Author Profile: Dan Perez

After six nights in Berlin, we arrive at our next stop, Rome. Now, I’m going to carefully preface my thoughts on Rome by trying really hard not to sound pretentious. Now, I grew up in New York City. The Bronx. During the birth of hip hop. As a teenager, my friends and I would take the D train down to Times Square (the wonderfully seedy Times Square from the 80s) to watch movies (the PG and R rated ones, not the other...   view more

Having thoroughly enjoyed our four-day stay in the enchanting city of Prague, we hopped aboard an ÖBB train from Prague to Vienna (about 4 hours, very comfortable) and checked into the Hotel Royal in the Historic Centre of Vienna, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our hotel just happened to be around the corner of Austria’s most important Gothic building, St. Stephen’s...   view more

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic and is home to about 1.4 million people. It is considered one of Europe’s most beautiful cities and (spoiler alert!) it really is. It’s one of the cities I’ve always wanted to visit (especially in December), not to mention Prague being named in just about every spy movie (am I...   view more

In this post, we stay in Brussels and visit some of the city’s other attractions. I mean, you can’t just spend three days gawking at The Grand-Place, right? Well,...   view more

Our first stop was Guimarães, which was settled in the 9th century(!) It is often referred to as the “birthplace of Portugal” or “the cradle city” because it is widely believed that Portugal’s first King, Afonso Henriques, was born there, and also due to the fact that the Battle of São Mamede – which is considered the seminal event for the foundation of the Kingdom of Portugal – was fought in the vicinity of the city (on June 24,...   view more

On the evening of December 13th, we flew out of Miami International Airport on a TAP Air Portugal flight and landed in Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado Airport the morning of the 14th. Picked up my rental car and checked into the 5-star Palacio do Governador hotel in the Belém District of Lisbon (after three years, I wasn’t cutting corners). Belém lies 5km to the west of central Lisbon, situated on the northern shore of the Tagus River. The plan was to see the more laid back western Lisbon first...   view more

I haven’t been to San Juan, Puerto Rico in over 20 years. I’ve been to the island many times during that span but I’ve landed at the Rafael Hernández Airport in Aguadilla, on the west side of the island. You see, my late wife’s family are from beautiful Rincón on the westernmost tip of Puerto Rico and that was our stomping grounds. The last time I was in Puerto Rico at all was for her funeral service in November...   view more

Guadalajara, located in the Western-Pacific area of Mexico, is the capital and largest city of the Mexican state of Jalisco. The Guadalajara metropolitan area has a reported population of over five million inhabitants, making it the second most populous metropolitan area in Mexico, behind Mexico City. It’s also the tenth-largest Latin American city in population, urban area and gross domestic...   view more

Guanajuato’s historic city center was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988. It was the last city on our four city trip through central Mexico, starting in Mexico City. So, if you want to see some of the best that Mexico has to offer, you can follow our itinerary and start in the historic center of Mexico City (making a stop in Teotihuacán), head west to the historic centers of Querétaro, NW to San Miguel de Allende (making a stop at the Sanctuary of Atotonilco), then continue west...   view more

I’m finally wrapping up my series of photographs from our trip to Mexico back in late May (it’s been fun, right?) with our final destination, the city of Guanajuato, located in central Mexico. Now, if you remember in my post about San Miguel de Allende, I wrote that for the fourth year in a row, Travel + Leisure magazine chose San Miguel de Allende as the 2019 top city travel destination in...   view more

Some 50+ miles northwest of Querétaro (and about 170 miles NW of Mexico City) is what many people call Mexico’s most beautiful city, San Miguel de Allende. The city’s name derives from two persons: 16th-century friar Juan de San Miguel, and Ignacio Allende, a captain of the Spanish Army in Mexico who came to sympathize with the Mexican Independence movement, eventually leading the rebellion and becoming a...   view more

The historic center of Mexico City (Centro Histórico de la Ciudad de México) is the central neighborhood in Mexico City and it extends in all directions for a number of blocks. It contains 9,000 buildings, 1,550 of which have been declared of historical importance. Most of these historic buildings were constructed between the 16th and 20th centuries. The Centro Histórico contains most of the city’s historic sites from both eras as well as a large number of museums. This has made it a UNESCO...   view more

Mexico City was where our trip would begin and then we would head east to Querétaro, then to San Miguel de Allende, then to Guanajuato, then back to MC. Alas, as some of you know, my wife passed away this past September. So it created another travel opportunity for my daughter and I (we did Spain back in December) and she was looking forward to having another country stamped on her passport (not to mention a cavity filled and a good...   view more

Santiago de Compostela is the capital of the autonomous community of Galicia, in northwestern Spain. The city has its origin in the shrine of Saint James the Great, now the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, as the destination of the Way of St. James, a leading Catholic pilgrimage route since the 9th century. In 1985, the city’s Old Town was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Archaeologists have revealed that the old city of Compostela was inhabited, starting probably about 50...   view more

Oh, Salamanca – how I misjudged you. This ancient university town was only supposed to be a layover city on our drive from Seville to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. I was not expecting it to be as lovely and dynamic a city as I (we) found it to be. Alas. Well, if you’ve been following this blog, you’d know that my daughter and I embarked on an eight-city tour of Spain back in...   view more

Córdoba was a Roman settlement, taken over by the Visigoths (a kingdom that occupied what is now southwestern France and the Iberian Peninsula from the 5th to the 8th centuries), and then taken by Muslim armies in the eighth century. In 1236, Córdoba was returned to Christian rule when it was conquered by King Ferdinand III of Castile during the...   view more

Our first stop on our direct flight from Miami was Madrid, the capital city of the Kingdom of Spain and the largest municipality in Spain as a whole. It is the third-largest city in the European Union (EU) after London and Berlin and has been occupied since prehistoric times. Now, there’s a whole lot I liked about Madrid. A whole lot. But here’s the thing – it reminded me too much of New York City. And I grew up in New York...   view more

Earlier this month, I traveled to Guatemala with my teenage daughter to attend the Giant Kite Festival in Sumpango during Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) on November 1 (you can watch the spectacular video I shot and edited HERE). Just under a three hour flight from Fort Lauderdale and bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the territory of modern Guatemala once formed the core of the Maya civilization, which lasted until the mysterious collapse of the civilization around 900...   view more

My wife and I recently traveled to Bosnia and Herzegovina to attend a screening of one of my films at the Jahorina Film Festival in Sarajevo. Now, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this mysterious country and “infamous” city but after our week there, I can tell you that this is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever been to and Sarajevo is a city that will steal your heart. We stayed in the heart of Sarajevo (Old Town) and spent the better parts of two afternoons walking...   view more

Bucharest was first mentioned in documents in 1459. It became the capital of Romania in 1862 and is the center of Romanian media, culture, and art. It is home to just under 1.9 million inhabitants, while its metropolitan area bulges up to 2.2 million. During my short day and a half there, I found it to be a city in transition, a city in the process of reanimating itself while still trying to maintain the historic charm of its glory days. A city that required more than just a day and a half to...   view more

So last week, my wife and I traveled to the city of Cluj-Napoca, the second most populous city in Romania (after the national capital Bucharest) to attend the screening of one of my documentary films at the ClujShorts International Short Film Festival. The city, considered the unofficial capital to the historical province of Transylvania, is one of the most important academic, cultural, industrial and business centres in Romania and is home to the country’s largest university, Babeș-Bolyai...   view more

Ponce, often referred to as La Perla del Sur (The Pearl of the South), was founded on August 12, 1692 and is named after Juan Ponce de León y Loayza, the great-grandson of Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León. The city can be found 73 miles SW of Luis Munoz Marin International Airport (SJU) in San...   view more

The name Tlaquepaque derives from Nahuatl (a family of indigenous languages of the Americas that dates back to the seventh century) and means “place above clay land”. The area is famous for its pottery and blown glass. Upon the arrival of Spanish conquistador Nuño de Guzmán in 1530, the region was inhabited by the Tonalteca (a kingdom comprised of several neighboring towns with the capital being Tonalá) and ruled by a woman named Cihualpilli...   view more

Known simply as Querétaro, it is located in central Mexico, about 132 miles northwest of Mexico City. The area of Querétaro was settled around A.D. 200 by Mesoamerican groups moving north. In the later pre-Hispanic period, the area was populated by the Otomí (Indigenous peoples of Mexico) and for the next several centuries, the Otomí (and to a lesser extent, the Tarascan and Chichimeca) were the ruling tribes in the region. In the mid-13th century, the region was conquered by the Aztecs and...   view more