Los 3 Cuernos

Craft store by day, hipster bar by night, is probably the most concise description of the Old San Juan pub known as Los 3 Cuernos. This translates into three things: beautiful decor, limited space, and flavored chichaito.

Walking through Old San Juan at night, streets glistening after a recent rain as yellow and white streetlights reflected off the cobblestones, I made my way from the central square of Plaza de Armas down Calle San Francisco. I fell into pace behind a lady carrying several loaded bags of groceries, slightly hunched, and vaguely aware of someone following her, on occasion glancing over her shoulder discreetly. For some reason she felt familiar to me but I couldn’t place her. Soon the lights of Plaza Colón and the dark shadow of the San Cristóbal fort came into view but instead of turning down towards the plaza she continued past a crowd of twenty-something year olds hanging out of a narrow entrance, up a couple of steps, under a wooden sign with the words Los 3 Cuernos roughly painted on, and into a colorful cave where music played loudly while a few televisions showed old movies in mute. I went in behind her.

Crema de Zanahorias y Calabasa

Whenever Julia Child dropped something on camera or flipped a potato pancake too early or generally fumbled about the kitchen in a manner that made the BBC believe that she was drunk, she would look at the camera, her trademark smile fading for a moment.

"Never apologize," she said, looking the housewife taking copious notes of her deceptively easy recipes straight in the eyes. "Just smile and serve your food as if nothing was wrong."

Most of the time, no one except you thinks anything is wrong anyway.

Me, I cook with disclaimers. "Its too spicy, its a little messy, I know what I did wrong..." But heaven help you if you don't eat the damn thing.

Homesick?

Feels like all I talk about lately is New York.

Its like that scene in Mean Girls when pre-cocaine Lindsay Lohan is talking to her friend about how much she hates Rachel McAdams and that's ALL she talks about. I guess its not entirely inaccurate to say New York is that hot girl in school that's also a bully and who is absolutely fascinating for some reason.

Below are the links for the respective articles. Two out of three are about food (surprise, surprise). And, not gonna lie, pretty excited to go visit the city in October on the heels of my London trip.

How to Fall in Love with a Place

The river split the city in two while ornate bridges worked like stitches connecting one half to the other. The spired Parliament building led the façade that eventually spread out into the tapestry of short, grey buildings that were Pest. Behind us on the Buda side, the red clay roofed houses suggested a fairy tale town that was more show than substance. I was sitting with Tünde, my Hungarian friend, at the top of Buda Castle, getting a run down on why Pest is infinitely cooler than Buda.

I tried to carefully observe all the miniscule structures that created the labyrinth that is Pest, the mix of architectures, the flowing river that reminded me of the Spree, the Seine, the Río Grande de Loiza— all while sitting on a Castle-Cathedral that was a distant cousin of the one I’d visited a few days earlier in Prague. That day my friend Nick had noted with frustration how impossible it is to see every beautiful thing, every detail, take in every element that together creates the whole that is immediately, but vaguely, beautiful.

Impressions of Amsterdam

“I watched the universe fall apart. Twice. When I went to Amsterdam,” was one of the first thing my now ex-boyfriend told me when we met. A concise, albeit dramatic, summary of what Amsterdam means to the uninitiated. Mushrooms are no longer legal in Holland, by the way.

Amsterdam is an idea, a threat really. When someone says, “I’m going to Amsterdam,” the first thing that pops into your head isn’t the Van Gogh Museum (for some it might be, some people have class), its brownies. Special brownies.

But if smoking weed is all Amsterdam is to you then the words of Wells Tower’s customer in a recent GQ article become unavoidably true: “For a visitor, there are two very happy days in Amsterdam—the day you get here and the day you leave.” Granted, I don’t like weed. But even I couldn’t avoid the fact that coming to Amsterdam meant making a certain type of commitment: the universe better f-ing collapse.