Gummies and Orange Soda

Welcome to my blog. I don’t have (personal) Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snap accounts (my current social media list includes LinkedIn, Venmo, and Peloton), so it won’t surprise my reader that this Luddite’s initiation to the medium first arrived on the scene about two years after commenters had already begun heralding the Death of the Blog. As  you will see, I am not well-suited to the brevity required by Twitter, the photographic talent needed on Instagram, or the pop cultural literacy demanded by TikTok. The blog is named after my favorite food and favorite drink: gummies and orange soda, respectively (and also plays as a retroactive allusion to the opening line of Kendrick Lamar’s classic “The Art of Peer Pressure“).

Despite my culinary preferences, I am no child. In fact, I am thirty-one years old (a number that will become inaccurate unless I update this section yearly). Upon learning my beverage of choice and wanting to cultivate my vague sense of writerliness, a relative’s ex-boyfriend’s mother said, “You should make a blog about that.” I thought it a fine idea. So, about half a decade later, when I started travelling in earnest, I did.

I love to travel. I love to see new stuff, to race from place to place, to get lost in new cities and plunge into things that look like they could be trails through the woods and hopefully are. I like to sit and drink the best coffee a city has to offer, to browse bookstores (go-to question: who is your favorite local author who has been translated into English?) and go out to eat way more than I do at home in Chicago. Thanks to penchants for ignoring sound advice, wandering into places I shouldn’t, and saying stupid things to people, I think I have a fair number of absurd experiences that later become mildly amusing stories. I try to take scrupulous notes on everything I see, do, and try. And everywhere I go, I seek out a local orange soda (or interesting alternative) and local gummy.

Note one: The cover photo is from the Maspalomas Dunes on Gran Canaria, Spain.

Note two: I post-date my publishing dates to match the time of the trip, not necessarily the time that I wrote the summary, story or review. This modification is for the purpose of chronologically ordering the posts and is not intended to misrepresent what was written when.