Adventures of a Discoverer

This was quite strange but... very interesting! We had heard of  miracle berries , these little berries from Africa that supposedly make sour things taste sweet, which seems hard to believe. But, we found some for sale on Amazon (you can find pretty much anything at Amazon, it seems) so we decided to buy some and try it out ourselves. Once we got a small package of freeze dried miracle berries, we bought some lemons, limes and grapefruits to really test the berries. We licked a slice of lemon, lime and grapefruit, and then we ate a berry. According to what we read, you're supposed to slowly chew the berry in your mouth, and let its liquid really spread around your tongue. Then, after that, I licked the lime and... it was indeed sweet! It was a striking difference compared to what I had tasted just before. The same thing happened with the lemon and, in the case of the grapefruit, I felt like I was licking a sweet orange. After half an hour, the effect was gone and licking the fruits...

Short films can be defined differently depending on who you ask: but in general any movie that is less than half an hour is classified as a short film, or "short" for short. In the old days short films sometimes would be shown before the main feature at a movie theater and on rare occasions you could see them by themselves, typically at a non-commercial theater. Interestingly enough, these days they are easier to see because of the Internet: you can see a number of them on streaming, YouTube or Vimeo. At the same time, it's not so easy to see them anymore at a movie theater. Today I had the opportunity to do just that and watch a short film at an actual movie theater (and a pretty good one at that). The SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) was showing all five of the short films that have been nominated for this year's Oscar at their theater in Queen Anne, the SIFF Cinema Uptown . All five movies were shown back to back, so with one ticket you could see them a...

Last week I listened to a live concert that I wasn't so sure it would be that good, but it turned out to be in fact very good: Gangstagrass . It's a band that brought together three Bluegrass musicians with two rappers, and the combination of the sounds and lyrics from both Bluegrass and Hip Hop is surprisingly quite good - it made for a very fun live concert. The band is on tour and they played at the Vashon Center for the Arts , a small but really lovely performance venue in Vashon Island that I had never been at before. The Center is relatively new and its facilities are in great shape, and it's nice that the Center is bringing various forms of art to the community of the island. The show was sold out, especially because for this specific event some rows of seats were removed, so that people could dance during the presentation. The MCs in fact invited people to go to the front and dance with them, and they would interact with the crowd.  Their songs combine some social c...

This last December I traveled to Brazil and my flight had a really long layover at the Houston airport: seven hours! I hadn't slept well the night before, so I was feeling very tired when I got to Houston and I still had a ten hour flight ahead of me to Brazil. That made it a perfect opportunity to try something new: Minute Suites. It is an interesting concept: in the boarding area of an airport (so, past the TSA security) you have a tiny little hotel with tiny little rooms that you can use for a few hours, typically two or three. Each room is the size of a little office, with a couch that can become a bed, a blanket, pillows, a small desk, a chair and a flat screen TV. You can control the temperature and the lights of the room, and there are plenty of power outlets, and also Wi-Fi. The rooms are soundproof as well. The idea is that you can be in a small space that you can lock yourself in, set the light and temperature to exactly what feels more comfortable to you, and take a nap,...

As I spend some time in Brazil, as always I take some time to do some urban exploration at my alma mater, Unicamp ("Universidade Estadual de Campinas" - State University of Campinas) as I did in a previous occasion . This time, in addition of taking pictures of some of the animals that roam the empty campus (everybody is on vacation) I also managed to check out a building that I had been curious for a long time: the unfinished theater. Pretty much since the University was created, back in the 1960's, the drama and dance faculty and students have complained about the lack of a proper theater in which they could show their creations. In the best Unicamp style, there are some improvised spaces where they can do so, but the lack of a genuine space for artistic performances is undeniable. So, a few years ago, the University managed to get some government funds to create a big theater in the campus. The structure and walls of the brand new building were put together and it was ...

A number of major cities around the world have created a similar tourist attraction, that has proven to be quite popular: a glass cube, made of reinforced glass, that sticks out of the side of a major skyscraper. I'm spending some time in São Paulo, which has its own version of this attraction, and I had the opportunity to try it out. In a major skyscraper close to the city center there is Sampa Sky : on the 42nd floor, four glass cubes stick out of the sides of the building giving an incredible view of the massive city of São Paulo (the eighth largest in the world, with 21 million people in the metro area - and also where I was born). I'm not going to lie: I had an intense feeling of vertigo when I stepped in the first cube. It requires some courage to go all the way forward and touch the front glass. After some time you overcome your fear, that is, until you look down and back at the building and you have the impression that you are not on the side that you should be in a sk...