My Year In #Instatravel
12.23.2014
This year was a good one for my passport, which got a lot more action than I did and on multiple continents at that. I wish I could just fly around taking pictures and stuffing myself in between shots, but I get the sense that no one wants to pay me to do that? If they did, though, the following is a taste of the unfettered brilliance I would bring, literally and metaphorically, to the table.
I travel alone a lot and am just generally a hermit, so whenever I deign to crawl out of my cave I make sure I take lots of pictures of interesting walls, floors, roofs, maybe some food—a table for me and my phone is the new table for two, you know? LOL #loneliness.
Traveling solo has its ups and downs, and by the end of my time in Italy I was kind of wishing I had a companion, preferably someone else with a really irregular poop schedule so maybe our cycles could sync up. Right? And can we talk about how I missed the Alamuddin-Clooney wedding in Venice by like, three days? I mean, thanks a lot, God. I guess I'll just have to remember Venice as that place on water where I almost saw George Clooney get married, and how catchy is that?
Speaking of bowel movements and water, the food in Colombia man, wtf. Not exactly a diamond in anyone's culinary crown, Cartagena was nonetheless a lot of fun to trek around, at least for the first three days. Plus, thanks to whoring myself out as press, I got to stay at Hotel Santa Clara, where Lauren Santo Domingo had her rehearsal dinner back in '08. Vogue devoted ten pages to the wedding and showed Bonnie Morrison, Barbara Bush and Amanda Brooks standing in the hotel's breezeways (not to mention Ivanka Trump by the pool, bitch), which basically validates the entire trip and all of my life choices leading up to it.
And then there was Nice, France. That was cute. Chanel flew us out there to make a video of their rose harvesting process and when we came back Julianne Moore, Jason DeRulo and Adriana Lima were on our flight, in the same cabin as us. And then our heads exploded and I couldn't.
So this is all to say that traveling is totally worth it, as long as you see a celeb or ostensibly share the last dying wisps of stale air once breathed in by one, or at least someone who's like, really hot and rich. Otherwise, IDK why you even left your house and I definitely cannot fxck with why you brought your phone out like somebody cares.
JK! Traveling is great. Here is where I link you to all of my other travel posts and tell you to follow me on Instagram.
I travel alone a lot and am just generally a hermit, so whenever I deign to crawl out of my cave I make sure I take lots of pictures of interesting walls, floors, roofs, maybe some food—a table for me and my phone is the new table for two, you know? LOL #loneliness.
Traveling solo has its ups and downs, and by the end of my time in Italy I was kind of wishing I had a companion, preferably someone else with a really irregular poop schedule so maybe our cycles could sync up. Right? And can we talk about how I missed the Alamuddin-Clooney wedding in Venice by like, three days? I mean, thanks a lot, God. I guess I'll just have to remember Venice as that place on water where I almost saw George Clooney get married, and how catchy is that?
Speaking of bowel movements and water, the food in Colombia man, wtf. Not exactly a diamond in anyone's culinary crown, Cartagena was nonetheless a lot of fun to trek around, at least for the first three days. Plus, thanks to whoring myself out as press, I got to stay at Hotel Santa Clara, where Lauren Santo Domingo had her rehearsal dinner back in '08. Vogue devoted ten pages to the wedding and showed Bonnie Morrison, Barbara Bush and Amanda Brooks standing in the hotel's breezeways (not to mention Ivanka Trump by the pool, bitch), which basically validates the entire trip and all of my life choices leading up to it.
And then there was Nice, France. That was cute. Chanel flew us out there to make a video of their rose harvesting process and when we came back Julianne Moore, Jason DeRulo and Adriana Lima were on our flight, in the same cabin as us. And then our heads exploded and I couldn't.
So this is all to say that traveling is totally worth it, as long as you see a celeb or ostensibly share the last dying wisps of stale air once breathed in by one, or at least someone who's like, really hot and rich. Otherwise, IDK why you even left your house and I definitely cannot fxck with why you brought your phone out like somebody cares.
JK! Traveling is great. Here is where I link you to all of my other travel posts and tell you to follow me on Instagram.
Guillermo Vega
11.28.2014
I've had this story in one of my notebooks since last summer, when I went to Cartagena. I haven't shared any of those pictures here, but now seems as good a time as any since I posted some of the art I bought down there in my bedroom makeover.
I stumble upon the Getsemanà studio of Guillermo Vega. Someone out back waves me in and I enter; when I look up it's not the same man I initially saw coming forward, but an older man. I wish him a good afternoon and start to look around the room at the paintings. "This is you?" I ask, pointing to the signature on one painting: "Guillermo Vega." He says yes it is and goes on talking about his work. I catch almost none of it, but nod and try to repeat every other word I comprehend, thinking it seems appreciative. He says something about the world and starts listing off countries. "Yes, so many countries," I agree.
If Guillermo can tell I'm completely clueless he doesn't show it. He tells me he has been painting for a long time, fifty-five years. He shows me photos of himself when he was younger. He shows me his garden where he grows aloe vera, which can be used in your hair and as a mask, he says, as he mimes putting it all over his face. He has eggs on the ends of some tree branches and I ask him why; I think he tells me it's to keep away ants, but it might have something to do with flowers. A pair of pants is hung up on a clothesline, dusty. "It's maravilloso," I tell him, and he seems appreciative. There's a man behind him in the garden, I think Guillermo calls him Carlos. Carlos sits on the stoop and the two of them chat for awhile which gives me time to take pictures.
Guillermo holds up a golden piggy bank he's using as a planter and smiles. He pulls together the leaves of one plant; he seems to take pride in his garden and is happy to have it photographed. I'm happy to have something beautiful and personal to photograph. We go back inside his studio and he signs his name on the back of the portrait of Christ I've selected. "If I don't sell, I don't eat," he tells me. Or maybe he's saying, "I go hungry," but either way I think he is glad to make a sale, even though I can't offer him the full 50,000 pesos he's asked for the painting. He kindly accepts 46,000.
Carlos comes from the back to help wrap the painting in plastic, but first he writes the day's date and the name of the neighborhood on the back of the painting. Portraits of Christ, army generals, wild cats, and neighborhood life line the walls. It feels good to be an audience for someone who's invited me into his backyard as a guest, to step beyond the threshold and see something real as real can get for a clumsy monolingual American lugging around a camera, glued to his iPhone.
P.S. I'm telling myself I'll share other pictures from this trip next month, for sure. Look out.
I stumble upon the Getsemanà studio of Guillermo Vega. Someone out back waves me in and I enter; when I look up it's not the same man I initially saw coming forward, but an older man. I wish him a good afternoon and start to look around the room at the paintings. "This is you?" I ask, pointing to the signature on one painting: "Guillermo Vega." He says yes it is and goes on talking about his work. I catch almost none of it, but nod and try to repeat every other word I comprehend, thinking it seems appreciative. He says something about the world and starts listing off countries. "Yes, so many countries," I agree.
If Guillermo can tell I'm completely clueless he doesn't show it. He tells me he has been painting for a long time, fifty-five years. He shows me photos of himself when he was younger. He shows me his garden where he grows aloe vera, which can be used in your hair and as a mask, he says, as he mimes putting it all over his face. He has eggs on the ends of some tree branches and I ask him why; I think he tells me it's to keep away ants, but it might have something to do with flowers. A pair of pants is hung up on a clothesline, dusty. "It's maravilloso," I tell him, and he seems appreciative. There's a man behind him in the garden, I think Guillermo calls him Carlos. Carlos sits on the stoop and the two of them chat for awhile which gives me time to take pictures.
Guillermo holds up a golden piggy bank he's using as a planter and smiles. He pulls together the leaves of one plant; he seems to take pride in his garden and is happy to have it photographed. I'm happy to have something beautiful and personal to photograph. We go back inside his studio and he signs his name on the back of the portrait of Christ I've selected. "If I don't sell, I don't eat," he tells me. Or maybe he's saying, "I go hungry," but either way I think he is glad to make a sale, even though I can't offer him the full 50,000 pesos he's asked for the painting. He kindly accepts 46,000.
Carlos comes from the back to help wrap the painting in plastic, but first he writes the day's date and the name of the neighborhood on the back of the painting. Portraits of Christ, army generals, wild cats, and neighborhood life line the walls. It feels good to be an audience for someone who's invited me into his backyard as a guest, to step beyond the threshold and see something real as real can get for a clumsy monolingual American lugging around a camera, glued to his iPhone.
P.S. I'm telling myself I'll share other pictures from this trip next month, for sure. Look out.
La Bottega Moderna
10.30.2014
La Bottega Moderna is this artist's studio I stumbled upon in Florence. I think the guy in the photo above is Richard Prosperi, who paints under the name Simafra...? I don't know, I link to things for a reason people. I popped my head in thinking the space looked cool and he was nice enough to let me take a picture or two. His work is really great, a bit grotesque and haunting, like it's channeling Francis Bacon.
I realized that two of his pieces are actually in Cameron Diaz's Kelly Wearstler-designed apartment, in the living room and bedroom, as seen in Elle Decor. Small world, right? Photos (below) © William Abranowicz / Elle Decor.
Long story short: I am a jetsetting international tastemaker, obviously, and if you hang out with me you will be connected to the art in Cameron Diaz's apartment by six degrees of Kevin Bacon or whatever. Seriously though, I felt much more attuned to the significance of design and the decorative arts on this visit to Florence. Pretty much every other shop reupholsters or refinishes or at the very least sells antiques. It's so accessible in this way that seems really foreign, or, you know, telling of the fact that you're in Italy, home to like, all of the craft ever.
I found this short and sweet video tour of La Bottega Moderna, if you're interested. It's like you can live my journey...#LiveMyJourney #WishThisWasSponsored #SomeoneSendMeSomewhereNew #ThirstyJourney
Snapshots From Florence
10.24.2014
Florence has a special place in my heart, as cheesy as that sounds. It was the first city I visited in Italy and going back felt like something of a homecoming, which makes no sense really except that I hit up some familiar restaurants? I haven't had a sec to sit down and get thoughts and real words out of my brain, but here are some pics!
The Venice Biennale
10.16.2014
Ok, I've had a crazy busy week, so much going on, and I was really hoping to have a somewhat-if-not-totally comprehensible post written up about Venice like yesterday—no such luck. My day trip up to the city of floating dreams (or whatever its official nickname is) was very spur of the moment and I'm really glad it happened, and even more glad it happened right before the Clooney wedding. Everyone knows celebrity water traffic is just absolutely tiresome.
These were taken on the grounds of the Venice Biennale, which is actually sort of like a World's Fair, but with art? Or, as is the case this year, architecture. The different country exhibits were nice and curated by Rem Koolhaas, so that's cute, but at the end of the day the sun came out and I stumbled upon this enchanted garden situation around the corner from the Arsenale and pretty well forgot about whatever else I saw that day.
I mean, damn, right?
More to come next week! Maybe even over the weekend? She dreams big...
Industrial Italia
10.10.2014
Something I've failed to mention thus far is exactly how I came to be in Italy the other week. If you follow Lonny's Instagram you may have witnessed a whole lot of tile going on, because I was trekking around Cersaie, a ceramics trade show. It was fun to pretend like I had a home I could return to and start implementing some of these new technologies and ideas. Instead, the best of the show is filed away in my dream home spank bank—though I'll try to mention here when I start posting about trends and takeaways over on Lonny. This is a roundabout way of saying that the show was held in an industrial exhibition space called Bologna Fiere that was dauntingly, inhumanly huge, but also really intriguing in a Baushaus way.
My group also got to tour a tile factory out near Modena (all of the employees rode these little bikes around the grounds!) and was allowed just enough time to wander Bologna and see some of the more Soviet-y residential buildings.
I would love to make this a project and go back sometime to shoot more buildings and spaces like this. It was something I hadn't really been aware of—or looking out for—on my last trip to Italy. Below are some snaps from an industrial park in Florence that caught my eye.
I would love to make this a project and go back sometime to shoot more buildings and spaces like this. It was something I hadn't really been aware of—or looking out for—on my last trip to Italy. Below are some snaps from an industrial park in Florence that caught my eye.
I'll share more travel snaps next week, along with our regularly scheduled programming!
35mm Around Bologna
10.08.2014
So the majority of my Italy trip was spent in Bologna, which has a youth-in-revolt college town vibe. (Graffiti! White people with dreadlocks!) As I mentioned yesterday, I got in pretty late on Saturday and didn't have time to explore, but over the next three or four days I made it around to a host of museums and local sights. I quickly learned that if I said I was press (I am press!) I could get in to a lot of museums for free or at a discount, which was the best discovery ever. (Shout out to the bilingual docent who let me scope out the Artelibro festival.) Typing is hard, so here are a bunch of pictures:
Below are some shots I took in a museum I found while out walking. I can't remember the name, but if I think of it—or find my ticket stub—I'll update!
More to come soon. And it goes without saying, but just in case: all photos © Sean Santiago
How to Travel in Style (When You're a Mess)
10.07.2014
I become that which I most dread when I travel: a Facebook user. I insist on uploading even the most mundane pictures, geo-tagging every step of the way as if the validity of my social sharing directly corresponds to my distance from home. Exhibit A: the crappy photo below, for which I didn't even clean off my mirror. You're welcome!
This is everything I packed for the trip. (AND: I made my bed! Quilt from Coming Soon, African throw from Home of the Brave, pillows from Hammer & Spear.) I bought "luggage" for this trip because I wanted to be cute, duh, although I couldn't necessarily hold so much? The backpack is from Joshu & Vela and the tote is Billykirk. Since my bandwidth for fashunz was so limited, I only packed one other pair of jeans. Then I boarded my flight, ordered red wine, and promptly spilled it all over my ass.*
*UPDATE: Many people (two people) have now asked me how I managed to get the wine directly onto my ass cheek, albeit not in so many words. You see, the wine cup slid off of the tray table and fell to the side of my ass and I sat in it. Science!
*UPDATE: Many people (two people) have now asked me how I managed to get the wine directly onto my ass cheek, albeit not in so many words. You see, the wine cup slid off of the tray table and fell to the side of my ass and I sat in it. Science!
As you can see, it looks like some super angry ass bruise. Needless to say, my white jeans were out of commission for the duration of the trip, and yes, I had to walk around in my stained pants through two more airports. Cool. (Though, FYI, a hot and heavy bathroom interlude with some club soda helped to mitigate the worst effects of the wine; an intense therapy session with Simply Spotless once I got back home—yes, a full week later—pretty much completely removed the stain. Bless!)
Also, here is my backpack in Rome's Fiumicino airport. I ate cookies for lunch that day because I wasn't sure I could use my Visa card abroad. But the backpack looks cute, roight? Once I finally landed in Bologna I checked into my AirBNB, which was insanely gorgeous and I died.
No joke, right? So that was my travel day. I was totally exhausted by the end of it. I managed to navigate to a restaurant that came recommended in some 36 Hours in Bologna guide, stuffed my face with Bolognese and tiramisu, then crashed. I haven't really edited my film photos from the trip yet, but I'm going to start that soon, so keep your eyes peeled!
Also, here is my backpack in Rome's Fiumicino airport. I ate cookies for lunch that day because I wasn't sure I could use my Visa card abroad. But the backpack looks cute, roight? Once I finally landed in Bologna I checked into my AirBNB, which was insanely gorgeous and I died.
No joke, right? So that was my travel day. I was totally exhausted by the end of it. I managed to navigate to a restaurant that came recommended in some 36 Hours in Bologna guide, stuffed my face with Bolognese and tiramisu, then crashed. I haven't really edited my film photos from the trip yet, but I'm going to start that soon, so keep your eyes peeled!
