Tag: Learned

A bit over a year ago, I was a completely monolingual English speaker with zero experience with the French language. Twelve months later, I very comfortably passed the internationally recognized DELF B2 exam. If you don’t know what “B2” means, check out the CEFR scale. Furt...

It’s not easy to put into words the journey of five years; the laughter, the late nights, and the vibrant community that surrounded House of Xelas. After an unexpected turn of events, we had to close the doors to our beloved bar this past August. Boyle Heights was my family’s first ho...

Many visitors go to a new place yearning to sample the food. Tasting street tacos in Mexico City, poutine in Quebec City, or jambalaya in Louisiana means that you experienced something quintessential about a place. Learning the samba, or tango, or salsa is like that. It’s feeling the flavor of...

For me, it was last year when I boarded a one-way flight from San Francisco to Berlin. Alone and nervous. Ready yet still so naive. I arrived on a crisp November day with two pieces of luggage, a broken heart from losing my mom to cancer, and a too-thin jacket from California. As I stepped throug...

Last August, amidst a global pandemic, I packed my life into a suitcase and checked-it in onboard an EasyJet flight to Athens. I went to see what was happening at the Mediterranean border, the gateway to Europe for millions of asylum seekers. I chose Greece because I’d seen pictures of the fil...

“Somehow, she’d survived the massacre when ISIS had opened fire on civilians fleeing the city. That was almost two days ago. Now, in a pile of rotting corpses she huddled next to her dead mother’s body suffering an even more cruel demise under the relentless desert sun. No doubt IS...

No, it has nothing to do with Michaelangelo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yes, it has everything to do with cows. Cows teach us a ton about investing. Specifically, they can open our minds to multiple possibilities in personal finance. And you might be scratching your head. Why ...

My dad died a year ago last month. In some ways it seems like a lifetime ago, in others it is as though it happened last week. It feels like the phone could ring tomorrow with the same news and I would nod my head and say “Oh yes, I have been waiting for this call. The past year was just a ...

Letters, or strings, as we, software engineers, like to call them. Letters form words — or soup, if you like ABC pasta — words form sentences and finally, string enough of them together, and you got yourself a story or an article, right? Right?!? You can probably guess the answer is no, ...