Travels
I'm not what you would consider cosmopolitan, although some day I would like that reputation. As of right now, the farthest abroad I have been is Canada. My family rarely vacations, and when do we always go to Michigan to visit extended family. However, I have been through most of Florida via road trips with friends. Next semester (I have been saying this for a long time), I plan to go to Sevilla, Spain, to study Federico Garcia Lorca and see some bullfighting. Otherwise, I would like to visit Florence, Italy, to continue my Dante studies. The cities listed below have been the best travel destinations for me thus far.
Miami, Florida:
I have never seen a greater tropical paradise than in Miami. I used to visit my girlfriend of the time who lives in Kendall. She would take me to Key Biscayne, South Beach and Villa Vizcaya, an Italian Renaissance-style estate with lush plant life where all the young girls in Miami go to take pictures for their quinceaneras.
One time, she brought me out to the Outpost in Homestead. A small zoo in the middle of nowhere, the Outpost has a ton of exotic animals that I had never seen before (lions, camels, black bears and black mambas) in some rickety cages. Although the flies never stopped pestering us, it was a thrilling experience to be so close to such beautiful animals.
I also vividly remember a trip to a small juice bar in Miami, where no one spoke English and my ex-girlfriend had to order my food for me in her broken Spanish. Mexican men in ten-gallon cowboy hats lounged around on the outdoor benches underneath the awning, watching afternoon Spanish soap operas.
I even got a taste of the celebrity life there when we drove past Gloria Estefan's heavily foliaged house on Star Island.
Mackinaw Island, Michigan:
On the day my parents took my brother and me on our first trip to Mackinaw Island on Lake Huron, a great storm set in that violently rocked our ferry boat. I turned the experience into a semi-fictitious poem I entitled, "Postcard from Mackinaw Island," which I consider the best poem I've written to date.
The island has two very distinct smells: fudge and horse droppings. As you walk or ride rental bikes (as motor vehicles are strictly prohibited) through the streets, you must be careful to avoid the poop that Clydesdale horses leave during the carriage tours they give around the island. Streets are lined with restaurants, boutiques and candy stores that all sell world-famous fudge. The town has many Victorian-style buildings, including the Grand Hotel, which was the site of the 1980 film Somewhere in Time.
My family also visited Fort Mackinaw, an historic landmark built by the British during the American Revolution that contains the oldest building in Michigan. Most of all, I remember an actor dressed in Union garb who launched the cannon during a demonstration before proposing to his real-life girlfriend.
Chicago, Illinois:
The windy city. I first became interested in the majestic, "somber city" through the work of Chicago natives Carl Sandburg and Saul Bellow. I followed Bellow through his wacky, mid-life-crisis adventures through the city in Humboldt's Gift and sympathized with the proud suffering of the city's poor and working class in Sandburg's poems.
As a detour from our usual trip to Michigan, my mother took me to Chicago the summer after my junior year of high school to see the campus of Northwestern University. It was my first and only taste of the big city. We visited the Navy pier, the Sears Tower and the Art Institute of Chicago, which was my favorite part. I became obsessed with art (buying numerous coffee table books on Cubist and Surrealist painters) after visiting the institute, my first time ever in a museum. I raced around the different galleries taking pictures of all the Impressionist paintings, utterly astonished to see the names of Vincent Van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet on the canvases.
I am determined to live in Chicago after my undergraduate years, hopefully as an MFA student at the University of Chicago.