Hi, I’m David

When I was 23, I ditched my lease, got rid of most of my stuff, and booked a flight to Barcelona. I wound up traveling for two years while working as a freelance writer.

  • I learned languages (I now speak three)
  • I fell in love with cities (especially walkable cities with good public transit)
  • And most of all, I felt inspired by my travels to take the lessons back home and fight for a better world. In 2024, I moved back to New York City.

Here on my blog, I write about all of that: travel tips, transit advocacy, and in-the-trenches reporting on the fight for more green space in our cities. Subscribe to my newsletter, and fight for a better world along with me.

Taking The Unconventional Path

My journey as both a writer and a traveler began in 2017, the year I graduated high school.

My parents always encouraged me to take an unconventional approach in life, and like many young people, I didn’t know what I wanted to do or study. So, I decided to take a gap year.

To start my gap year, I spent what I’d earned washing dishes in high school and got on a flight to Barcelona. I didn’t know what I was getting into.

While in Barcelona, as I experienced a different city, language, and culture, I dedicated myself to learning Spanish. I would talk with anyone and everyone, pausing my host mom or host brother in the middle of sentences so I could ask, “What was that word you said?”

I started writing down new phrases I’d learned, what Barcelona was like, and how it made me feel. With lots of free time, I turned inward, and writing helped me do that.

When I came home and spoke to my grandparents in Spanish for the first time, able to hear them express themselves in their native tongue.

That first trip to Barcelona had instilled in me a joy of traveling and writing that I’ve carried with me since.

When I returned home at the end of the summer, I got a job at a gym and studied for a personal trainer certification.

I started teaching adult and youth fitness classes while taking on personal training clients.

Once again, I turned back to writing as a way to make sense of the world. How do you coach a push-up? What were the challenges of working with middle schoolers?

I published these on the gym’s blog, but in the process, they helped me reflect on my own thinking.

A year later, I started my own blog, where I wrote about fitness, traveling, learning Spanish, and anything else I was learning in my gap years.

While I loved my time as a personal trainer, I knew that I wanted to be a writer.

I moved to New York in the fall of 2019 to study at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study, a program at New York University where every student creates their own major, or “concentration,” as we call it in Gallatin. At Gallatin, I went in with the intention to learn how to write. All kinds of writing. My final concentration was called “Writing and Storytelling for the Internet Age,” a reflection of how writing has evolved in our digital world.

I started freelance writing, mostly for fitness websites and businesses, the year before I graduated from Gallatin in 2022.

After I graduated, I ditched my tiny New York apartment and headed back to Barcelona. I thought I would just spend the summer there, but I decided to keep traveling.

From tours around the US, to working from Colombia, to summers with friends in Barcelona, I visited over two dozen cities in over a dozen countries over the following two years.

I especially took an interest in cities and what it was like to travel without a car. I took trains, buses, and cheap budget airlines, slept in hostels and guest bedrooms, and random Airbnbs where the host lived.

Then in 2024, I moved back to New York City with my now girlfriend. As I write about in why I’m no longer a digital nomad, I was ready to join movements, to go from observing to participating. I was ready to get my hands dirty in advocating for so many of the amazing things I saw on my world adventures.

I’m currently posted up here writing, volunteering in community gardens, and working with neighbors to fight for a cleaner, healthier, more just world. (I still travel plenty, though, and will still blog about it.)

Welcome. Please poke around. If you like what you see, then you’ll love my newsletter.

Some Fun Facts

  • I’m trilingual. English is my native language. My Spanish is full professional fluency (although I also know lots of unprofessional sayings learned in Barcelona’s streets.) I also have become enamored with Catalan, Barcelona’s main language, and after three stints in Barcelona since 2022, I speak it quite well. You can read more about this in my article on learning Catalan and why we should protect endangered languages. As the years go on, I will add 4th, 5th, and 6th languages.
  • I love pop punk music. Neck Deep, The Story So Far, Knuckle Puck, and State Champs are some of my favorite bands. I also am into hardcore and punk. A good two-step and spin-kick during a DRAIN set is one of life’s great experiences.
  • Reading is my default activity. It’s what I do when there isn’t anything else obvious to do. Support your local bookstores and libraries, and cancel your Amazon membership. My favorite authors change too frequently to have any. But I love reading personal essays, as popularized by Philip Lopate. George Orwell has had the biggest impact on my writing. Carlos Ruiz Zafón is the author of my favorite novels, The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series.

You can follow me on Instagram. However, I’m most active on my TikTok.