Reasons to fall in love with Mexico City

View of Mexico City from the Castillo de Chapultepec

There’s a newness every morning in Mexico City, as store owners wash their sidewalks and prepare storefronts, the sun peeks over the horizon into the cool blue sky, and vendors take their bikes and carts to the streets to sell tamales, coffee, and more, filling neighborhoods with sounds and smells like urban birds singing. Opportunities to experience this unique and beautiful culture are served up, rolling by, on street corners and peeking out of unexpected places – yours for the taking. The beginning of my Mexico City love affair My senior year of college, with and insatiable sense of curiosity […]

Continue Reading

Pixar’s Coco, Hard Conversations, Colorful Memories

Pixar's Coco, Hard Conversations, Colorful Memories - Pura Vida Sometimes - memento

Lately, my four-year-old has been asking some hard questions, perhaps a testament to the times we’re living in: Why do we fight wars? Why do soldiers die? Are you going to die? Does everyone die? We’ve been seeing trailers for Pixar’s Coco for about a year and were anxiously awaiting its release (today!), but given her inquisitiveness, you can imagine my concern. We were invited to an advance 3D screening of the film, so we drove more than an hour across town and arrived on Mexican time…but they let us in anyway. I don’t know who between my daughter, husband, […]

Continue Reading

Time to Stop Saying Millennial Like a 4-letter Word

Time to Stop Saying Millennial Like a 4-letter Word - Pura Vida Sometimes

Young professionals have fallen into a grossly generalized demographic: the Millennials, or depending on who you are, those effin Millennials. They are a generation of the workers who grew up with technology, are adaptive and disruptive, and they’re giving the rest of us a run for our money. Millennials don’t do things the way we do them, which isn’t bad and is probably a good thing. We can leverage our collective talents and avoid multi-generational pitfalls with some of the tips I’m about to share. But let’s just get it out there – It’s time to stop saying Millennial like […]

Continue Reading

Have Passport – F Your Rules

Have Passport - Pura Vida Sometimes

When I was literally 18 and a day, I traveled overseas for the first time. It was an amazing, illuminating experience – all that I’d hoped it would be, in most ways – but a couple of days into the trip I broke the travel rules and was labeled a delinquent and punished for the remainder of our travels. In hindsight, do I feel bad about what I did? Nope. I was invited to be part of a musical ambassador program, for high school musicians (or in my case, recent graduates) in which we traveled to seven countries in two […]

Continue Reading

Unalienable, Color-blind Love

Color-blind love on Pura Vida Sometimes

At a few points last week, I felt so much grief, guilt, helplessness, and confusion that I found it hard to concentrate on anything. I welcomed any stupid distraction – the stupider the better – because no one likes it when their coworkers sob into their keyboards. Especially not IT. I wanted to express my sympathy for those I love and outrage at the senselessness of all the week’s events…at what could best be chalked up as hate crimes, but what is turning out to be an American epidemic and a global war on ignorance. Or maybe what we have for […]

Continue Reading