Live An Adventure Podcast

Live juicy.   Stamp out conformity.  Stay in bed all  day.   Dream of gypsy wagons.  Find snails making  love. Develop an astounding appetite for books. Drink sunsets. Draw out your feelings.  Amaze yourself. Be ridiculous. Stop worrying now. If not now, then when? Make yes your favorite word. Marry yourself. Dry your clothes in the sun. Eat mangos naked. Keep toys in the bathtub. Spin yourself dizzy. Hang upside down. Watch children play. Celebrate an old person. Send a love letter to your self.   Be advanced. Try endearing. Invent new ways to love. Transform negatives. Delight someone. Wear pajamas to a drive in movie. Allow yourself to feel rich without money . Be who you truly are. Believe in everything. You are always on your way to a miracle. The...

One of the writers I admire most is Augusto Monterroso. He was born in Guatemala in 1921 and died in Mexico City in 2003.  Monterroso is often credited with writing the world's shortest story, "El Dinosaurio" ("The Dinosaur"), published in Obras completas (Y otros cuentos). The story reads, in its entirety: Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí. "When [s]he awoke, the dinosaur was still there." Carlos Fuentes wrote of Monterroso (referring specifically to The Black Sheep and Other Fables): "Imagine Borges' fantastical bestiary having tea with Alice. Imagine Jonathan Swift and James Thurber exchanging notes. Imagine a frog from Calaveras County who has seriously read Mark Twain. Meet Monterroso."  Another review online: Occasionally one stumbles over a book, without expectations, and finds a small gem -- and wonders how it can have gone unnoticed so long. Monterroso is, of course, not unnoticed. Anyone who reads Span...

After sleeping in the coziest, smallest room with the softest pillow, in a small hostel called Macondo, I feel like writing. I left bolivia 15 days ago  (written July of 2006) to travel for 2 months in Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. I am falling in love with Latin America again. A year ago I was considering going back to the US and after much thinking I decided to go South instead of North. I am so glad I did! Ecuador has been simply awesome: walking the colonial narrow streets filled with magnificent buildings in Quito, while pouring rain fell on me! Exploring the deserted beaches of Galapagos where lazy sealions soak up the sun while the young ones swam up to our boat to greet us, playfully circling and jumping out of the water. Wandering around Guayaquil in the old barrio of Peñas I stumbled into the coolest eatery. A family began a business by literally opening their house to sell food, with children running around and a teen daughter with...

After 10 months in my beautiful Guatemala, spending time with my family and directing a small school, I am in Bucharest, Romania where I will be teaching Spanish to grades 1 to 5 for 2 years!!  On August    5th 2010 I flew to Bucharest via Mexico and Frankfurt. M y new school, American International School of Bucharest  http://www.aisb.ro/ , is a world IB school, which means I made it to the major leagues as far as international schools go.  I found a great apartment overlooking a lake only 15 minutes drive from school. AISB has provided me with a blue VW Polo to use during my contract. I've been driving for 2 weeks now, and I am beginning to not need a map to get around town. The teachers and the administration at my school are the best. Everyone has been extremely friendly and helpful. My principal and vice-principal are amazing. It's a pleasure to work with such professionals who are passionate about education. I have colleagues from the US, Can...

If you have only 10 days, you can enjoy the best that Guatemala has to offer. The following itinerary will help you see as much as you can in a short amount of time without running ragged. After all, it’s a vacation. Day 1 Fly into Guatemala City around lunchtime. Take the afternoon to visit the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología or the Museo Popol Vuh and Museo Ixchel (next door to each other) for a crash course on the Mayan civilization. Enjoy dinner in one of Guatemala City’s excellent restaurants. Days 2–3 Take an early-morning flight out of Guatemala City to Flores, the gateway to the Mayan ruins in Tikal National Park, in the northern Petén department. Tikal is the most famous of Guatemala’s Mayan sites and boasts impressive temple pyramids. Spend all day exploring the ruins and enjoying the sublime jungle environment. You have the option of staying at the park and seeing the sunrise over the rainforest from the top of Temple IV or heading back sou...

The Power of Being Alive All I could think of was to move one foot after the other. I had a hard time breathing and the headache pounding me like a hammer did not help. This was a message from my brain telling me I should be on lower ground, not at 6,000 m (18,000 ft) on top of Huayna Potosi near La Paz in Bolivia. It was 3 in the morning, at midnight I had woken up and put on 3 pairs of socks, 3 pants, 2 fleeces, 1 jacket, and 2 hats to begin the final ascent to the summit at 6,088 m (20,000 ft). I tried to think of my family and friends to forget the excruciating effort I was making. I brought to my mind the image of a hammock waiting for me in the tropics in a couple of months at home. Then I stopped thinking altogether. I concentrated on walking.  After a couple of hours which felt like a couple of weeks, for a fleeting moment, I asked myself: Why in the world are you here? I answered myself immediately: because you wanted to. Yes, I wanted to challenge myself by climbi...

There's this ‘thing' we refer to as the presence of God. I'm not sure if there is another way of labeling it or a more clever turn of phrase to correctly describe it. But then again I like the phrase the presence of God: that's exactly what it is. It does what it says on the tin. It's when God is near, it's when God feels closer than the air in a steam room. It's when all this talk about ‘it' becomes talk about ‘Him'. And if we believe that God is not dead but alive, it is the most precious ‘commodity' we have. When Jesus left earth to be with his father again he said that he would leave his ‘spirit' with us. The Holy Spirit. The Holy Ghost, our comforter. It's the ‘spirit' that breathes life into the law. Now, laws are good but we know from the whole of human history that no one can keep them all. The law is just half the story - that's all it can only ever be. The ‘bestsellers' - the ones that have the whole st...