While walking around Playa del Carmen, you see an endless advertising stream for CocoBongo. What is it? A show? A club?
Turns out that it’s a bit limited to see it as one or the other…
For a considerable amount of my time at CocoBongo, I kept thinking: “You don’t go to CocoBongo, you experience CocoBongo.”
The quick summary is that it’s a series of mini-shows of dancing and acrobatics with an open bar that then becomes a nightclub. But really, it’s so much more.
joshreads.com (AKA The Comics Curmudgeon) is one of those sites I go to when I have an extra couple of minutes and need a laugh.
It used to be called “Josh Reads the Comics so You Don’t Have To”, hence the discrepancy between official name and URL. The gist is that Josh Fruhlinger takes comic strips, posts them in full on his page and makes funny comments. That easy, which is why it’s pretty cool how it’s taken off. And how often it makes me laugh. His jokes are diverse enough that you don’t always know what direction he’ll go.
Josh has some of what I see as hallmarks of success:
All of this is due to the guy’s encyclopedic knowledge and dedication to complaining about/commenting on something that a lot of us look at briefly before going to the sudoku/crossword puzzle.
ON SAFARI!
I still am floored by all of my experiences from this past weekend.
I went in, as I mentioned in my prior post, with some reservations.
I was excited to be coming in with a Media badge. Beyond that, I didn’t know what to expect from the event itself or from my fellow bloggers.
After having gone, I swear by the event. For $9 for an online ticket or $12 at the door, you got to hear celebrity speakers, get lots of swag (pins, calendars, fridge magnets, mini Simple Green bottle, etc.), see cultural dancing sorts of exhibitions, get tips from professional photographers, do the scuba diving tank, etc. A solid day’s entertainment, nay, more than I could pack in over two days of being there from open til close, for less than the cost of a movie. Not to mention, if you really were looking for vacation ideas or wanted to talk to people from other countries, they had the whole world there for you. On the right side of the floor, everything from Papua New Guinea to Thailand to African safaris. On the left side, tons of stuff in the US and Canada, along with other sorts of other trips, including polar and nudist trips.
Plus, the speakers.
I saw all of the headliners:
Arthur Frommer, Andrew McCarthy, Rick Steves and Samantha Brown.
But, this is my overview post, so we’ll end here. I’ll do a few more over this week.
Coming up:
More on the headliners: My reactions to and interactions with the speakers.
The booths: Schmoozing with those aforementioned people from all over the world, including talking to Egyptians about the goings-on over there and an Indian journalist who will never go back to his native land.
My compatriots: Networking with the press and fellow travel bloggers, including the exclusive parties.
And that should pretty much cover everything of note.
Hope you read. And, of course, if you were there, I’d love to hear how your impressions were similar or different from my own.
Plus, at some point, another video of my experiences, including my first time scuba diving.
I have already pitched Radiolab as a podcast that is worth listening to.
Now, I want to key you into a short video that they had, entitled ‘Moments‘.
The whole video is less than 5 minutes, encapsulating a wide variety of the small moments in life.
Before I started watching it, I was in a depressive funk. While watching it, I was opened up to the simple beauty in the world and how even the shortest duration of time can tell a much longer story.
Check it out. Maybe you won’t be brought to tears, as I was, but it certainly is worth a watch.
(I also have it as a Favorite on my YouTube page.)
I am probably toward the medium to low-end of the tech savvy.
I became a member of Facebook when you still had to have a college e-mail addy (although I was out of college). I was on Friendster, which a lot of people missed, before Myspace.
I try to keep as up-to-date as possible with what’s new and cool online. I’m sure that I used Wikipedia religiously before most people that I knew. That being said, if you’re ahead of the curve (if I define said curve), you probably already know about the podcast ‘Radiolab‘.
