[Spanish here / leyelo en español]
Christmas season is coming up, which means it’s time to start thinking about the things we could get out loved ones to help them along their way, and brighten their days in the year ahead.
Since I often write about climbing on here, I thought I’d put together a brief list of gift ideas that could be good for an aspiring climber or a beginner climber.
Read on for my recommendations.
If you suffer a flight delay of a certain length within the European Union, you are legally entitled to monetary compensation. But you may find that actually CLAIMING this compensation is a bit difficult.
As I briefly mentioned in my post on Tuesday, I was delayed by seven hours on a Norwegian flight from London Gatwick to New York JFK in September 2018. Here is how I successfully claimed my compensation under EU Regulation 261/2004, how long it took, and how I claimed compensation for my airline delay, for free.
“You said you saw something in my eyes that day in Lisbon that scared you. What was it?”
I am sitting in London Gatwick airport. C is on the other end of the phone. This is first time I have heard her voice in a month. It has been an excruciating five weeks in London.
Every time I leave Europe, I fly out of Gatwick. It’s reliably cheap. Today, for the first time in my life, I’ve missed my flight. I’ll have to wait there in Gatwick, overnight, for the next flight home to New York.
On the phone, there’s a long pause.
When I’m traveling and people find out I’m American, one of the first things they usually say is: “Oh, America: Black Friday!”
I’m not sure why this event has managed to attach itself to the American identity, but I’ve had enough foreigners ask me about it that it clearly has. The rest of the world sees us as capitalism-crazed lemmings; people who will jump out of bed at 5 a.m. for anything, as long as the discount’s high enough.
And maybe that’s true, for some segment of my countrymen. But that’s not MY America. The same way the extreme Islamic clerics don’t represent Nouman’s Morocco, the homophobes in the streets don’t represent Iuri’s Brazil, and the Brexiteers don’t represent Sean’s England. Black Friday shoppers don’t represent MY America.
You can’t (successfully) stereotype people of any country — but the US, even less so. As I tell people when they ask about my home: there are many Americas.
While everyone else got up at 5 a.m. to snag #dealz, we got up at 5 a.m. to go snag some early-season ice climbing at Hidden Falls, in Rocky Mountain National Park. Find a different side of America, below the jump.
My final weekend in Europe.
I’d imagined I would spend it somewhere romantic with C. A sixth country. Somewhere new; somewhere that could be ours. Some use for all that money I had saved, after months of living simply in New York and London. I would buy her ticket, I had told her in Lisbon.
“Be present!!” she’d told me in response, before spending the afternoon shopping for a washing machine and pointedly ignoring the yawning tension between us.
“I have three weekends left in Europe,” I’d told her on the phone. “Come meet me somewhere. Let’s not let things end the way they did.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
I hung up, went to bed with a smile on my face.
The next a.m., I woke up to a text: I don’t quite understand the point of the request. My answer is still no.
So I went to Brussels to see an old fling.
Someone much better at ‘keeping things light.’
thisisyouth 