Below are a few photos (slideshow) I took while at The Salton Sea this summer around mid June. It was incredibly hot. And humid. I didn’t last long.
External link to the photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/afroxander/albums/72157719510509706
My latest article for L.A. Taco is now available! It’s an interview with Will Coleman, co-founder of Alto, a new rideshare company that is operating differently than its competition (y’know, like Uber and Lyft).
An excerpt:
A critical aspect of Alto’s brand is that it hires drivers as employees as opposed to its competitors, who work with drivers as independent contractors. In addition, the company provides them with a uniform, including PPE, hours of training in defensive driving, and training in the “culture of the service model,” as Coleman describes it.
Employment also provides peace of mind to drivers who continue to contend with the efforts of many rideshare and gig economy companies to limit their pay and benefits. The fallout from the passage of Prop. 22 last year in California hasn’t been pretty, as noted in The Guardian (“‘A slap in the face’: California Uber and Lyft drivers criticize pay cuts under Prop 22”), Protocol (“California gig workers say Prop. 22 isn’t delivering promised benefits”), VICE (“Uber Shuts Down App That Told Drivers If Uber Underpaid Them”), and Business Insider (“Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other gig companies said California’s Prop 22 would create opportunity for workers of color. A new study says it ‘legalized racial subordination.’”).
Read my full story at L.A. Taco: https://www.lataco.com/alto-rideshare-new-app-will-coleman/
I visited FC Barcelona‘s Camp Nou stadium last year on April 5th, which was the day before they defeated Atlético de Madrid with two late goals. It was exciting to have walked down the same tunnel many legendary players have walked through.
Here’s a short video of the tour including the walkthrough of the locker room area and the player tunnel ending with the entrance onto the field:
And a few photos:
The full album of photos is available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/afroxander/albums/72157714330528121
First, an admission: today marks nearly a year to the day that I left for a week-long trip to Barcelona and I still haven’t fully edited the photos and videos I took during that trip. OOPS!
I have more free time now due to reasons related to that-one-virus. I hope to finish editing, uploading, and sharing the rest of the photos/videos from that trip beginning with this post of photos I took while walking the various streets of the city. Enjoy!
More photos can be found in the album here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/afroxander/albums/72157713502940888
I geeked out at the Biblioteca de Catalunya (Library of Catalonia) in Barcelona this past April. I even spent some time there to work on an academic paper. Academia eventually rules us all!
You can find the full album here along with larger/higher quality versions of the photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/afroxander/albums/72157710380479047
Back in 2012, I took a trip out to Machu Picchu in Peru. My group’s trek to the ancient city included a stop at Cola De Mono zipline near Santa Teresa. We had about an hour of time to kill before the employees returned from assisting the group before us and, somewhere along the way, my breakfast was ready to escape my intestines.
I walked around the large, outdoor waiting area and found the sign for the restroom. The bathroom was many feet away from the entrance facing the Sacsara river that borders the park on one side.
I walked over to a small paved area where a lone, single-person stall stood under the shade of a number of trees. Three of the stall’s sides were dressed in thin bamboo reeds and foliage and the entrance…had no door!
“Where’s the door?” I asked out loud to no one because everyone was near the entrance killing time by playing a bean-bag toss game. There was no door, no curtain, nothing to spare the world, especially the river of gorgeous, crystal-clear water, the view of my answering nature’s call.
I figured the bathroom was out of order but a flush of the toilet showed me wrong. Meanwhile, my stomach continued to warn me there’d be no chance of flying over the Sacsara on a zipline with irritable bowels (all those damn potatoes!).
So be it.
I sat down, pulled my pants down far enough and went to town.
There I was, sitting on and shitting in a toilet facing the Sacsara river, various exotic birds singing their songs amid the gentle rush of the running water, the cool mountain air doing its thing as the greatest air freshener money will never be able to buy.
It was the most unexpected place to find bliss.
These are the last set of photos from my trip to Mexico. I spent the last two days of my trip at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Zocalo (Main Square), and the Paseo de la Reforma. There are more photos HERE.
I skipped the last day of the Vive Latino festival for good reason: to take a trip to the city of Teotihuacán de Arista. The city is home to the Pre-Hispanic City of Teotihuacán, an ancient, Pre-Colombian city important to the Mayans and Aztecs such as the Nahua, Otomi, and Totonac people of southern Mexico (the exact information is still debated by scholars).
The ancient city includes many large and important structures such as the Avenue of the Dead (Calzada de los Muertos), the Pyramid of the Sun (Piramide del Sol), Pyramid of the Moon (Piramide de la Luna), and many others.
Unfortunately, my trip was cut short by a sudden and powerful thunderstorm that occurred the moment I step foot on the summit of the Pyramid of the Sun.
Below are some photos of my journey from Mexico City to Teotihuacán. The full set can be found HERE.
The Plaza De Las Tres Culturas in the Mexico City neighborhood of Tlatelolco is one of the most important historical sites in the country. The site is known by that name because it is home to the three cultures of Mexico: Indigenous, Spanish, and Mestizo (Native & European descent). There’s a large stone slab that marks the area as the “painful birthplace” of Mestizos and, thus, the birthplace of modern Mexico.
It’s also the site of Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968. Thousands of students convened at the plaza on October 2nd of that year to continue their protests against the policies of president Gustavo Diaz Ordaz and the PRI. Military snipers fired at their own servicemen in order to provoke their attack on the protestors. The exact death toll is still unknown but numbers vary between 30 to over 300.
I spent a few hours at the site shooting photos. Click here for the full set and a few of my favorites below:
Afroxander (aka Iván Fernández) 