Submitted by Nikki on
While spending a month in Spain, Greg and I formulated a perfect itinerary for a return trip. It may happen...un dia. First, fly into Madrid and spend a few days checking out museums including seeing Picasso's Guernica housed in Museo Nacional Reina Sofia...and eating churros y chocolate.
Submitted by Nikki on
Much in the way How Soccer Explains the World discusses societies through, well, soccer, Taras Grescoe's travelogue The Devil's Picnic examines societies by way of food, and more specifically what food it forbids. This is my book of the year, and I have told everyone I know that they have to read it. It combines two great loves of mine: food and travel and adds in witty social commentary to boot.
Submitted by Nikki on
I had planned to spend my whole time in Rioja with purple lips, bouncing from winery to winery until I just couldn't take it anymore. At the recommendation of our hotel director, I decided to branch out and start with a trip to the Dinastía Vivanco Museo de la cultura de vino (Vivanco family culture of wine museum) in Briones, Spain.
Submitted by Nikki on
One of the many things I love about Spain is the good, cheap, and plentiful wine. While outside of Alicante, Spain, we went to a nice restaurant and ordered an $10 bottle of white wine from the region. The bottle was Marina Alta, a white table wine that was the most interesting wine I've had since we've been in Spain, despite it's price (which I imagine is about $4 in a local store).
Submitted by Nikki on
The Tortilla Curtain is the story of two couples in Southern California and their contrasting lives. America and Candido have recently crossed the Mexican border in search of a better life for themselves and their soon to be born child. Instead of the panacea they thought they would find, the couple tries to eak out a living working day labor jobs and camping in the bottom of a canyon. An unfortunate event links their lives to those of Delaney, a nature writer, and his wife Kyra, a ambitiously high rolling real estate agent, who live in an exclusive neighborhood.
Submitted by Nikki on
Not quite accurate to call Isabel Allende's trilogy the Latin American answer to Harry Potter, it is a series for young adults that deals with themes of adventure, surrealism, and good versus evil. The three-book set, which is available in English and Spanish, includes La Ciudad de las Bestias (City of Beasts), El Reino del Dragon de Oro (Kingdom of the Golden Dragon) and El Bosque de los Pigmeos (Forest of the Pygmies). Alexander Cold, a teenager from California, accompanies his grandmother, an adventurous and not at all grandmotherly writer for National Geographic, on adventures from the Amazon to the Himalayas to the forests of Africa.
Submitted by Nikki on
Title: Missing
Released: 1982
Submitted by Nikki on
Title: A mi madre le gusta mujeres (My Mother Likes Women)
Released: 2002
Submitted by Nikki on
Title: Kilómetro Cero (Kilometer Zero)
Released: 2000
Kilometer Zero is the story of 14 lives that intersect at Plaza de sol in Madrid on hot summer day in August. Through chance meetings and mistaken identities, the chararters form and rediscover relationships. The movie weaves together six storylines, and does a great job of bringing the stories together at the end to provide a funny climax for the movie. The stories are each enough to make a decent movie on their own, but slicing them together ends up producing a little less development in each story but a funny original movie in total. At times the production felt a little weak or the plot a little predictable, but overall this is a solid, funny film.
Submitted by Nikki on
Title: Antes que anochezca (Before Night Falls)
Released: 2000
