rogue, so JC borrowed some 15-year-old kid’s lighter to burn off the excess strings.

I thought he was going to burn my hand off in the process.

After dinner, we hit another bar nearby that was absolutely, positively dead, then we headed to Perro Negro for the night’s events. Perro Negro is Medellin’s go-to nightlife venue, and we had rented it out this fine Monday. It’s normally closed on Monday, so I’m sure they were happy to have our business.

The line was like 95% CBS people (obviously, because the bar was supposed to be closed) but some 60-year-old and his 25-year-old date who was totally not an escort were in line too. I jumped in front of them, signed off on my name, and was promptly greeted by a bottle of Aguardiente in my face, courtesy of Majo.

A few minutes later, I believe Majo also told Dollar Tree Hugh Hefner to go somewhere else.

I had been to Perro Negro a couple of times during my last trip to Medellín, and I can honestly say we packed out the venue as much as I’d seen it on a November Friday night.

I was making my way through the VIP section of the club, which really just meant I was in the area behind the DJ (can you imagine how pretentious it would be to have an actual VIP section at a private business school party?) when I stopped to chat with Hannah and Ben.

One of us made a joke about three-picos, which is a party bit that the Latin crew does where they say “three-picos!” and do a three-way kiss. And for a second there I thought we were going to rip a three-picos, and I think they also thought that we were going to. The sexual tension in that triangle was insane.

But then we didn’t.

So Hannah walked away, but then Steph walked up, and we made another three-picos joke, putting us right back in the exact same scenario that we were just in, with all three of us thinking, “Are we about to have a three-piece mouth high five?”

But then we didn’t, and Steph walked away.

So now it was just me and Ben looking at each other, playing chicken, seeing who would take the bit further. Fortunately, there was a silent, mutual agreement to abort mission.

We both busted out laughing and continued to the bar.

Every Colombian in this club was fully armed with a body of Aguardiente, shoving shots down the throat of anyone unfortunate (or should I say, fortunate?) enough to catch their eye. While waiting on my cervezas, I was ambushed by Antonio, who, now back from NYC, wanted to ensure that we didn’t remember this fine Monday night.

And Toni succeeded.

The night progressed as you would expect: dangerously. But what else can you expect when you have an open bar at Medellín’s premier night club?

All in all, not a bad way to kick off Medellín round two.

- Jack

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See below for the previous and next chapter:

It’s Saturday morning in Bogotá, and I’m preparing to kick off an 8-day trip of good, clean, wholesome fun with 300 of my favorite classmates. My immune system has been playing Russian Roulette with me for the last 48 hours, but God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers. A cocktail of 3 Emergen-C packs, some Colombian Tylenol, 12 hours of sleep, and a steaming hotel bath can cure anything.

But more on that later, because I need to tell y’all about the last five days in Guatemala.

If you’ve been following this travel blog for a couple of months, you probably know that I was in Japan for a couple of weeks in March. Japan was a fantastic bonding experience for the boys, and it was also an opportunity for me to get to know some new friends better.

One of such friends was Marcos Zedan. After spending six hours sitting in a 5ft x 5ft square drinking hot sake together at Kyoto’s premier sumo wrestling tournament, we became boys.

Marcos is from Guatemala, and after we returned from Japan, he invited a group of us to visit him for 5 days before meeting the larger group in Colombia. I’ve never been to Guatemala, or anywhere in Central America for that matter, so I was pumped to join the trip.

The biggest benefit of business school is having friends from a dozen countries. The local experience is always better than the gringo special, and Guatemala absolutely exceeded my expectations.

So let’s dive in 🤝

Sunday, May 7^th

I should start this by saying that outside of purchasing the necessary flights, I did nothing to prepare for this trip. Much like Japan, I am 100% going with the flow. I didn’t start packing until midnight on Sunday, which was ill-advised given my 9:00 AM flight, and I passed out at like 2:00 AM.

Alarm went off at 6:45, and I set out for Columbus Circle to link with Ben. I thought I could hit the Chick-fil-A on the way, but I forgot it was Sunday, so I had to settle for McDonald’s. Ben and I grabbed an Uber and scooped Antonio from his mom’s place, and we headed to LaGuardia.

Toni and I were sitting near the front while Ben was hanging out with the flight attendants in the back (a recurring trend), and we set off for Miami. After an hour layover and some airport Cuban food, we caught our second flight to Guatemala City. I spent most of the flight somewhat trying to write/work on stuff, and I completely missed the view of the volcanoes out the window as we approached our destination.

Upon arrival, we didn’t know Marcos’s address so we just wrote “MZ Residencia” on the customs forms (to be fair, it wasn’t incorrect), and Marcos scooped us from the airport. His family owns a mattress foam company (or something like that), and he and his sister had opened a mattress shop in town around a year ago. We stopped by to check it out, bought some flowers and wine for his mom (Tanmaye is arriving in two days, and we beat him to the punch with gifts for the host, lo siento), then headed to his place.

On our drive, Marcos gave us a brief history lesson about gang violence/crime in Guatemala. It’s actually one of the safest countries in Central America, but the isolated gangs that are here originated in the US.

During the Central American civil wars, a lot of people fled to the US, especially LA. LA had a large Hispanic gang population at the time, and many of the new refugees/immigrants joined. When the US cracked down on gang crime and deported many of the gang members, they set up shop in Central America.

After winding our way up the mountain, we arrived at Marco’s house. First impression: his crib is sick. It was three stories built into the side of a hill, with a central stone staircase wrapped about a tree growing in the foyer. We met Marco’s mom and some friends and family before hanging out on the back porch, enjoying some cervecitas and apps.

Marcos manned the grill, and an hour later, we enjoyed steak and an assortment of Guatemalan food. I’m going to make an early nomination for Marcos as the top grill master in the class, the meat was insane.

Marcos, Ben, and Toni left to pick up Brody while I posted up on the porch to work on some newsletter stuff. When they got back, Brody dropped his stuff off in my room (we were doubled up while Toni and Ben shared the other guest room), and we all went to the basement to watch a movie.

We settled on the most cringe Rom-Com of all time, Ghosted, where Chris Evans aka Captain America plays the world’s biggest simp.

I dipped halfway through to finish some work, then hung out in the room with Brody. After 20 minutes of trying to share a bed, I realized that this probably wasn’t going to work:

I’m 6’3, Brody is 6’7, and we were dangerously close to accidentally engaging in a way-too-tall cuddle sesh, so I grabbed a blanket and crashed on a basement couch.

Monday, May 8^th

We needed to be out the door at 7:25 for a 9 AM flight to Flores, because today we were going to see some Mayan pyramids. At 7, we had a breakfast spread of fruit, eggs, toast, beans, and plantains, then threw our stuff in the car and headed to the airport.

We passed the world’s biggest McDonald’s sign on the way down, and because it’s my life’s mission to sample McDonald’s in 100+ countries, I’ll have to make a pitstop before we head to Colombia.

After getting hit with some last-second baggage fees for our > 10 lb backpacks, we headed to the gate. We boarded our twin-propeller plane (Brody and I were seated in the front, but since the flight boarded in the back, this was actually a bad thing), and after an hour, we landed in Flores in northern Guatemala.

Marcos had arranged a shuttle to pick us up and take us on a tour of Tikal National Park to explore Mayan ruins and pyramids, and our guide, Milton, was the man. During our hour-ish ride, Milton told us all about the agriculture and history of northern Guatemala. The variety of wildlife is incredible, from jaguars and crocodiles to toucans and monkeys, and ancestors of the Mayans still speak ~22 different Mayan languages today.

Milton also offered us a local fruit, which at first tasted sweet, but then left a numbing sensation that felt like a local anesthetic.

We stopped at a store on the way to sample some local coffee, and Milton showed us a massive model of the park in the back of the shop, where he went over the layout and history of Tikal.

Archeologists started using new LiDAR technology to look for Mayan ruins a few years ago, and they have discovered 10x more ruins that were previously hidden.

We boarded the van again, and 20 minutes later, we entered the park. Most national parks that I’ve visited have strict rules about entering/climbing the ruins and monuments, but we were able to explore 90% of the pyramids and temples in Tikal.

Milton said 11 million people lived in the Mayan empire at its peak, which seems insane for a civilization that roamed Central America so long ago. I’m pretty sure Tikal alone housed hundreds of thousands of Mayans in a small area.

We spent the next two hours scaling various temples and pyramids, exploring the sleeping chambers of Mayan kings, and watching spider monkeys “OOOO-OOOO AHH-AHH” as they swung from tree to tree.

Marcos and I chatted about what we were doing before business school and our plans after, Antonio went crazy with his camera, and Brody tried not to look down as we climbed 100+ feet up these pyramids.

There is something ironic about someone 6’7 not liking heights. My guy, you ARE heights.

If you ever have a chance to visit Guatemala, Tikal is a must-see. Words don’t do it justice, so here are some pics.

After the tour, we hit the bar at the park entrance for some ice cold cervecitas, and then we reboarded the van to head to our hotel.

We were spending Monday night on an island in the middle of a nearby lake, and Milton drove us to a dock, where a boat escorted us to our residence for the night. Our captain, Hugo, greeted us with a cooler of beers that bore interesting names (I deleted a “sin novias” and “Don Nadie”, which translate to “no girlfriends” and “Mr. No One”), and we reached our destination 20 minutes later.

*An aside from our boat ride*

One of the funnier parts of this trip so far has been Brody asking how to say various phrases in Spanish, and on the boat, we had a Brody Spanish lesson.

Antonio and Marcos are native Spanish speakers, my Spanish is sufficient for a gringo looking to goof off in Latin America, and Brody’s Spanish is a work in progress. We were helping Brody come up with follow-ups to “Hola, me llamo Brody,” when Marcos thought of a banger.

Brody’s nickname is “Big Grizz,” the word for “bear” in Spanish is “Oso,” and Marcos said his new nickname in Spanish should be “Oso Delicioso.”

So now Brody can say, “Hola, me llamo Brody, pero mi apodo (nickname) es El Oso Delicioso.” This is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

*back to the story*

Our hotel was almost invisible from the water due to the island jungle, and you could almost hear the White Lotus theme song queue up as we arrived.

We were greeted with cold towels and cold drinks, and then we rode golf carts to our room. We had a large two-bedroom condo with 3 beds in each room, and a hot tub.

The other guys hit the sauna while I hopped on a companywide call (read: an anonymous meme page, me, and three interns) and updated a newsletter. An hour later, we all showered and headed back to the bottom of the hill for dinner at the hotel restaurant.

We had a variety of shrimp, chicken, and fish dishes, along with quality tequila, rum, and a few Coronas (decked out in a Hawaiian shirt and holding a Corona, I was the face of every 47-year-old man in a Panama City Beach dive bar), and we finished the meal off with cheesecake.

We spent another hour shooting the shit in the restaurant before heading back to the room.

Shooting the shit with your boys while 3 drinks deep is a peak-life experience.

We fired up a movie in the living room, but I was sweaty as hell and tired (no AC in the living room, sadly), so I got in bed, read for a bit, and caught some Zzzs.

Tuesday, May 9^th

I woke up without an alarm for the first time in I don’t know how long, and Ben and I threw on some shoes and shorts and headed outside for a prison workout. We’re like 10 days away from a boat party in Cartagena, and being in peak physical condition is imperative.

I hiked up the trail behind our room for some cardio, jumped on a pushup/band pull circuit with Ben, accidentally broke one of the handles off the band, jumped rope for a bit, then showered and headed down for breakfast. Ben kept working out for like 30 more minutes because he’s more dedicated to the grind than me. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, mediocrity is for cowards.

We had a full Guatemalan spread for breakfast, then loaded up on the boat and headed back to shore. We had to take two different taxis to the airport, so Brody, Ben, Toni, and I took one car while Marcos hopped in the other car with some other guests.

Our cab driver rear-ended Marcos’s cab driver two minutes into the drive, laughed like nothing had happened, and kept heading to the airport. Classic!

Unlike yesterday’s flight, they didn’t give a shit that our backpacks were > 10 pounds, so we avoided the extra bag fees. Once at the gate, I looked at everyone’s tickets and realized that all four of my friends were on Row 17 while I was on Row 10. This induced a catastrophic wave of FOMO as I realized that they would probably create and/or exchange no less than 10 new inside jokes, I would be out of the loop, and it would be totally, apocalyptically over.

I did, however, have a row to myself, so I could stretch out and work on this blog that you’re reading right now.

When we landed, I got clowned for not being part of the Row 17 crew (tribalism runs everything, ya know) and we waited at the airport for our next two amigos: Ryan and Tanmaye. Tanmaye, a staple for the Japan trip, had arrived the night before and spent the night at Marcos’s place, while Ryan arrived early that morning before heading to the Zedan crib as well.

Ryan and Mr. Maye arrived, a cooler of beers (and waters!) in hand, and we hopped in a shuttle to embark on a three-hour drive to Lake Atitlán.

Road trip humor, especially road trip humor with a few cold ones, gets funnier and funnier as the trip progresses as riffs and jokes and stories compound.

This was one of those roadtrips.

We stopped about an hour in to grab more snacks and beverages and hit the little boys’ room, and then half the crew passed out for 30 minutes or so. However, when we were an hour out from the lake, we had a problem: the seals had been broken, we were in the middle of nowhere, and bladders were full.

So we made an impromptu pit stop.

We reached the lake that afternoon, and I thought we were headed to an Airbnb by the dock. Instead, we were led to a boat, where we strapped our bags to the roof, climbed “below deck” (This is a stretch. This “boat” was basically an oversized bath tub with holes cut in the side for windows and a roof/platform for the captain and our bags), and FLEW across the water.

The lake was surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, so the views were immaculate. After 30 minutes or so, we arrived at an inconspicuous dock on the other side of the lake.

We disembarked and walked up the pier to a ~2 foot wide path running parallel to the water with a massive stone wall behind it. Marcos led us through a wooden door in the wall, and we emerged in a new world like the children in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Our Airbnb was a sprawling, four-bedroom compound with a luscious yard, pool and hot tub, and covered patio (which had an insane projector screen). Just an unbelievable place.

Brody and I threw our stuff in an upstairs room, Ben and Ryan threw the 76er’s game on the projector, and we fired up the hot tub. Our housekeeper, Elena, told Ryan and me how to control the hot tub with an iPhone remote, or so I thought. But after 30 minutes in the tub, it was lukewarm at best until Marcos took the remote, tinkered with some settings, and got the whole thing working.

I was just doing what Elena told me.

At halftime of the game, Brody and I went on a food run for the boys. We exited the gate and turned right, walking along the elevated lakeside path until we reached some restaurants five minutes away.

We first tried a restaurant adjacent to a local hostel, but they were only serving a buffet that night, so we went to the next restaurant over.

This is where we seriously messed up (not actually, but initially it definitely seemed that way).

We had 7 hungry dudes, and we didn’t want to under-order food. The menu had “tortillas con pollo/chorizo/carne,” which I assumed meant something similar to tacos. So we got 10 of each (30 total), plus several side orders of fries, beans, plantains, and rice.

Our mesero told us that it would be ~40 minutes, so we grabbed two Modelos and sat at the bar upstairs with a view of the lake. Brody and I were bro-ing down pretty hard, as you do when you are posted up on a Guatemalan lake with a volcano in the background, when the waiter returned and told us that it would be another ~hour.

I thought I misheard him because we had already been there 30 minutes, but he repeated himself and said that it was taking a while to cook all the chicken.

And that was when I realized that we had screwed up. We didn’t get 30 tacos with sides. We got thirty plates that each came with a fat serving of meat and tortillas, along with a ridiculous serving of sides. The waiter told us that some of the food would be ready in 30 minutes if we wanted to start eating.

This is like 1/3 of the total food lmfao

We chilled for another 30 minutes until the boys back home starting calling asking about the food, and I explained that we had accidentally ordered enough food to sedate a 3^rd world country for a week. Ryan and Ben headed our way as the food started coming out, and Brody and I watched in awe as the kitchen staff brought out plate after plate of food. By the time the other guys arrived, we had 30 plates of food sitting on the bar, with more to come. They took the first 30 plates back while Brody and I grabbed more drinks and waited on the chicken and chorizo to finish, then we headed back as well.

We pulled no punches on the meal, but we still had 20 plates of leftovers in the fridge for the next day. After dinner, I worked on some newsletter stuff while the other guys hung out in the pool/tub, then we all regrouped inside to play fan favorite card game: Cabo.

If you haven’t played Cabo (pronounced “Kaboo”), you’re missing out. This particular match lasted hours and got more and more intense as the night went on, with folks slamming cards their cards down on the table left and right.

By 2 AM, there was briefly a push to stay up for the 5:30 AM sunrise, but we ended up calling it a night. I did, however, get woken up around 5 by an onslaught of cannon explosions from nearby. Apparently, there was a local festival going on while we were in town, and they loved their “BOOMS.”

I also realized in the morning that our porch door was open all night, which explained why the cannons were so damn loud.

Wednesday, May 10^th

I slept in today (after finally going back to bed post-explosions), and I walked in the living room around 10:45. Elena was already at the house preparing to make eggs, bacon and coffee, while the crew was lounging around the patio hanging out. We also had a random dog hanging out in our kitchen. We named him JC and let him chill at the house for the rest of the trip. This is JC on Wednesday night:

Tanmaye fried some of the leftover tortillas in the bacon grease, and we started the day off with a dank-ass breakfast.

Brody and I planned to spend most of the day working (him with job onboarding stuff, me with blog shenanigans) while the rest of the boys took a boat to a nearby town to explore.

I’ll share some Toni photos from their side adventure:

Most of the afternoon was spent posted up on this laptop. After everyone returned, Ben and I hit a workout before I finished up my work for the day. It was starting to drizzle a bit, so kicked it in the now-steaming hot tub until the rain really started coming down.

At 7, we tried, unsuccessfully, to stream the Heat game, before getting the Lakers game pulled up at 8:30. Tanmaye threw together our remaining food and make nachos, eggs and rice, beans, and guac, and we contemplated the night moves.

Brody and I wanted to chill and watch basketball, so I headed back to the room to shower. Five minutes later, while bathing and jamming to Hozier, I got a knock on the door.

“Yo it’s Brody. So… we’re going out.

“What does that even mean?”

“I have no idea, but Marcos said we have a driver.”

“There’s a road here?”

“Nah, like a boat driver.”

The whole situation made 0 sense to me, but I hopped out, threw on some clothes, and met the guys outside. We went to the pier, and sure enough, there was our boat, bright red and blue lights attached.

Once again, we hopped aboard, but this time we were across the lake to San Pedro. We quickly found a dive bar with a band playing the Chili Peppers, and we grabbed a table in the back.

Ryan grabbed a bucket of beers for the table, we made a couple of new friends (local dogs hanging out in the bar), and we played different drinking games for 2-3 hours. One game, “Harmon Killabrew” was especially entertaining.

As the bar closed down, a few girls at a nearby table told us that another bar down the street was popping off, so we headed that way.

SURPRISE SURPRISE: it was not popping off, so we headed back to our boat to go home.

I decided to push some buttons and started asking the crew about their political beliefs, declaring that I was “fiscally liberal but socially conservative” (think about that for a sec, it’s hilarious. But also, maybe we should make that a thing?), and I accidentally kickstarted a pretty heated debate between Ryan and Maye.

Like the night before, we kicked of another game of Cabo (except Toni, who fell asleep in the boat, woke up when we got home, then went straight to bed).

This particular game was ridiculous because Tanmaye and I made a stupid wager on who would end up with the better score, I managed to beat him (though we both did horribly) thanks to a ridiculous last second move, and then we all went to bed at like 3.

Thursday, May 11^th

Last morning on the lake. Brody woke up at like 7:30 to fly his drone around, while I didn’t get out of bed til 9:15. Marcos, Ben, Tanmaye, Toni, and I grabbed breakfast and coffee from the hostel restaurant nearby, then we returned to the house to chill for a bit.

Hanging on the patio with JC

We didn’t have to leave til 12, so I took a dip in the lake and hung out on the patio until we took the boat back to town. Marcos had arranged for a shuttle to take us to Antigua, the old capital of Guatemala. We turned off the highway to enter the city, and it felt like we had been teleported to Spain.

With its cobblestone streets and Spanish colonial architecture, Antigua looked like it had been cut out from Andalucía and dropped in front of a Central American volcano.

Antigua was Guatemala’s capital for years, until natural disaster after natural disaster forced the government to relocate to the newer Guatemala City.

Upon arrival, we headed straight a rooftop restaurant for a late lunch, where we had steak, lobster, and fish. We also made Tanmaye and Ryan have a live political debate. At its conclusion, the judges (the rest of us) decided that no one won, and everyone who listened to it lost.

After lunch, some of the crew set off to explore the city, while Brody and I posted up at a nearby bar to watch the 76ers / Celtics game.

And it was right about… now that Brody and I started feeling awful. Maybe it was traveling too much and sleeping too little, maybe it was some bad local cuisine, maybe it was the ill-advised number of beers we consumed the night before, but we were down horrendous.

We stayed at the bar chugging waters and Emergen-C’s (shout out Toni for the vitamin plug, te quiero mucho) until it was time to leave, when we regrouped with the other guys by the van.

We had another hour or two until we were home, so I finished up most of my newsletter stuff in the van.

When we got back, we met Marcos’s dad (also named Marcos), shot the shit for a little while, and ran all of our laundry to get ready for the morning: 6 AM wakeup for the 9:30 flight.

I hung out with everyone in the basement until ~10, then retreated to my room and passed out.

Considering that we have a party at Guillermo’s house in Bogota tomorrow, there could hardly be a worse time to feel under the weather. Time to see if 27 Emergen-C’s can fix me up. (Edited two days later to note that 27 Emergen-C’s can, in fact, cure anything. I’m back.)

Catch you guys later.

- Jack

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Tanmaye and Toni had headed to Hakone a day before us to bike around with Marcos, and now Ben, Brody, and I were headed there too. I had purchased our train tickets the night before, and we left for Tokyo station to catch our ride.

We were seated in the front car, and because the front end was largely transparent, we had an insane view of the Japanese countryside the whole way there. I wrote the last blog post on the way there, while the other two chilled in the row behind me. For a country that's quiet in literally all public places, the locals were chatting away on this train.

Hungry upon arrival, we first went to a coffee shop (smelled like an old attic) and a noodle shop (the line was insane), before settling on a Japanese curry spot. And it was incredible. Top-tier grub. At lunch we discussed renting a car to drive around to see Lake Ashi and hopefully Mt. Fuji, and we decided to check the Nissan rental spot nearby.

They were sold out, and we went to the Airbnb to drop our stuff off and scheme. I checked online, and to my surprise, there actually was 1 minivan available at the shop. We almost booked it, before deciding to grab a taxi or bus to Lake Ashi instead. We got in the bus line, boarded the bus, and immediately jumped off at the first stop (which was, ironically, next to the Nissan shop) because we realized a quiet, standing-room-only bus for an hour would be abysmal.

We went back in the Nissan shop, asked to rent the one available minivan, and the dude working there started glitching hard. (There were a lot of glitching incidents over the course of the trip. I think, because Japan is so orderly, any action out of the ordinary is super poorly received by the local populace.)

There was a car available, per their website, but he kept just shaking his head. Ben and this dude exchanged translated voice messages back and forth over some translation app, but after 15 minutes, we left the shop dejectedly.

We thought about trying the bus again, or maybe just heading to a local Onsen (hot bath/spa), before an empty taxi drove by. I flagged him, we got in, and we headed to Lake Ashi. The bus would have been trash, shout out to a well-timed cab.

Lake Ashi was super pretty, surrounded by mountains with a view of Fuji on a clear day (unfortunately, no views of Japan's highest peak were had due to a partly cloudy sky.)

We walked a mile or two around the lake, checking out various observation decks and paths in the woods, spotting the occasional pirate ship floating around the water (they have hourly pirate ship tours).

We then made our way to a small village/shopping area, Ben and I ate some trash mochi soy-cicles, and we tried to figure out how to get back. Unable to find a cab (we were miles from town at this point), we walked in a nearby hotel (super nice spot right on the lake) to see if they could call us one.

The receptionist was super chill and hooked us up, and we hit the hotel bar for 30 minutes while we waited. Views were immaculate.

Once the cab arrived, we headed to the main Onsen in town for some relaxation.

For those who aren't aware, an Onsen is a Japanese hot spring that you can bathe in. Clothing isn't allowed, so it's just you and the homies chilling naked in the pool.

Brody, Ben, and I checked in, headed to the locker room, stripped down, tried (and somewhat failed) to act mature and not laugh at the absurdity of this whole thing, and rinsed off in the outdoor showers (you had to bathe before hopping in the water). This Onsen was bumpin', with like 60 naked dudes vibing in the water. There were 7 pools (6 hot with varying temperatures, 1 freezing) and a sauna hut.

After some time in the hot tub, I hit the cold pool (WARNING: SHRINKAGE) to reenact the good old days of mandatory football ice baths while Brody headed to a hot tub in the corner, where he sat, unmoving, for the next 45 minutes. Ben joined me in the Arctic Ocean, then we pool-hopped for a bit, hit the sauna, and dried off in human-sized dryers.

Sorry kiddos, no Onsen pics.

We were only 1.2 miles from home, so we decided to walk back and grab food on the way. We hit a dank steakhouse, where they cooked a multi-course meal in front of us, Japanese steakhouse style (we are in Japan, you know), and met up with Tanmaye and Toni at the crib (they had 7-11 for dinner).

The boys hung out for a bit before calling it a night, another travel day awaits.

Wednesday, March 15th

I got up, grabbed some 7-11 coffee and snacks, then Tanmaye went for a hike, Ben and Toni booked a pirate ship tour to catch a glimpse of Fuji, Brody slept in/gamed, and I slung some emails before we headed to Kyoto.

Toni and Ben were in luck, Fuji was looking pristine this fine morning:

Brody and I bounced at 10, where I posted up to work on some stuff at the train station cafe while he wanted to try the noodle spot we'd passed the day before (it was trash, he discovered). The two of us waited for an hour, then Brody said, "What are we waiting for? Let's just get to Kyoto."

He was right. We grabbed the Hakone train that would take us to the main station, where we bought our Kyoto tickets. We hopped on a 12:35 train with zero switches, but arrived in Kyoto at the same time as Toni and Ben because they took an express line.

The crew checked in at the Airbnb (super Japanese vibes, great spot), and we walked around looking at temples and stuff all afternoon. I also ate grilled bamboo. It wasn't great. Toni super some "super fire" pics with his camera. Big artsy guy. Also, a ton of folks were wearing kimonos, which I just realized look a lot like the Star Wars robes.

We found a super cool speakeasy-esque bar, deleted a few cocktails, then set out to find dinner. Our search for dinner was tough: we tried 12 different restaurants only to strike out, then we walked in, and subsequently left, another spot after realizing that it was terrible, before I found an Italian spot on the map.

"Why get Italian food in Japan?" You might ask? Because Italian food is fantastic.

I ran ahead to make sure we could get a table, accidentally walked in the place below the Italian spot, and we went to the correct spot once the rest of the crew arrived. The long, weary journey was worth it. The Italian food freaking slapped: pasta (gas), pizza (super gas), and a slew of appetizers.

After dinner, we headed to another bar before Manu (aka "El Guapo") and Agustin (formerly known as "El Tanque" then "Bebe Tanque" and now "El Bebe") told us to pull up at some club for Laura's birthday.

The Argentines have a nickname for basically everyone. Mine is "Bebe Grande" or "Big Baby," because JC thought I looked like a baby after wearing a toga for Halloween (see below). Agustin is Bebe Normal and I'm Bebe Grande when we're hanging out. Nicknames are weird.

Feat. Baby Tank and JC

Agustin and Manu are also JC's roommates, and JC was a primary character in the critically acclaimed Chamonix blog, so it would have been criminal to not hang with them in Japan.

We arrived just in time to wish Laura a "Feliz Cumple!" and Manu grabbed us a round of High Balls (so good) before we said what's up to everyone. What was originally going to be a chill night became quite the opposite of a chill night as we were out til like 4 AM.

Guille, Manu, Toni, Big Baby

When I got back I tried to figure out our clothes dryer (I had washed clothes earlier and we had a 2-in-1 washer dryer), I failed to figure out the dryer, I spent 20 minutes frustrated that I couldn't figure out the dryer, and I finally just hung my clothes on a rack to dry (which was actually impressive given that this was happening post-club at 5 AM).

Sumo tournament tomorrow, buckle up!

Thursday, March 16th

If and when you go to Japan, there are a lot of things you can do: eat dank food, go skiing in the north, visit shrines and memorials, and buy some Pokémon pillows. However, there is one thing that you have to do: go to a sumo wrestling tournament.

Sumo is the national sport of Japan, with its origins dating back ~2,000 years. Its modern format took shape in the 1600s, and now the Japan Sumo Association holds six 15-day tournaments each year. There is a certain irony to sumo: the country with the world's lowest obesity rate reveres its most obese figures, and we decided to join thousands of spectators in Osaka.

The boys had a big night out celebrating Laura's birthday the night before, and we probably slept 4-5 hours before Tanmaye made the rounds to wake us up around 9:45. The tournament was starting in Osaka at 10ish, but the senior-level wrestlers wouldn't take the arena until 3:45.

I finished updating some newsletter stuff, then we showered, got dressed, and tried to taxi from Kyoto to Osaka (failure, none of the drivers would take us from city to city), before settling on taking the train.

Peep my new Shiba Inu sticker

We linked up with Guillermo, Marcos, and Juan Ma at the train station, and made our way south.

Ben and Brody got off at the wrong stop (because Guillermo gives trash directions), but all eventually made it to the arena.

I was starving: from taxi issues to difficulties navigating the train station, we didn't make it to the Osaka arena until almost 1. I was this close to grabbing McDank's before we went inside, but Toni said, "They have fire food inside that we can crush, just wait."

Once inside, we realized that they had zero food.

The arena probably fit thousands of people, and we had a box situated 20 rows from the front. When Tanmaye told us he got a box, I pictured a "box" in a basketball or football arena: an isolated room with comfortable seats overlooking the game.

This wasn't a box. It was more of a square. We had two 4'x4' squares surrounded by foot-high guard rails, each with 4 cushions to sit on. So we were going to be 8 deep in two toddler play pens.

It was hysterical.

Considering that I was 3 minutes from dying of hunger, I went to McDonald's, scooped Samurai burgers and Teriyaki chicken sandwiches for the boys, and headed back to watch the matches.

And let me tell you, there isn't a sport in the world more entertaining than sumo. 400 lb beasts struggling against each other in a 10 ft circle? Sign me up.

This dude was white

Here are the rules of sumo: you fight another man one on one, and the goal is to either A) force your opponent outside the arena or B) have any part of their body, other than the soles of their feet, touch the ground.

The ring is elevated about 3' off the ground, and there is only ~1' of space outside the ring before it drops off, meaning that we got to watch four hours of 400-pounders get launched, flipped, and tripped off the edge, and the judges and photographers were smothered more than once.

Sumo has ancient roots, and the pre-match festivities include tons of symbolism: the ref wears a Shinto priest robe, the fighters through sacred salts into the arena, and the robes they wear during their introductions are adorned with different symbols and animals.

The matches themselves were electric: some lasted 2 seconds, others lasted a full minute. Larger athletes would try to bullrush their opponents, blowing them backward out of the arena. Smaller competitors would finesse their opponents, leg sweeping, side stepping, and twisting them to the ground.

Slapping, grabbing, and tripping, are all legal, leading to some wild slap fights and grappling matches over the course of the afternoon. We watched, I don't know, 60 matches? Including some insane finishes such as one where one wrestler, millimeters away from stepping out, spun on his toes, using his opponent's momentum to pull himself back in the ring while slinging the other combatant into oblivion.

After a few matches (and beers), some of the guys started betting on the wrestlers.

"100 yen on red" (referring to the color of their mawashi, or outfit)

"100 yen on black"

And the bets got more and more outrageous over the course of the day.

"500 yen that the match is under 7 seconds!"

I abstained from drinking for most of the time here, not because my body is a temple, but because my body would likely have rejected all forms of booze after last night's antics. However, as the rest of the crew grew more jovial (read: ridiculous), I could tell that we were reaching that point where my sobriety would make it impossible to relate to their booze-influenced jokes and wise cracks.

And also, I knew this experience would be 10x more interesting if I was sipping on some sake.

Now fully back thanks to a partially digested McDank's burger, I bought some warm sake and indulged in the festivities. And Toni was right, it was 10x more interesting watching these meat balls toss each around.

Brody and I had bet back and forth most of the day, and I was 1,500 yen ($11) in the hole against him and Tanmaye as we reached the final match.

"3,000 yen to fade whichever guy you pick," I told him.

"...Okay. I'll take the one on the right."

"Word, I have the one on the left."

*Shakes hands*

It just so happens that the guy on the left was the Lebron James of sumo, and he bodied the other guy in 0.8 seconds. The art of the deal.

We left the match, sake'd up, and I grabbed a McFlurry (so good) before Brody, Toni, Tanmaye, Ben and I headed home. Ben and Tanmaye grabbed dinner, Brody met up with some other folks, and I hung out with Toni for an hour before he linked with the LatAm folks for Laura's birthday dinner.

Unrelated, but I swear the LatAm crew celebrates their birthdays like 100 times. In January, we went to a club for Manu's birthday, then there was another party for his birthday, and I think he had a birthday dinner, and also a birthday brunch. And probably a birthday breakfast. And a birthday lunch. And probably another birthday party. Idk.

We fully intended to "send it" tonight, so I woke up at 10:30 trying to will myself to go out. However, morale was at an all-time low, and I was secretly relieved that no one wanted to go out. Ben and Tanmaye came back and passed out, Toni said they probably weren't doing much, and Brody was headed back when Maeve texted me asking if I wanted to go out with her and four other girls. A tough sell, considering I was in sweats and it was 11 PM, but also, I wouldn't want to waste a Thursday night in Kyoto!

Then Guillermo texted me and said to meet at the same bar that Maeve had mentioned, and I was fully prepared to "send it." Then Maeve and company bailed, and I, lowkey glad that they bailed, got back in bed.

When Brody and Toni got back, we had a nice wholesome family-friendly guy-talk session, then passed out.

Friday, March 17th

Today was, admittedly, a slow day for your boy. Ben and I grabbed breakfast at a local cafe at 8:30, then we split up to wander around Kyoto for an hour and catch up on some phone calls with the folks back home. I saw this cute-ass pup on my stroll.

Also, Japanese dogs just look so... Japanese. No idea why. But you can look at a Shiba Inu and instantly know, "Yep, that pup is Japanese."

When I got back to the crib, the other four went to explore, and I went to a Starbucks down the road to work on some stuff. I grabbed a cinnamon roll, and I thought the barista said they would bring my coffee to my table, so I posted up upstairs. This Starbucks was super Japanese: most of the tables were low to the ground, surrounded by mats.

I realized, 20 minutes later, that there was a separate coffee bar where I needed to get in line to grab my coffee. I walked up, saw 10 people in front of me, took the L and left. I did, however, find an even better coffee shop with some 10/10 lightly powdered crispy donuts on the way home, so the L was actually a W in disguise.

I spent most of the day working on stuff from the crib, taking a break mid-day to walk around town and grab some lunch, and the rest of the crew got back at 5-ish. Tanmaye brewed some homemade high balls (read: he poured whisky and soda in cups, though he did use perfect proportions), I picked up more McDanks (I love McDanks, the Samurai burger is insane), and then we played Kaboo, the most entertaining card game on the planet, until like 11.

The weather sucked, so our plan was to card game it up until we headed out for the night. Taka, the legend himself, happened to know the owner of a local club in town, and he told us to say, "We know Taka," at the door.

Honestly, meeting this dude was, without a doubt, the best thing that happened to us on the trip. We got to the club before 12, and the owner or manager or someone greeted us and took us through the club, then to a secret bar within the club, then to a secret bar within the secret bar within the club, then to a table at the back of the club.

I'm now firmly convinced that every club has like 4 secret bars for special clientele.

We kicked it at the club til like, I don't know, 3ish? Then the boys, got more McDonald's (It's getting ridiculous) headed back to the crib and played more Kaboo til 5 AM. Just good, family-friendly fun.

Saturday, March 18th

No early wakeup this morning, finally.

I got up at like 10, and Tanmaye and I hit the same donut/coffee spot that I visited the day before, Loose Kyoto. Great spot, highly recommend. When we got back to the crib, we decided to visit Arashiyama, an area on the outskirts of town with bamboo forests and monkeys.

We entered the park, and after 20 minutes of climbing, we hit the monkey area. The animals freely roam, climbing on the ropes at the edges of the paths and hanging on the roof of the tourist center here. You can actually feed the monkeys through the fence in the center, too.

Tanmaye told us a bunch of stories of how annoying monkeys were when he was growing up in India: one time when he was in school, a monkey was perched in their window. Their teacher said to leave it alone and it would be fine, and five minutes later, the monkey jumped in the classroom, grabbed her by the face, and slapped her.

Monkeys are insane.

We saw a bunch of little monkeys playing with each other, and some big monkeys try to create some more little monkeys.

After watching some monkeys and taking a very-sus group picture on a massive banana, we headed down to the down for some food. I had a crepe, some chicken wings, and a Kyoto beef skewer.

Gas, gas, and incredibly gas. Then we headed to the bamboo forest, which was a forest. Of bamboo. Toni took lots of good pictures of the bamboo, and the boys, and the buildings, and then Brody and Tanmaye bought some chopsticks from a local store.

Brody made the entire establishment glitch when, as he approached the register, he decided to switch out his chopsticks for a pair like Ben's.

When we got back to the crib, Brody, Tanmaye, and Toni went to some world-famous sushi place, while Ben and I took a nap and made plans to get a prison workout in around 6:30.

Workout didn't happen, as we didn't wake up til like 7:30.

Now what happens is actually quite interesting: Tanmaye and Brody had a 10 AM flight from Tokyo back to NYC on Sunday, so the plan was for them to take a train to Tokyo after dinner, grab a hotel, and fly out in the AM. Ben, Antonio, and I were going to head back in the AM for our 7 PM flight.

But Brody half-jokingly said that he and Tanmaye might go out in Tokyo, and we should all join. And I thought about it and realized that it would be pretty dumb to waste our last Saturday night, wouldn't it?

So at 7:42 PM, I found a hotel right next to the Tokyo train station with 2 rooms left. And we saw that there were like 4 more bullet trains from Kyoto to Tokyo tonight. Antonio said that we were dumb for even thinking about it, and he was just going to chill in Kyoto.

But Ben and I thought it was an excellent idea, the stars had aligned, and "Why not us?" So we booked the hotel, threw our stuff in our bags, told Toni we would catch him in Tokyo in the AM, and grabbed a cab to the train station. We arrived at 8:34, got train tickets at 8:38, stepped on the train at 8:45, and were going to arrive in Tokyo at 10:50.

Incredibly efficient turnaround. Unfortunately, the train was standing room only for non-reserved seats (us), but fortunately, we managed to snag seats 30 minutes in after the first stop.

So here I am now, writing this blog on said train while sitting next to an unconscious Tanmaye. I will finish this blog sometime tomorrow before we fly back to NYC. Never waste a Saturday night, right?

~Fast forward to 6:25 AM Monday morning where my sleep schedule is screwed, and I'm now finishing this blog~

This last-minute maneuver to Tokyo, which Ben affectionately dubbed "The Tokyo Send," or TTS, was dumb, ill-conceived, and precisely what we needed for our last night across the Pacific. We had procured two bottles of 7-11's finest Japanese whisky before hitting the train, and we were left with much less than two bottles when we arrived at Tokyo station.

The hotel was a 10-minute walk from our arrival point, and after we checked in, I headed back to the station to grab my bodyweight in McNuggets and fries for the boys. We showered, changed, then Tanmaye headed to a cocktail bar with Guillermo and Marcos while Brody, Ben, and I made our way to the final destination: 1 OAK.

1 OAK is exactly the place that you would imagine Western European and American tourists to go: loud remixed pop, rap, and alt-rock hits, confetti raining from the ceilings as the beat drops to every song, scantily-clad bottle girls putting on their best fake smiles while serving Grey Goose at a 100x mark up to a table of past-their-prime late-30-something British guys, bathroom attendants who expect $10 tips for helping you with the soap dispenser, and hundreds of materialistic folks looking to feign that they're having the best night of their lives.

It was perfect.

There was a 40-person line to get in, but in fake-it-til-you-make-it fashion, Brody posted up by the bouncer, said we had a group of three, and got us in within two minutes. Once inside we stored our coats, grabbed a round of drinks upstairs, then headed to the main club section below.

The next four hours were a blur of high balls, tequila shots, and the occasional "WHERE ARE YOU FROM?" "OH NO WAY, I'M FROM NEW YORK." "NO, NEW YOOOORK. LIKE, IN AMERICA."

At one point I chatted up a nice Vietnamese chick, but I quickly realized that she was only nice to me because I was a potential client (do with that what you will), and I politely declined her offer before resuming my white guy fist bumping on the dance floor.

Guillermo, Tanmaye, and Marcos arrived around 3, and I joined them upstairs for a bit before we decided to experience Tokyo's best early-morning activity: the Toyosu Fish Market.

At 5 AM every day, locals arrive to bid on quality tuna and other fishes: apparently, it's one of the top tourist attractions in Tokyo. The lights flickering on the club was our sign to bounce, so I grabbed a vending machine coffee and we grabbed some cabs to the market... just to find that the market was closed today.

Unbelievable.

Distraught, we ubered back to the hotel, arriving around 5:45, and called it a night (morning)?

Sunday, March 19th

Brody and Tanmaye left at 6:30 for the airport (they had early flights), so Ben and I got our own rooms for the night. Thank goodness, sharing a double bed with him after the club would have been disgusting. Ben headed out to grab a coffee around 11, I stored our bags for a few hours and met Toni for lunch, then the three of us headed to a local park to see the cherry blossoms.

Toni, being the king of camera, wandered around for an hour, while Ben and I chilled in the park. I used my newly acquired pokeball pillow as a headrest and finished The Sun Also Rises. I'm still not sure if that book actually had a plot, but it was a good read.

After a few hours in the park, we returned to the hotel, scooped our bags, and made our way to the airport, where we embarked on the 15-hour journey back to the US.

My circadian rhythm is more erratic than a kitten chasing a laser pointer right now, but it's good to be home, where I slept 3 hours.

All in all, Japan was 10/10. Good food, good vibes, and good dudes to travel with. Catch us in Colombia in May.

- Jack

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Backstory

The cool thing about being back in school again is that I get to experience the very American tradition of spring break two more times. With no classes this week, and midterms that ended last Tuesday, I had ~12 days of freedom.

Instead of making a pilgrimage to an undergrad spring break Mecca like Panama City or Breckenridge, I headed somewhere a bit different: Tokyo.

How I ended up here was the same way you end up anywhere interesting: an impulse decision influenced by three IPAs.

In November, Ben and I had discussed a few different Europe trips as well as Southeast Asia, but nothing really stuck. I knew that Guillermo was going to Japan with a large group of 100 or so students, but we didn't want to join an organized trek that large. This was going to be a boy's trip for a small, but very capable, group of dudes.

So in December, after getting obliterated by a Business Analytics final (I didn't have an Excel plug-in that you need to do half of the problems, so as you could guess, I made a 56 on the final), I headed to The Craftsman, a watering hole near Columbia's campus, to watch the World Cup with a few friends.

The friends in question were Brody (Big Grizz), Tanmaye (Mr. Maye), Antonio (Toni), Ben (nickname is just "Benny" followed by basically any "B" word), and me. I headed back to the bar for beer number three, and when I came back, Antonio said, "What if the boys rip Japan?"

My first thought was that none of us wanted to join the big group (though it's not like there was any more room on that trip anyway), and my next thought was that Brody was hellbent on spending at least a month in Japan, and he didn't want to settle for a 11-day trip.

But Brody had since come around to the idea of a boys trip to Japan for 11 days, and we realized that we could just book our own lodging. So while we were sitting there, half-deleted Brooklyn Lagers in hand, I said, "Yeah I'm just gonna go ahead and book mine."

And I bought a plane ticket. And then Toni bought a ticket. And Ben bought a ticket. And by the end of the day, all five of us were locked in on Japan.

(Planning a trip really isn't that hard, is it?)

Now to the trip.

Tuesday, March 7th/Wednesday March 8th

After finishing my last midterm around 5 PM on Tuesday, I should have planned to go to sleep around 9. I had to be up 3:45 AM for our 6 AM flight (Antonio, Ben, and I were flying from NYC to Tokyo with an Atlanta layover, it was going to be a long day), and getting some sleep would have been ideal.

Instead, I went to dinner at Guillermo's around 9 (I was the only gringo in attendance, for those curious), and I didn't get home til ~11:15.

And then I needed to pack.

And then I went to bed at 12:30.

And then I woke up at 3:45 and hated myself.

I called an Uber, scooped Antonio from his place, and we headed to LaGuardia. Toni was actually down worse than me. He had arrived from Denver three hours earlier, got 0 sleep, washed his clothes, and headed right back to the airport.

I bought an Emergen-C (life saver) in some kiosk, then Toni and I met Ben in the Terminal. We also saw Laura, Ma Jo, Juan, and Marcos, four other classmates going on the organized Japan trip.

The flight to Atlanta was chill (I was a zombie), and we balled out on Sky Lounge breakfast in Atlanta. The flight to Japan was longggg though. 15 hours, give or take. Luckily, Toni and I had thought ahead and secured Premium Select seats for the Pacific leg.

I sat down next to a nice old Japanese lady, opened my Kindle, and read for a bit until meal number one. After that, I was in a sort of sleep, sort of work, sort of read haze for the next 10 hours, with a snack in the middle. And then at 2:40 PM (12:30 AM NYC time), we landed in Tokyo.

Thursday, March 9th

We basically time-traveled when we crossed the international date line, so I'm going to switch days here.

I've traveled a lot over the past two years, probably visiting 25 or so countries. But man, Japan is different. Like, when I landed in Argentina and Colombia they obviously spoke Spanish, but it wasn't "another world" different. It's still the western world.

Japan? Japan is very different. You can't read anything because the alphabet is entirely different. There aren't any of the half-speaking-slowly things that you can kind of do in Europe to find your way around. Japanese and English literally have nothing in common.

So yeah, it's different.

Toni, Ben, and I got through customs, then grabbed a cab and headed to the Airbnb.

There were six of us staying in the crib, the above-mentioned five dudes plus Guillermo, who was with us for two nights until the "official" Japan trip started. Toni, Ben, and I beat the other three there by about an hour, and we dropped off our stuff, showered, then took a stroll through the town.

Tokyo is a massive city: the metro area has 40M residents (compared to, say, 20M in the broader NYC area), making it the most populous city in the world. However, the one thing we noticed immediately was that everything was so... quiet?

No cars honking, no one yelling on the street. 40M people, the streets were bustling, but it was tranquil. None of the "GET THE $%& OUT OF THE WAY" that you hear when you take 0.0002 seconds too long to cross a crosswalk in Manhattan. The other big difference is that 90% of people were masked, even outside.

Ben and Toni and I walked to "Golden Gai," or Golden Gate, a densely packed area with hundreds of small bars that seated 10 people max, before we found a hole-in-the-wall spot for dinner. This place had a bar, a few 2-seat tables, and a set of tables in the back surrounded by mats to sit on. The ceiling in the back seating area had like 6 feet of clearance, and we sat cross-legged while our bare-foot server/cook/bartender brought us beers.

He spoke maybe 12 words of English, and we spoke maybe negative 12 words of Japanese, so we just pointed at food, said, "chicken" and "pork" and hoped we ended up with something good.

Our man did not disappoint, Japanese cuisine is 10/10.

As we hit beer #2, Brody, Tanmaye, and Antonio rolled up. We have a pretty tall crew already (our group chat is literally called the Big Boys Club), but Brody, being 6'7, takes it to another level. He had to make his way through the restaurant in a semi-bow just to reach the table behind us.

We settled in and enjoyed our first meal on the other side of the world. After dinner, we returned to Golden Gai and hit some bars before Brody left us to meet with an acquaintance, then the rest of us enhanced our cultural knowledge (read: drink sake) at a small, 5-seater spot. After that, we linked with Marcos, Juan, Laura, and Ma Jo.

Dueces are a fav Japanese pose.

At this point, I was halfway delirious. I slept 3 hours the night before, and maybe 4 hours max on the flight. We tried to go to like 3 more bars, but none of them had room for all of us, so Antonio, Ben, and I called it a night.

On our walk home, Antonio referred to every other restaurant, bar, and iconic site as "fire" and "super fire." He is a walking mad-libs book of frat-star lingo.

Friday, March 10th

Toni, Ben, and Guille went on a run, then Tanmaye went on a separate run (Brody and I did not go on a run), and then all of us minus Tanmaye (who decided to take a nap mid-run, and tell us about the peaceful beauty of his run when we linked later) headed to Tokyo's oldest temple.

The city is littered with coffee vending machines (but it is not littered with litter. Zero trash, zero homeless people, in fact, zero "trash cans," so idk how there isn't any trash), and we bought some canned iced coffee for the road. Ben, who was our guide for the entirely of our time in Tokyo because the rest of us (minus Tanmaye, but he wasn't with us) are largely incompetent, led the way, and we took the subway to the temple. Japan has this payment app called "Suica" that you can add to your Apple Wallet to pay for everything: cabs, subways, regular trains, vending machine food, whatever.

So we Suica'd our way across the city. The subways are eerily silent. Like, no one was saying a word. Except for the group of tourists (us) who were talking about the sushi we wanted to eat for lunch, and other stuff.

Guillermo was visibly tweaking as maskless Toni talked nonstop, once again referring to everything in Japan as "fire."

This temple was peak-Japan, and some monks came in and did some sort of religious ceremony while we were there. It was also surrounded by a bustlin' marketplace, and we sampled some of the local cuisine. Whenever we asked a local to take a picture of us, they wanted to hop in too. We wanted pictures of old Japanese stuff, the local populace wanted pictures of tall non-Japanese people.

The duality of man.

After the temple, we met up with Tanmaye at a fish market, and we ate some unidentified fried street food from some vendor before running into a gaggle of ~eight girls from our class (there's like 100 Columbia folks in Tokyo right now too).

The boys then got sushi and beers at some spot around the corner, before Toni said he located a mochi ice cream place "really close."

This "really close" quickly became a 2-mile walk across the city in the heat. 20 minutes in, we were the only pedestrians in some industrial park, and then we were the only pedestrians walking across a commercial bridge. This was supposed to be a quick ice cream run before we hit Team Labs, an immersive arts museum, but after 45 minutes, Brody, Tanmaye, and Guillermo bailed.

Antonio the WOAT

Toni said, "It's right here," so Ben and I stuck around. I was expecting a Baskin Robbins-like ice cream stand, but he led us to some extremely mid food court connected to a factory(?), and when we finally reached our destination, they were sold out of mochi.

Of course.

Ben and I got some vending machine ice cream, and we took the subway to the museum. (The museum had ice cream, btw).

While our ice cream run was a catastrophic, sweaty failure, the museum was wild. It had all sorts of light distortions, areas where we walked through water, and a variety of mirror mazes. Trippy stuff.

Post-museum, we headed back to the crib to nap, and Tanmaye and Guillermo went to some event with a friend of his, who happened to be a model, who lived in Japan.

So Brody has a brother, who has a friend, who has a friend who is allegedly "the guy" in Tokyo. We had made plans to grab dinner with this "guy," Taka, that night. But we woke up from our naps at 8 PM in a daze. Dinner was at 8:45, and we didn't know if we were going to make it.

But since we're dudes and it only takes us like 3 minutes to get ready, we were up and out the door by 8:30.

Going to this dinner ended up being a top 3 decision of the trip, and it wasn't 2 or 3.

We met Taka and his friend, Rei, at a spot called Beef Kitchen, and we instantly realized that Taka was a homie. Actually, he was the homie. First of all, Beef Kitchen was fire. We ate a Noah's Ark of different meats, deleted ~6 high balls (Japanese whisky and soda) each, and exchanged two hours of laughs with our Japanese hosts.

Taka's family had a house in the States and he had lived there for a bit, while his buddy Rei was finishing up med school in Japan.

Taka told us, "We like to drink in Japan. I hope you guys are okay with that."

Obviously we were okay with that. We're in business school, after all. Consuming questionable amounts of adult beverages in foreign countries is a prerequisite for graduating.

Rei, who we now referred to as Dr. Rei, joyfully told us that they had a three-hour head start, so we needed to catch up.

Bet.

Meanwhile, Tanmaye and Guillermo were bar hopping with these alleged models (we did confirm later that they did, in fact, exist.) Once we were four high balls deep, we decided to troll Tanmaye by sending a "👎🏼" to every message that Mr. Maye sent to the group. Respectfully.

As dinner wrapped up, Taka asked us if we were ready for a big night. He said, "Check is on me, welcome to Tokyo," and we headed to the next spot.

It quickly became apparent that he was, in fact, the plug in Tokyo. We went to some exclusive bar with a delivery truck in it (it was sick, and yes we took pictures in the truck). We also slowly realized that Dr. Rei was actually insane in the best way possible. (Rei had the funniest laugh I've ever heard. If he did stand-up comedy in Comedy Cellar he could sell out a show just by telling stories in his Japanese accent and giggling.)

Feat Dr. Rei (front) and Taka (back)

Dr. Drip 😤

Next we headed to some church bar, which was a bar installed in a former church. Or maybe it was a bar built to look like a church? Idk. The bartenders were dressed like nuns, so the origins really aren't all that important.

This was also the first bar where anyone in the crew attempted to spit game with some locals. Complete language disconnect, absolutely zero traction was made.

Post-church bar, Taka took us to a club called Mitsuki, where he had a table lined up behind the DJ booth. We kicked it back there with him and Dr. Rei, and an Arizona ex-pat named Rena that he was friends with met us back there.

The vibes were immaculate until a group of Canadians posted up at the table next to us, and one of them (can't remember his name but this was easily one of the top-3 most annoying dudes I've ever met) wouldn't shut up.

I actually thought he was doing a bit. Like, no one can suck this bad, right?

Narrator: He actually did suck this bad.

Our interaction went something like this:

"Oh what's up man, I'm Brad (he was probably a Brad). Where are you from?"

"New York."

"Oh really bro? New York? I'm from Toronto. It's like New York but with a sicker night life, it's so chill. Have you been to Toronto? It's like, so sick."

*Brad proceeds to come sit at our table, Taka's eyes narrow as he glances at him.*

*Brad then spends 15 minutes telling me about how "sick" his boy is that "copped" a table back there. Everything was unironically sick to Brad, especially Toronto.*

*Brad then slides next to Rena, whose body language was screaming please don't talk to me, and Brad reenacted the meme of the guy yelling in the girl's ear while she looked annoyed*

*Taka tells Brad to go back to his table as I go to the bathroom.*

*I come back from the bathroom, Brad comes BACK to our table, sits next to me, and says "Bro can you believe that guy told me to move?" I am visibly restraining myself, Toni and Ben are cracking up seeing how annoyed I am.*

*I ignore Brad while he has a monologue until he disappears.*

Brad was the worst. Don't be a Brad.

It's now approximately 2:00 AM, and Taka said it was time to hit the actual club. We then head to a place called "Cé La Vi," a 20th-floor nightclub with an insane view of the city. Taka was boys with the owner (again, this man is the prince of Tokyo), and he introduced all of us before grabbing a table in the back.

Taka then walked up with a bottle of champagne, took a fat swig, and said, "Drink up boys."

So yeah I'm going to stop and say that our night was 10x more fun because we grabbed dinner with Brody's brother's boy's boy. 4th derivative homies are invaluable homies. Never discount those guys.

This spot had a very international crowd, and I glanced at Brody, made eyes at a nearby table, and said, "That girl is a smoke." Two minutes later, the girl in question walked our way. I was about to introduce myself before she walked right past me, headed straight to Ben, and asked him, "What's your name?"

Struck out before I even entered the batter's box. You hate to see it.

Brody just looked at me and laughed. Some other girl then walked up, mad that we were drinking her champagne (It wasn't her champagne), took it back, and Brody, Toni, and I bopped around the bar for a bit. At 4:00, we got ready to head back to the crib, when Ben walked up and said, "Well, she's French. She also has a boyfriend."

It turns out we all struck out before entering the batter's box. Ben just got a practice swing.

We attempted to procure some late-night ramen, failed, then headed back to the house, where Tanmaye and Guillermo were fast asleep in their shared queen bed ❤️

Not a bad night, 9/10. Would do again.

Saturday, March 11th

A slow start today, not sure why!

We finally got moving around 11, and we headed to a brunch spot across the street. The waiter didn't understand our order because everyone kept switching from hot coffee to cold and asked for random sides with their breakfasts, and we finally got a bunch of food that somewhat resembled what we ordered.

My French toast was good.

We asked Ben, "What does the doc have in store for us today?" and he said that we were headed to the Mori Art Museum. (We had a Google Doc, now called "the doc" that had a calendar that we semi-adhered to. I first looked at the doc about 30 minutes before we arrived in Tokyo).

So we looked at a bunch of weird paintings and sculptures, including, but not limited to, an exhibit of wood 3-D printed to match designs carved in wood by a group of badgers, and then we went to the roof (the museum was on the 40-something floor) to check out the views.

Tanmaye and I walked around a nearby mall for a minute, then Brody came down and met us and we Ubered to Harajuku to go shopping. I bought a hoodie and a cool hat with a surfing dog on it. We bopped around this district for a minute, Tanmaye and I grabbed some food, then Ben met up with us at a nearby bar.

We grabbed more high balls (Ben just got a coffee because "We ArEn'T jUsT hErE tO dRiNk GuYs" even though he was also high-balling 2 hours later), and then Brody called us to say that he bought a new jacket. I must say, the fit was immaculate.

Guillermo headed back to grab his stuff and go to another hotel (the "official" Japan trip was starting, and he was an attendee), and we bounced soon after.

I went to McDonald's for dinner (I must try McDonald's in every country, it's a rule of mine), and then I went home and showered before we went out. The remaining 5 of us went to some dinner spot, then Toni and I, who didn't want dinner, just went to a bar down the road.

We proceeded to crush 6 high balls apiece, ate some dank chicken (he decided to order food and they accidentally brought double because once again, communication totally broke down), and had one of those funny heart to hearts that dudes have when they're inebriated. Before dinner we didn't know if we had the energy to go out. But after the chicken skins, we were oh so back.

We met up with the other guys and Taka at another bar, and five more Columbia folks: Ross (total homie), Abby, Simone, Mauricio, and Will, linked with us too. Taka took us to another spot: he had a private bar with beer pong tables, darts, and a private karaoke room rented out for the crew.

Once again, Taka is the freaking man.

Toni and I smoked the field in beer pong (we were both in fraternities, obviously), then the karaoke machine got fired up. One of Taka's friends, June, joined us, as well as two Japanese girls that just giggled super Japanesily when we tried to give them the mic.

June had the voice of an angel, like a mixture of Fergie and Jesus.

Tanmaye challenged me to a game of darts for $1,000, I agreed, we then revised down to $100, and we played. I won, he wanted a double-or-nothing rematch, I initially declined, then figured "why not?" and accepted, and unfortunately lost the rematch by 1 dart.

It was an even battle, I'm looking forward to round 3.

We went back to the karaoke room where, as is Japanese tradition, it was cig-friendly. (People were ripping heaters in multiple restaurants this weekend like it was a 1970s Waffle House). I partook in the local culture because it would have been rude not to, no? And let's be real, vapes are infinitely worse than cigs. Plus they're lame. Cigarettes are, objectively, cool.

Then we headed to some night club called Harlem, which seemed like a night club that was trying way too hard to be American. Toni and I left and went on a 1-hour pizza hunt that ended without any pizza before heading home.

Everyone else got back at like 4:30, we hung out til 5, then passed out.

Sunday, March 12th

After the previous two nights plus the complete lack of sleep I had subjected myself to over the prior eight days, I felt like my body was decomposing. I got up around 9:45, went for a run, found an outdoor gym (singular pull-up bar), and exorcised my demons through some sweat equity.

I called Guillermo to see how his night went, he informed me that they met someone who was 10x cooler than Taka and stayed out with this dude til 8 AM, and he was now on a tour bus at 11 AM.

Impressive stuff.

When I got back, Toni had headed back to the Mori Museum to return a $20 shirt that didn't fit (such a waste of time), Tanmaye and Ben were grabbing breakfast, and Brody was in bed playing his Switch. When Ben and Tanmaye got back we headed downtown to explore a bit.

Brody and I ate at some tempura spot before grabbing coffee, then we linked back up with the crew at the Pokémon center. (It wasn't like Disney World or anything. Just a Pokémon super store). Brody bought a Blastoise, I bought a pokéball pillow (very useful object, you can just peg people with it), and then Brody and I headed to see some robot statue he wanted a picture with.

After that we explored a shopping mall, I snagged some new shades, we found another dog-related apparel store (Dog Department. Woof), and we were going to an arcade before he realized he had a dinner reservation with some other people at 7.

I passed out at like 8:45 PM when I got back. Dead.

Monday, March 13th

I did a whole lot of nothing today. Tanmaye and Antonio headed to Hakone a day before us, as they were going to bike around for a couple of days. Brody and I went to Denny's (yes, they have a ton of Denny's here) before Brody and Ben linked with Guillermo to hit a VR arcade. I sent a bunch of emails, sold some ads, and did newsletter stuff to ensure that I can afford to keep eating sushi in Tokyo.

I linked with Ben and Brody for dinner, and we were sad to see that a dank Wagyu beef burger spot was closed, but we ended up at a similarly dank ramen spot. We hit a bar down the road, befriended the bartender, and drank some sake before heading home to pack.

Last day in Tokyo! Gone, but not forgotten. On to Hakone tomorrow.

- Jack

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Bonjour my friends. Just wrapped up a fun week shredding fresh pow pow in Chamonix with 150 of my closest friends. Isn't business school fun?

This was my first time skiing the alps, so I wanted to share a few thoughts on the differences between Europe and US skiing. First of all, Chamonix has ~four separate skiable mountains that you can reach by bus or train from the city, while most US ski resorts have a central base point near town with multiple lifts. In total, the four mountains around Chamonix have about as many runs in total as you would find at a Keystone, Breck, Steamboat, etc.

They also don't really mark anything on the runs. You'll have a map at the top of the lifts, distance markers on the groomed runs, and the occasional signs with directions, but that's it. The red poles that mark rocks in ungroomed parts, the massive warning signs that surround tougher runs, and the ski patrol members that you'll often see in Colorado don't exist here. Half of the lifts don't even have workers, because you just scan your ticket on a kiosk to get on a lift.

Basically, if you die, you die. Natural selection at its finest.

Also, Chamonix is a bit further down the mountains from the ski areas, so you can't really walk to the slopes.

Anyways, I didn't die (assuming this gets published), so now let me tell you about it.

Saturday, January 7th

Rise and shine, Crox and I were up at 8 AM to head to the airport. We grabbed our bags, called an Uber, and headed out at 9. We were flying on Europe's premier budget airline, EasyJet, and I was surprised by how efficient their baggage-checking service went. We made it from the entrance all the way through security in like 30 minutes. After a two-hour flight, we landed in Geneva around 3.

Geneva sits just inside the western edge of the Alps, creating a beautiful approach as our flight touched down. I had received an email from AlpyBus (the shuttle that we used for our transit) saying that I would be on a 4:00 bus, while Crox was on a 5:00 bus.

Crox's luggage never came out of the chute, so he went looking for that while I made my way to the exit. Of course, when I got to the AlpyBus desk, they told me that there wasn't room on the 4:00 bus and, I would have to ride the 5:00 one. (AlpyBus is pretty terrible, as you will soon see).

Crox finally found his crate in the special luggage section, and we walked back to the Alpybus desk at 4:45. Our driver didn't walk in until 5:15, and he seemed high on... life (or some other substance). We finally left around 5:30 on a shuttle bus with 15 other passengers.

10 minutes into the drive, Crox texted me, "There's a 20% chance we die on this ride."

A few things that happened:

Our driver didn't seem to really know where he was going, he almost backed into traffic at one of the earlier drop off spots, and he tried to drop off a British family, who had taken this shuttle 5 years in a row, on the side of the highway half a mile from their intended destination. All in all, we arrived 45 minutes late, and one of our classmates named Will, who was on the bus after us, checked in before we got there.

But nevertheless, we arrived.

We dropped our stuff off, I took a quick shower, and we headed to the restaurant for dinner. We had an interesting mix on this Chamonix trip. ~2/3 of the attendees were second-year students, as the majority of my fellow first-years were fighting for their lives in banking/consulting interviews this week (while others were deleting beers in Thailand, Mexico, and Tanzania. Shout out Brody, Matthew, Ben, Larry, and especially Toni. He's living in a tree house right now in Africa.)

Business school is a bit like undergrad in that friend groups really take form in September and October, and those groups hold steady over the course of school. It's not that business school is super cliquey, but you just find your closer friends pretty early.

However, for the first years at least, there weren't any fully-formed groups on this ski trip. There were probably 50 of us from different "groups" there, which ended up being a good thing, getting to hang out with different folks on the slopes for a week.

I'm also about to name a ridiculous number of people over the course of this, and no one not in my class will have any idea who half of them are. Oh well.

We eat dinner with Jack Howerton (third roommate, also named Jack), Jeremy (a Swiss/British 2nd-year student, our psuedo-rugby coach, and the GOAT of sexual innuendos and general play-on-word humor), Preston, Taylor, Kristina, and Rachael before showering and getting ready to go out. The hotel had two separate buildings, and I went to the other lodge to Juan Cruz's room. Juan Cruz (who will be referred to as "JC" moving forward, also a verified 🐶) pretty much hasn't been in the US since Thanksgiving, having spent the entirety of the World Cup in Qatar cheering on Argentina before flying back to NYC for finals, before flying back to Qatar for the championship, before going to Berlin for a couple of weeks.

JC is also known as "the queen" for his excessive time spent taking candle-scented baths and fixing his hair, and he calls me "big baby" because I wore a toga for Halloween, and he said I look like a "big baby."

Left to Right: Agustin (El Tanke), JC (The Queen), Me (Big baby?)

He was rooming with another guy named Tyler, and they probably had like 30 people piled in their room for the pregame. We stayed there until like 11:00 before heading to a club (La Folie Douce) about 10 minutes away. There was a super nice cocktail bar upstairs and a nightclub downstairs.

We grabbed a round of drinks upstairs, and I ran into one of my favorite second-year drinking buddies, PJ (the origins of our friendship are pretty weird). After like an hour, we took the party downstairs. It was bumpin', as they say.

Feat. Clementine, she speaks like 27 languages or something

JC and I stayed at the club til the lights came on, ran into a group of Italians outside, bounced around town with them attempting to collectively communicate in Spanish (I think I accidentally called a girl Colombian while trying to say I went to "Columbia," and she was massively offended), and then we hung out in his room til like 4 as I continued to hone my Spanish skills, después demasiados cervezas.

Sunday, January 8th

I had planned to wake up at 8, grab breakfast, and pick up my skis to make the 9:30 ski bus. As you could probably expect from the preceding several paragraphs, that prediction proved to be false.

HOWEVER, pretty much no one woke up at 8, so I was not alone! I instead woke up at 10, barely made breakfast, and got my stuff together around 11:30. We had 6 days to hit the slopes though, so there was no need to be on the first bus everyday.

It was a 15-minute walk to my rental place, and JC had gone ahead to Le Tour (one of the mountains) with Michael and Brendan. I met Ned, Clementine, Maggie, Tori, Natacha, and Tyler in the lobby and we walked to the bus together. We actually reached the top of the gondola as JC and crew were skiing down, so we all linked up.

Visibility was basically nonexistent thanks to some fresh snow coming in (a good thing, however, as the Alps had been pretty dry so far this season), and we lost all of the girls except for Clementine by our 3rd run.

The problem with super hazy conditions is that you have to wear your goggles to keep the snow out of your eyes, but your hazy goggles prevent you from reading the terrain well, which means surprise moguls and ice patches will 100% cause you to wipe out. And everyone single one of us had at least one impressive wipe out on the day. Idk if Michael had a wipe out, but he did try to do the thing where you ski off the side of a run for a second and then jump back onto the run, except there wasn't a jump, and he ended up having to board down the terrain park.

After skiing for a few hours, we grabbed beers and snacks at the restaurant on the slope. Natacha had been there for like 3 hours reading a book or something. In her French accent, she said, "These conditions are not for me."

We hit a few more runs, then headed back to turn our stuff in before après. For those who don't know, après is just French for "after," and "after" is just English for alcohol.

We went to Bighorn Bistro around 5 for food and drinks, and some more of my classmates had rolled in. Former roommate Michelle made an appearance, along with Ana and Amanda, two other girls from my cluster. Amanda was mad at me because when Michelle and I were bunkmates in London, I had her tell their girls group text that "I miss Jen," with no mention of anyone else.

It wasn't a slight to anyone else, but Jen was the first girl in our class that I (unsuccessfully) hit on, and she also gave me snacks every week in strategy class. That's a special bond.

Amanda, you're cool too. Just bring snacks to operations class next week.

Alright, let's through some more names in the mix. I sat down near the band with Maddie (CBS's premier athlete that hates when I call her CBS's premier athlete), Jenn, Ava, and Ava's fiancé, Mark. Mark had to be heli-lifted from a slope in Switzerland (or was it Italy? idk they all share the same mountains) after accidentally skiing to the edge of a cliff. The video of the helicopter dropping him off was hysterical, but it also highlighted the reality of Euro-skiing: if you die, you die. Mark is also my #1 favorite CBS +1. Sorry to the field, step your game up.

I went back to the hotel to touch up a newsletter, met the crew for dinner in the hotel, anddd I think that was it for Sunday? Idk I'm touching this up a week after the fact.

Monday, January 9th

So we did actually get up early to ski today. With a fresh layer of powder upon us, we hit Grands Montets, arguably the top mountain in the area. Or at least with a name like "Grands Montets," it sounds like the top mountain in the area. Ski crew of the day was JC, Jack, Crox, Tyler, Rocio and Ani.

We took a cool train to the mountain this time, which was way better than the busses.

Ani, another Argentinian, had just arrived yesterday. Ani had also never skied before. Ani also believed she would pick it up easily, and JC and I had offered to teach her how to ski. What we did not know, going into this, was that after taking the gondola up to the mountain, the only run down was a steep blue. Which isn't great if you've never skied!

What ensued next was me putting my teaching cap on and trying to explain the physics of "pizza/french fry" on a 45-degree slope with mediocre visibility. Like, you really couldn't see much.

Ani was pretty frustrated on the way down (I would be too if I got thrown into the major leagues the first time I strapped on some skis), but we were fortunate to find a bunny slope at the bottom of the run. The training area proved to be a much better spot to get some practice runs in, and I went through it a couple of times with her before linking up with the other guys to shred some major pow pow ❄️⛷🤙🏼

The boys found a sick powder run under the lift, and we hit it several times.

We also wanted to try a way-too-powdery run, which didn't work out as expected.

Halfway through the day, we hit the restaurant on the mountain for some beers (JC really wanted a beer tower, but we decided to pass on that), before going back up for a couple of hours. By our last run, the chairlift up was a battle against the elements, with us taking a blizzard to the dome for 10 minutes. On our last run down, we grabbed Ani from the bunny slope (she had figured out skiing and proceeded to crush the run down to the gondola) and we headed back to the hotel to change.

I went to the après for like an hour before heading back to the hotel. Crox, Jack, and I went to bed at like 8 PM to wake up at 1 for the national championship game, while everyone else went out. JC texted me at like 11 to come out (I was asleep) before calling me at like 1:15 AM (I was awake) to meet him back at the club.

I declined and found out the next morning that the club was closed when he got back. Around 1, two second years, Max (French guy) and Nico (Italian guy) busted up in our room, and I heard one of them bounce on other Jack's bed. Some mumbled arguing, grunting, and heavy breathing ensued as they asked Jack, "What are you doing come to the bar?!" to which Jack replied, "We're going to watch the football game get out of my room!" to which they replied, "WATCH THE FOOTBALL GAME? YOU'RE IN EUROPEEEE! COME GET DRUNK!" (honestly, a fair reply).

Suddenly, Jack came around the corner, carrying Nico by his sweater like a mother dog carrying a puppy by the scruff of its neck, as Nico kept saying, "No no no don't stretch the sweater anything but the sweater," before Jack literally threw him out of our room. Then he looked at Max, and Max said, "I'll just leave please don't pick me up."

It's worth noting that Jack is a massive dude who played football at UPenn for a bit.

At 1:30 we successfully streamed the Natty (illegally, sue me) on my laptop (we had tried to connect to the TV through wifi, and we asked the lady at the front desk for the TV wifi info, but she just replied, "zee technician will be here tomorreww." Super helpful, truly). So we just set the laptop on a shelf. Michael, Brendan, Bridget, and Ani came over to watch, and Max and Nico showed up around 2, much calmer this time.

I passed out at halftime because the Dawgs were whooping that TCU ass. Not even a game, hardly a scrimmage, really.

Tuesday, January 10th

I woke up, saw that the Dawgs won by like 200, texted Maddie that she owed me $100 (we had bet $100 straight up on the game, stupid bet by her. We settled on beers and crepes over the course of the week), and headed down for breakfast.

Tuesday was, by far, the best powder all week. I went to Brevet (closest mountain to the town) with JC, we shredded for like 3 hours, then we headed to the very top of the mountain to the "Panorama" restaurant. The view up here was actually insane.

A bunch of the girls + Tyler were grabbing lunch up here, so we ate with Hannah, Ellie, Katherine, Tyler, Jenn, Maddie, Kat, and Collette, and we debated skiing all the way down on one of the back runs. However, Ned and Emma arrived just before we left, and the said the run was pretty tough and if you lose a ski you're probably toast. So we just took the gondola down and continued skiing from there.

JC and I skied a super powdery part, he almost hit a rock, I turned to avoid the rock, and I lost a ski in the process. I then spent 20 minutes digging around looking for said ski like an old guy with a metal detector on a beach. It's actually insane how hard it is to find a ski in the snow.

We skied til 4 with Maddie, Collette, Hannah, Kat, and Katherine, before grabbing après at the nightclub/bar spot from night one. They had a patio bar with fires which was fantastic.

And this set in motion was would become a really, really long Tuesday. High altitude + skiing all day + free-flowing adult beverages is pretty dangerous, and we had a group reservation for unlimited wine and fondue at 7:30 that night.

So after après we headed to the hotel to change, then we headed to the restaurant for dinner. I sat by Amanda, Ellie, and JC. Amanda and I gossiped about random stuff, Ellie tried to set me up with Hannah by saying, "Hannah, did you know that Jack played footballlll (American football, of course) in college?" And PJ invited me over to the second-year's table to talk about how I broke Linkedin, and then we did this really dumb but kinda funny drinking game where you stretch your mouth around a wine glass, pick it up, and swallow the drink in one gulp.

PJ is in the Hawaiian shirt

aha yeah college! 🤙🏼

I bopped around tables and hung out with Michelle and Maeve (my mom) and then we all headed out to a bar or club or something.

And it's a bit fuzzy after that lol. I sent this picture in our cluster groupchat telling them that Michelle and I are dating, which was a surprise to everyone, including Michelle (and myself the next morning).

And eight minutes later I was back with Brendan and JC.

And yeah that's about it. Humbled and honored to announce that I made it home safely. I think.

Wednesday, January 11th

Holy cow I have some combination of the plague and Covid and AIDS and tuberculosis and typhoid fever and malaria and everything else. I feel like I got hit by a semi-truck of pathogens. 25 years of poor decisions nailing my body like a five kill-streak predator missile on Rust in Modern Warfare 2. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

I was supposed to take a train to Italy with the crew, but after suffering through breakfast, I crawled back into bed and prayed for an exorcism of whatever demons were plaguing me. And no, Mom, this wasn't just a hangover. Maddie also had the plague, and Brendan was so plagued-up that he had to leave Italy early and come back and sleep. I think there was something funky in the fondue.

I literally slept all day, woke up and got coffee and crepes at like 4, then chilled til dinner. However, after 6 hours of napping, my immune system had extinguished the plague, and I managed to make the dinner reservation with Ani, Rocio, and Jenn.

Jenn let me know that the night before, I had told her that she was "too old for business school" despite her literally being like 2 years older than me (which means she's literally the average age of someone in business school). My apologies. I'm actually too young for business school. Probably.

Dinner was some family-style Japanese (I think?) restaurant, topped off with a 10/10 Oreo milkshake. (The amount of dairy consumed on this trip was out of control).

Thursday, January 12th

Crox got a tiny coffee for breakfast again.

And then we headed back to Brevet for a few runs.

We had a huge crew today: Me, JC, Jack, Crox, Michael, Brendan, Maddie, Hannah, Ellie, Jenn, Collette, Kat, and honestly idk who else. There were like 15 of us. Brevet had a ton of powder, and we spent most of the skiing off-piste (I thought it was off pace until Googling the term 30 seconds ago) because we're all incredibly advanced, elite skiers who wanted to hit bowls and stuff.

JC lost his phone in the snow but somehow found it (he found a phone quicker than I had found a ski), and then we took the gondola over to Flegere for some new runs.

JC explaining the logistics of losing his phone to Maddie and Jenn, colorized, circa 2023

After grabbing lunch in Flegere, the girls headed back while the boys continued to shred. We were deep in some powder when we found a sick jump, so naturally, being dudes, we all decided to jump it, even though none of us were qualified to jump it. Michael had the best wipe out:

While I had the least athletic one. And then I had a massive problem. After wiping out and losing one ski, I unclipped my other one to move out of JC's way (he didn't even hit the jump, how soft). The issue was that we were in deep snow, I couldn't get firm enough footing to restrap my skis, and I was just crawling around like an idiot for 30 minutes in search of solid footing.

Have you ever walked around in 3 ft deep snow? It's ******* exhausting. I just wanted to die. Snow sucks.

Finally I crawled back to the trail, laid there for 5 minutes, dealt with the embarrassment of every skier asking "are you alright?" (Yes, I was alright. I'm just an idiot), and skied, legs cramping, back to the boys.

And you know what? Shout out to the boys for waiting for me. They shouldn't have, I was dealing with the consequences of my own actions. But they waited anyway.

We hit two more runs then headed back.

I took a nap for a few hours, grabbed dinner, then headed to JC's to pregame. CBS had reserved the club that we went to the first night from 10-1, and we had an open bar. We headed over at 11 and took advantage of our ski-club fees.

Ned, a guy in my class who is an AVP of the winter sports club, was dealing with two British dudes who were claiming to be CBS students (they weren't) in order to sneak into our party. He called me over for back up, and I promptly trolled the piss out of them.

They said they were in the ESG cohort (we don't have "cohorts" and ESG isn't even a real thing, to me anyway), I started questioning him, he got real aggressive and bowed up at me, I told him a 3-word phrase that ends with "yourself" (let's see if you can figure this one out), and rejoined all my friends in the fun party that this dork desperately wanted to gain entry to.

At two we hit another club, everyone was out til like 4:30, and there was a 0% chance we made it to the slopes tomorrow.

Friday, January 13th

As predicted, we did not make the slopes. I took my gear back to the ski store around 11 and grabbed lunch nearby, and then Brendan and I headed to the spa to link up with JC and Michael. We ran into Maddie, Yael, Collette, Jenn, and Ani as well, and the crew had a nice relaxing day chilling in the hot tub, laying in weird pools that play underwater music, rubbing salt all over our bodies post-sauna, and doing all sorts of other weird spa stuff that seems like it's good for you but probably isn't. But it seems like it is.

I also read a book. A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain. Photo credz Maddie Bauer 🤌🏼

Ned and JC and I started a cult too. Entry fee in $500 for those interested.

After dinner I grabbed crepes with the crew (have you ever had a crepe filled with pecans, caramelized apple, and ice cream? Oh my God it was good), and then watched Eurovision with Jack, Jake, and Jeremy, The Will Ferrell movie, not the actual competition. Obviously.

Saturday, January 14th

Adios, Chamonix. Jack and Jake bounced at 5:30 AM, and I grabbed breakfast with JC at 7. I hopped in my shuttle at 8:45, and it was a real mess getting to the airport because we had 15 people booked for a 13-person shuttle (we just didn't get two of the people, idk) and the driver chilled in a parking lot for like 30 minutes ripping cigs.

France, baby.

I caught my flight back to London and checked into my Airbnb, a real posh spot in Soho.

So yeah, that's it for the ski trip. My plan this week is quite simple: hang out with my mates Murray and Shannon tonight, record a podcast with Iman and Cyrus from RationalVC tomorrow, and then chill hard and try to be productive for the week. Headed back to NYC Thursday.

Next travel blog will be Japan in March. I'm going to sumo wrestle and perhaps purchase a 6-ft tall plush Pikachu doll.

Catch you guys later.

- Jack

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Edinburgh is also a college town. Imagine Athens, GA, but you replace the football stadium with a castle on a hill, throw everyone’s accent in a blender, and paint the sky in a near-permanent overcast. That’s pretty much what we’re dealing with here.

The city was a bit sleepier than it was during my last excursion here, largely because many of the students were still home for the holidays. However, Crox and I managed to have a fun, family-friendly trip to Scotland.

Monday, January 2nd

I woke up to Crox knocking on my door at 8:30. Yesterday, the hot water went out in the hotel. It was slowly coming back on, floor by floor, so they gave us an extra room with hot water to compensate for the issue, and Crox and I got our own rooms for the night. Great customer service.

HOWEVER, while the hot water worked in the room the night before, it was not working this morning. Great stuff.

So anyways, I didn’t shower, and we grabbed our bags and walked 15 minutes to King’s Cross Station. We had a four-hour train to Edinburgh ahead of us, and we arrived about an hour early. King’s Cross has really leaned into the Harry Potter fandom, and we saw a line out the door of their “Platform 9 & ¾ “ store.

We grabbed coffee and breakfast (which for Crox just consisted of coffee) and boarded the train at 10:45. Our seats were on separate cars, and karma must have decided to balance out the lack of hot water in my hotel room because the person sitting next to me never showed up.

Train seat to yourself is so clutch.

I napped/wrote basically the whole time I was on the train, and we reached Edinburgh Waverley station at 3. I had left my Mac charger in London, so we hit the Apple Store across the street from the station, then headed to the Airbnb.

And yes, it was already pretty much dark by 3:45 PM. Northern latitude gang is wild.

Our Airbnb was great. A 2BR, 2 Bath flat tucked away in the Grass Market neighborhood. We dropped our stuff off, showered, then bounced around town for a bit. Like most European cities, Edinburgh had a Christmas Market set up near the town center. The market itself was great, but the Ferriss Wheel and flashing lights kind of took away from the rustic “old-ness” of the cobblestone city. Still, Edinburgh is a beautiful city.

Edinburgh is also quite literally a tale of two cities. The south side is “Old Town” with its centuries-old stone buildings and winding alleyways. It houses The University of Edinburgh, the National Museum of Scotland, and dozens of pubs and bars.

The north side is “New Town” with its grid-shaped street plan, newer architecture, retail shopping districts, and a strip of bars/clubs with live music.

In the center lies the Royal Mile, a cobblestone street that marches uphill to the castle.

When we arrived, Edinburgh Castle was painted in midnight blue light, making an imposing background from all points of the city.

Also, castles are so sick. America needs more castles.

We grabbed some dinner at a nearby pub (haggis burgers and guinesses for 2, please) before hitting a bar with live music near our place called Finnigan’s Tavern. However, we called it a night quickly. Still in recovery mode from NYE in London.

Tuesday, January 3rd

As you may know, Scotland is known for its whisky (you drop the “e” here), and Johnnie Walker is the world’s largest brand of scotch. Jake booked us a tour of the Johnnie Walker distillery in town, and it was fantastic.

I previously did the Heineken tour in Amsterdam, and it was pretty mid. An overly theatrical event that told basically nothing about the beer itself, that ended with 2 (or in my case, 4, because I reappropriated 2 extra) beers.

The Johnnie Walker tour, however, was awesome. We learned about the history of the company as well as its distillation process. The guide broke down the different types of whiskies, how they are aged, and how Johnnie Walker expanded internationally over time. We also got to sample 3-4 different whiskies over the course of the tour, which is always a nice touch.

After the tour, we headed further north to explore different parts of the city. We tried to go to Kitty O’Shea’s pub, but it didn’t open til 5 (which is shocking considering that 1) the Scottish are renown drunkards and 2) the sun sets at 3:30), so we explored the Christmas market. We drank some warm wine, I ate a cheese-bratwurst that exploded all over my shirt when I bit into it, then we headed back to the apartment to chill for a bit.

I took a nap for a couple of hours before we set out for dinner. We hit Finnigan’s again for a beer before going back to Kitty O’Shea’s that night, and the entire pub was enthralled by the darts world championship.

At first glance, I thought it was lame. But man oh man was I wrong. Those dudes are tacticians. Artists of their craft. Have you ever watched a British guy hit 12 triple 20s in a row in a room full of Brits? Electric. It's like the Super Bowl of fat, bald 48-year-old men.

Wednesday, January 4th

Today we got up at 9:30, grabbed some coffee, and set off to hike Arthur’s Seat. Arthur’s Seat is a massive hill located off to the southeast of the city. After a couple of muddy miles, we reached the summit. The wind was insane on top, and there were two stones up there, and I’m guessing that one of them used to be the home of Excalibur.

We got back after lunch, and grabbed some food before I spent of a good portion of the day writing while Jake was preparing for an interview. He was supposed to have a full interview with Amazon on Thursday, but they screwed up the scheduling and split it into two slots: one Thursday and one Friday.

I had a Spanish lesson that afternoon, and then I went to grab some dinner and bop around the town at night. I walked past Why Not nightclub at 11-something, briefly considering checking it out, then decided to bounce because It didn’t look that promising. I did pop in a piano bar near my old Airbnb from my last time here (Devin, remember Rat Pack?). The bar was dead, but the pianist was crushing it.

Thursday, January 5th

Today we toured the castle at 10:30. A lot of tours suck, but to Edinburgh’s credit they do tours well. The castle tour is cool because it includes several museums within the castle compound. We climbed the ramparts where the cannons protrude through the walls, we spent about an hour in the Scottish Museum of War (which was super fascinating to Jake, a former GI Joe himself), and explored the prison below the castle.

Medieval prisons are wild. A few Americans actually ended up in the Edinburgh Castle prison back in the day (1800s). Ironically, the French were the best-treated prisoners, even though I think the Scottish hate the French. They received better food and garments that were designed by their own countrymen. All Americans were treated as pirates.

Jake prepped for his interview while I worked on some stuff for most of the afternoon before hitting the gym, then I had a two-hour Spanish chat while Jake had his interview.

Except his interview didn’t happen. They actually moved the whole thing to Friday, but sent him a schedule that showed one call Thursday and one Friday. Pretty annoying stuff tbh. He texted me and said that Isaac, a guy from his cluster at Columbia, was in Edinburgh. Isaac was a Navy veteran (I guess veteran is the right term, but he’s actually working for the Navy after school. So maybe a seaman-in-transit? Idk.) They were at a pub around the corner, so I linked up with them.

Now I thought it was going to be a chill Thursday, much like the rest of the week. I thought wrong, and the night quickly escalated.

After the pub closed, we decided to hit another bar. While we were figuring out where to go, Isaac mentioned that Kitty O’Shea’s in Glasgow was his favorite bar. I said Edinburgh had one as well, and we headed back that way.

They had live music tonight, and the singer was crushing it. There was a decent crowd of young folks gathered there, and we posted up around a barrel, people-watching some of the locals. One particular drunk guy appeared to be dancing with/harassing a couple of girls in the bar, and a group of 4 dudes started dancing with/around him. He didn’t realize that he was on the receiving end of the joke.

One of the guys, who looked like a 21-year-old Kawhi Leonard, then tried to dap him up no less than 4 times, and the guy completely ignored him. The kid looked shocked, so walked over and completed the dap for him. He was a cool guy named Collin (I think), and he was a senior at University of Edinburgh out with three of his mates.

We exchanged rounds of drinks, and he said, “Mate, you have to come to Hive nightclub with us!”

I had actually been to Hive last year, and it is grimyyyy. Like, as you as you walk in a heavy scent of stale beer mixed with sweat and a hint of vomit hits your nose. The kind of place that makes you want to shower (and possibly go to church) as soon as you leave.

Hive was also next to my apartment. So of course I was in.

Isaac and Crox stayed at Kitty’s while I headed to the club with the Scottish lads.

On the way there, one of the guys, an English kid named Freddie, told me that he and his mates were participating in something called the Mongol Rally this summer. I thought he was making this whole thing up until I looked it up for myself the next day.

There’s this race, if you can call it that, that starts in England and goes to Mongolia. Obviously, the Russia route is now off-limits, but some of the other routes are still open. Here’s how it works: you buy the worst used car that you can find, like $1,000 max, in England, drive through the Chunnel and head to Amsterdam for a party (and anyone starting in continental Europe meets there as well), and then head east, through Germany, down to Greece, across Istanbul into Asia, through Iran, then Kazakhstan, and finally Mongolia.

The event takes 3-4 weeks, there’s a pretty good chance you never actually reach your destination, you could die, and you get to see 15-20 countries.

Tentatively, I would like to do the Mongol Rally with the homies in 2024. We’ll see.

Anyways, we got to Hive around 1:45, and it was just as, if not more, grimy than I remembered. At least the drinks were cheap.

Friday January 6th

I didn’t wake up until like noon lmao.

However, I had a productive day post-wake up! I grabbed sausage pie from a local restaurant, headed to a coffee shop to attempt to create words to eventually post on the internet, and then hit the gym again that afternoon. Jake finally had his interviews and I had another Spanish lesson at 7 (I’ll be fluent in 6 months, just wait). After Jake crushed the interview, we grabbed some grub.

We went back to Finnigan’s that night for a beer or two or three, I got curved by the most attractive Scottish chick I’d seen all week (she kissed me on the cheek and called me sweetie before she left though, pretty sure that’s first base around these parts), we got beer number four, before heading to 3 Sisters Pub down the road. Jake and I met a group of local girls who thought our accents were insane (or at least I think they thought our accents were insane, I have no idea what one of them was saying half the time), and then we headed home at like 1.

Flight to Geneva in the morning. Bout to go skiing with all of my business school friends! The next edition of this will probably say: Sunday: skied, Monday: skied, Tuesday: skied, etc. But maybe not. Idk.

Also, happy birthday to my sister Frances and Columbia Business School’s most eligible bachelor, Ben Levine. Technically I was the first to tell both of them happy birthday on their birthdays at like 1 AM in Scotland, because it was still the 6th in America. Shoutout time zones.

Catch you guys later.

- Jack

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It's funny, I haven't been to London in 14 months or so now, around Halloween of 2021. And I had a blast in London in 2021, largely thanks to some quality travel companions (seen below)

Still, I asked myself after the fact, "Do I actually like London, like really like it? Or is it just convenient that everyone speaks English?"

Well after running it back, I can say that yes, I do very much like London. It's like a cleaner, less-condensed New York City, but with aristocratic accents floating through the air. London is a timeless city where cobblestone streets and centuries-old pubs blend in with soaring skyscrapers and an incredible public transportation network, like Shakespeare met the Jetsons.

It's a city where you can explore for hours and hours on foot, with no destination required. So yeah, I like London. I'll actually be back here for a few days later in January before flying back to NYC. Anyways, let's dive in.

Tuesday, December 27th/ Wednesday December 28th

Overnight flight.

After spending a couple of days with my mom in Birmingham, I headed to Atlanta to fly to London. Why was I flying to London, you might ask? I'm going skiing with 150 of my closest friends in Chamonix, France, on January 7th, and I wanted to mess around in the UK for a couple of weeks first. If you're going to fly that far, you certainly need to get more than a week out of it.

So anyways, the itinerary was 5 days in London, 5 in Edinburgh, 7 skiing in France, then back to London for a few days to get my life together before diving back into the chaos known as New York City.

I bought some melatonin at the airport for my direct flight to Heathrow, and I upgraded to an exit row seat to catch some Z's. As you can probably guess, I caught basically no Z's, despite being drugged up with leg room.

I did make some nice banter with Harriett, my seatmate on the flight, and Elizabeth, the flight attendant across from us. They were both late 20s females discussing relationship issues, and they initially asked my thoughts before Harriett sighed and said, "Oh he's 25, just a wee child."

That's what you think, Harriett. My frontal lobe is fully developed now. Maybe. Probably not.

So I landed at like 6:20 AM basically delusional, took the tube (London's subway) to Holborn Station, and planned on hitting Beck's Cafe for a full English breakfast around 8. Except I accidentally went to the place next to Beck's. Which was lowkey better than Beck's. And the waitress was Spanish, so I got to speak Spanish to her, which I think she appreciated.

I was hoping to be able to check in to the hotel at 9 (even though checkin was at 3) to catch some shuteye because my mate Murray was riding over from Oxford to hang with me. Of course, I couldn't get in til 3. So I hit a coffeeshop nearby to write for a bit before heading to Marylebone to meet Murray.

Marylebone is such a funny name for a neighborhood.

I met Murray and his girlfriend Shannon in Berlin last Thanksgiving:

Left to right: Murray, me, Hudson, Sebastian

And Murray was working in real estate in Oxford. Thanks to the UK actually having a functioning train network, he was only 30 minutes from London. And because the UK's economy revolves around crushing pints at the pub, he suggested that we meet at a pub to crush pints.

Which we did.

We caught up on all of the random life stuff that's been going on over the last year, and also spent probably a good hour insulting each other's countries, just like God intended. By 4:00 I was running on a full day of no sleep, and I needed to catch a power nap before the night. I think Murray and Shannon are going to come hang in two weeks when I'm back though, which will be sick.

I went back to the hotel and took a power nap, then wrote some newsletter stuff, then headed out for my second appointment of the day: drinks with an American ex-pat named Amy. Amy is a Florida native that I met in Lagos, Portugal last year (I met a surprising number of people that I still keep up with at The Rising Cock Hostel in Lagos, great place), and we met at some place in Soho that night.

The cool thing about traveling a lot is having plenty of friends all over the place.

She's lived in London for like 4 years now, which has made her accent hysterical. Like, a weird mix of Cali-girl meets Love Island. "Oh my God" and "Where abouts" can coexist in a sentence.

So anyways, she told me about how she might move back to the US soon, and I said pretty much the same stuff that I say to everyone about how I write a blog for a living, and we drank a lot of cocktails in a bar that was sorta loud and not very conducive to conversations. I got a bunch of bar recs from her for the weekend since I had some other Columbia friends coming to town, and we split up around midnight.

Headed home, wrote a blog at like 2 AM, and fell asleep.

Thursday, December 29th

*noises of someone trying to open a door*

"For the love of God please open it so I don't have to get up."

*Phone goes "RING RING RING"*

Michelle: Hey Jack can you let me in?

Jack: Grumbles something and hangs up.

Michelle is in my cluster, or the group that I took all of my classes with in my first semester at Columbia. Michelle has like 223542134 friends in London this weekend apparently, but the 1 that the other 223542133 ones are staying with wasn't arriving til Friday. Jake, the guy staying with me, wasn't arriving til Friday either. So Michelle was crashing in my hotel Thursday night.

I let her in, exchanged pleasantries, then climbed back into bed.

She was thrilled, I'm sure, to see that our twin beds were positioned side-by-side. Really romantic stuff. We love each other dearly so it was cool.

I attempted to proofread my blog while she told me that she slept in the Uber the whole way here, warned me that if she snored I should give her a good shove, then passed out.

She didn't really snore. I don't think so at least, but I fell back asleep too.

Michelle planned to wake up and be, as she said, "good to go," at like 10:30. A series of 7 alarms went off, none of which led to her being good to go. At 11:30, I got up to meet my buddy Alex for lunch. Alex is a Twitter friend of mine.

I have a lot of Twitter friends these days.

Like me, Alex is a young dude with a finance newsletter, but he has also built his own startup, Tribescaler, that helps you write better social media content. Alex also linked Young Money in a Twitter thread that went nuclear last spring and gave me like 1,000 new subs. He's the man.

It's always fun meeting your Twitter friends in person.

After lunch, I met Michelle at some hotel library bar restaurant thing (I literally have no idea how else to describe it), to work on some stuff while she updated a cover letter. And I also helped proofread the cover letter. It's a banger of a cover letter now.

We grabbed dinner then headed back to the hotel to get ready for the night.

Another one of our Columbia friends, Tanmaye (aka Mr. Maye) was in town for a week too. They were celebrating both his sister's engagement the day before, and his birthday this day. We met Tanmaye and his girlfriend Quinn for drinks. Tanmaye gave us the recap of the celebrations, apparently Indian families go all out for wedding festivities.

Mr. Maye also got the best little birthday cake in the world.

Michelle and I were going to meet up with friend at her friend's favorite bar in North London, but that bar was closed. So they went to a gay bar next door. And we met her friend there. And her friend (I think it was Annabelle but honestly I cannot remember what her name is to save my life, so we'll go with Annabelle), immediately apologized for bringing us to the worst bar ever.

Now, I live in Hell's Kitchen, aka the gayborhood, so I'm used to gay bars. Gay bars are great. Want to know if your outfit is on point before a night on the town? Go in a gay bar and see if you get hit on.

But this gay bar had no AC, a sticky floor, and a nonexistent crowd except for the small inebriated crowd that was there. Nevertheless, we got some drinks and stuck it out. I was graciously offered a "Ket-beer" by a random attendee, but I politely declined. Not really my cup of tea, as they say.

One of Michelle's friend's friends was a dude named Charlie who was pretty cool though, and he invited me to his going away party in two weeks. It's at his apartment, not a gay bar. I might go, Charlie had a kickass mullet.

Michelle and I bounced a bit later, updated our BeReal's with a really cute selfie that elicited a lot of emoji reactions from our classmates who either jokingly or seriously think we're having a romantic fling in London (sorry to disappoint, we're not. Unless 👀)

But actually, we're not.

Then we passed out.

Friday, December 30th

I headed across town to chug coffee and write words while Michelle got her stuff together and relocated to her friends place (I miss her so much 😩), and my buddy Jake Croxdale arrived around 2.

Crox is actually insane. Former college football player turned Army ranger turned cowboy for a summer, who now plays rugby with me. The dude can run through a brick wall, delete beers, and probably kill a grizzly bear from 2 football fields away.

I met Crox at the hotel, and we walked around for a bit before heading to Soho to meet one of my buddies Elliot. Elliot and his mate Alex roomed with me for a night at The Rising Cock Hostel in Lagos (SERIOUSLY IT'S ACTUALLY INSANE HOW MANY PEOPLE FROM THERE I STILL HANG WITH. CANADIAN MIKE WAS A RISING COCK CONNECTION AS WELL!)

Elliot DM'd me on Instagram when he saw that I was, as he put it, "back on the better side of the pond," and we met him at Waxy O'Connor's Irish Pub. Karlie, a girl that Crox had a mutual friend with, met us as well.

Elliot is a total homie, and he's also tentatively planning to move to NYC soon. Which would be sick, because hanging out with a British accent guy is NYC is like hanging out with a celebrity.

We exchanged stories and stuff for a few hours, probably deleted 27 Guinesses cumulatively, then he bounced around 11:30. Big day tomorrow for NYE! He did have a quality rec for NYE, Blue's Kitchen. It was a great rec.

Crox and I went to Shoreditch next, but every good bar that was supposed to be open was actually closed, so we didn't stay long. However, I had completely forgotten that my buddy Ray and his girlfriend Sophia were in town too, and they were staying in Shoreditch!

Crox bounced and went to sleep, I met up with Ray and Sophia for a sec and told them to get tickets to the same event as us.

Saturday, December 31st

Happy NYE, to those who celebrate. Crox and I planned to walk around the city, but the weather was rubbish. So we got on a "Hop On, Hop Off" bus to take us around the city. They might be touristy, but they're actually a super efficient way to see everything. Seriously slept on, I might start doing touristy stuff in NYC more.

Michelle, Ray, and Sophia also bought tickets to the thing at Blue's Kitchen, which was tight. Crox and I hit a sports bar to watch the TCU game, then we headed to Blue's around 10:30. The place was so sick. Wooden interior with three levels, a massive dance floor on the main area, a live band that was playing 80s bangers, and drinks that were actually reasonably priced. What more could you ask for?

Thank u Sophia for photographing

We bopped around the bar for a while, and I thought Ray and Sophia left to go to another rave at a warehouse which I also thought about going to but ended up not going to, which was probably a good thing, before I saw that Ray and Sophia were in fact still there!

They were sitting downstairs at a booth with 4 British girls they had just met. The drinks were hitting just right, and Ray was doing wholesome boyfriend stuff.

Meanwhile, I was exchanging witty banter with the Brits.

Live, Laugh, London ❤️

I tubed home at like 3 AM or something idk. When I got back, Crox was passed out, and I checked the UGA score.

Dawgs were down 14 in the 4th quarter so I figured it was game over. Little did I know that Stetson Bennett is actually Himothy, and I missed an instant classic.

Sunday, January 2023

Welcome to 2023, time to do that thing that you keep saying you'll do but never actually doing.

I was grabbing coffee at 12 with another Twitter buddy, Rohit. I have made quite efficient use of my time, no?

However, hot water was out in the hotel, and the water didn't work at all in our room this AM. So I woke up at 11 and had to head out, post-NYE, showerless. And I had glitter on my face (thanks Ray and Sophia), which wasn't great.

Luckily, Rohit thought it was funny. Rohit is an LBS-educated former venture capitalist who also writes about finance and similar stuff. We're in the same internet ecosystem. We talked a ton about writing, and just career stuff in general, over coffee. We also talked about funny business school stuff.

After coffee, I grabbed Nando's for lunch (shout out Tom Morgan, well-known Nando's fan), before linking up with Crox again. We walked around Hyde Park for a bit before heading back to the hotel to chill. The desk folks gave us another room with a hot shower (thank u), and I moved my stuff there so we could have separate rooms. We grabbed dinner at a burger joint and tried to find a bar with the NFL games, but O'Neill's had the darts world championship on, because apparently that's a thing.

We came back, watched James Bond, and then I wrote this thing that you're reading now.

So anyways, headed to Edinburgh in the AM. I'll be back with pictures from the castle later.

Catch you guys later.

- Jack

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In November, I made an impromptu decision to book an Airbnb in Medellín, Colombia for 8 days because one of my buddies was working remote down there, New York was cold, and I guess I kind of wanted a break from classes for a week?

Not that it was really a break, I still had homework.

So anyways, I will now write about Medellín.

No, this probably won't be an entirely accurate day-by-day recap of my trip. But I spent half of my time there writing stuff anyway so I figure it really isn't thatttt important to cover the nitty-gritty of all of it. So anyways, let's dive in.

Background

Mike Slavei aka Canadian Mike, decided to spend about a month working remote from the family-friendly city of Medellín, Colombia with a couple of his buddies. Canadian Mike called me up and said, "Hey Jack, come to Medellín."

I said, "Let me check my schedule."

*Checks my schedule*

*Sees nothing too important on my schedule*

"Yeah, this is a skippable week of class. I'll be there in two weeks."

After consulting with mis parceros colombianos, I snagged an Airbnb in the El Poblado neighborhood. I thought Devin, my 6'7 travel buddy who previously seemed to have infinite vacation days and work-from-home flexibility, would come as well.

But he didn't.

His loss.

So anyways, the day after Thanksgiving, Friday November 25th, I drove to the Atlanta airport, caught an early flight to Medellín by way of Miami, and here. we. go.

Friday, November 25th

I spent the night before with Devin in a last-ditch attempt at peer pressure (plus, I needed to crash with someone in Atlanta. Which he is). It didn't work. Up at 4:45 AM to make the drive to the airport.

Drive was uneventful, and I hopped to Miami and then Medellín. On my flight from Miami to Medellín, I sat by a Moldovan (any of y'all know where Moldova is on the map?) dude named Alfie on the way to Medellín. Alfie was a total homie living in Miami who ran his own ecommerce business, and his girlfriend was from Medellín. He was traveling solo to find some new suppliers for his fitness brand closer to the states (previous suppliers were in Asia, and as you know there was a bit of a supply chain crunch).

After we got through customs we made plans to link for dinner the following week. I exchanged some dollars for pesos and caught a cab to the city. The ride used to take an hour+, but a new tunnel through the mountain cut the ride in half. My driver, Willy, was super excited to tell an American about Medellín. Also gave me a good chance to speak some Spanish, because he didn't know a lick of English.

My Airbnb was great. It actually had two beds (ONE WAS FOR YOU, DEVIN 🙃) and a decent sized kitchen, all for $40 per night.

I love Latin America.

After dropping my stuff off, I explored the city for a bit. Medellín is built into a valley in the mountains of Colombia (I think it's part of the Andes), and the city is quite literally in a jungle. Seriously, look at this:

Mike sent me his gym, and I met up with him there. My man found a 10/10 spot with one hell of a view (second photo is the view from the treadmills):

I signed up for a one-week membership, and Mike met me there 20 minutes later. We bro-hugged and shot the shit for a minute before grunting and displacing heavy objects for the next hour.

On the way home, I passed a hotdog place called "Perritos," which literally means puppies.

After showering and stuff, I headed out to link up with Mike at his buddies' place. Mike had his own Airbnb, while two of his friends, Dan and Daraab, were sharing a different one. I actually met Dan in Barcelona over the summer. He and Mike previously met in Mexico, and they have traveled together a bit. I have no idea how Mike met Daraab. They may have met in Medellín. It's tough to trace the genesis of travel friends.

Mike, Dan, and I went to dinner after, Daraab claimed he was staying in for the night. Narrator: He did not, in fact, stay in for the night.

Mike (left) and Dan (right)

Besides previously asking my Colombian friends in New York about where to stay, I also asked them where to go out. The unanimous answer was a club called "Perro Negro." Apparently, it was the spot in Medellín. We needed to get there early if we wanted a decent chance at getting in.

So after dinner, we (and Daraab joined us at this point) headed there. And the bouncer kindly told us to screw off, he wasn't letting in a group of four dudes.

Fair, honestly.

So Mike glanced around. El Poblado was bumping on a Friday night, with bars everywhere and tables in the streets. He walked up to a table with 3 girls and said, "Hola, quieren ir a Perro Negro con nosotros?"

Hey, want to go to Perro Negro with us?

They shrugged, said sure, and hopped in line. We exchanged introductions, of which I only remember one of their names (Luisa, a flight attendant for Avianca. Avianca sucks).

We also got our picture taken upon arrival:

I gotta say, I was proud of how well my Spanish held up in a nightclub, all things considered. Me and Luisa kinda hit it off (as well as I could tell), but dancing was much simpler than talking.

The girls bounced at like 1:30, and me and Mike just kinda wandered around town after that. We ended up in some bar in an area called Parque Lleras where every girl in there was a 10/10, and something didn't seem right. Because these 10/10s were talking to dudes who were, very much, not 10/10s. And the dudes tilted a few years older.

So one of these 10/10s sat down next to me, and I asked, "Una pregunta; son todas mujeres acá prostitutas?"

And she smiled and said, "Sí, estás interesado? $100?" (or something like that, idk what the price was. I was pretty borracho at this point.)

So I sat there for a minute and did the math: "$100 is like 20,000 beers in this country," I thought. "Spending that $100 on anything other that 20,000 beers is a heinous misuse of capital.

So I said, "No, gracias." Grabbed another $0.50 beer, closed my tab, and called it a night.

Saturday, November 26th

So, I publish this blog on a platform called beehiiv, and one of the guys who works at beehiiv, Tyler Gillespie, actually lives in Medellín. And for some reason, at 2 AM Friday night, I agreed to meet him for coffee at 9 AM on Saturday.

Boy oh boy did that 8:15 alarm suck. But I linked up with Tyler, and I'm glad I did. He's a super cool dude who's been doing the remote work thing since before it got popular, and he actually moved to Medellín like 10 years ago. He has a whole girlfriend and life down here now, with no plans of leaving.

We chatted about work stuff and Medellín stuff and Spanish stuff and lots of other stuff and I ate a dank waffle, then I headed home and slept til like 3.

After that, I hit the gym (view was SICK, especially when it started raining), and went to a Mexican place called Dos Santos with Mike and Dan for dinner. They had live music. It was loud.

We proceeded to hit one of the street bars and then I think bar hopped but honestly it's been a month so I don't remember where we went specifically, but with it being Saturday night and everything, that's probably the most likely outcome.

Sunday, November 27th

Mike and I took a taxi to the city center today, and we took a gondola over the city. The views were sick, but a girl in our cab was convinced that the thing was going to break and kill us all (which honestly probably wasn't a bad fear to have).

While the views were awesome, it was pretty crazy seeing just how poor so much of the city is.

Once we reached the other side of the city, we caught a taxi to Comuna 13. Comuna 13 was a hotbed for drugs and crime in the 80s and 90s, but it has since been cleaned out and converted to a tourist attraction. The walls are covered with all sorts of graffiti, and street vendors were out in numbers trying to make a quick buck off of gringos like me.

Mike and I made it to the upper levels of the neighborhood, where we posted up in a half-constructed favela "apartment"-turned bar to check out the views.

We grabbed dinner at some Mexican place and called it early on Sunday. It's a school night, you know!

Monday, November 28th

I didn't do much this day. I worked out early in the AM, and I wanted to see some other parts of the city, so I ubered to Los Laureles and posted up in a coffee shop there for the day. My Uber driver offered to take us to visit some of the tourist attractions outside the city, but nothing materialized.

I did get dinner with another Americano that I met at the gym. Drew was an Army vet/Harvard grad working for a crypto hedge fund, and he figured he could live a lot cheaper while shorting every token on the market from Medellín.

I'm pretty sure he made bank on the bear market.

Tuesday, November 29th

A big day of writing and doing homework (I did, unfortunately, have a decent homework load this day). Mike met two girls in Medellín and set up a double date for us that night, but we literally couldn't hear a word they were saying because the bar was so loud.

However, the night was still young, and Medellín catered to its local white folk with a "Gringo Tuesdays" event at some bars near the center of El Poblado every Tuesday. Mike, Dan, Daraab, and I decided to check it out, and we ended up hanging out with a massive group of Dutch folks who were in town for a week.

Wednesday, November 30th

I grabbed dinner with Alfie (flight seatmate from day 1), but just chilled after that. I was exhausted.

However, I heard a pop..pop...POP POP while laying on bed, and I thought a gang had just gunned someone down. But as the pops kept going, I realized they were... fireworks.

Medellín puts on a big show for December 1st.

I thought my crib was about to get aired out.