What's up ladies and gentlemen vagabuddies, welcome back to the channel.
It has been a long time since we made a favorites video, far too long,
and it's pretty much not even spring anymore.
but don't worry, these are our spring favorites.
But that's the thing, you make the favorites video after the season has been done
- Is that how it works? - so we're just right on time right now. So this is spring favorites from the vagabrothers. Let's get into it.
So my favorite spring destination is a place I visited in February with my buddy Griffin: Fez, Morocco.
Fez is a medieval city
that at one point was the leading center of learning in all of the world
and it has the world's oldest university.
The medieval quarter is actually the world's largest
pedestrian only area and in such a dense
warren of alleyways lot of whom with dead ends
that it actually doesn't have Google Maps, doesn't work there,
you have to use an old-school map to get around.
It was a great choice because I only had a couple of days
like I said,
So I stayed in a couple different riads around town
and riads are like these old-school 16th century houses with a central courtyard
oftentimes the pool. A lot of tourists go to Marrakesh, which is the more popular destination
but Fez is really great value.
There's fewer tourists. The prices are lower and it's much more of a local city.
In February of this year I visited Italy with my girlfriend Carrie Rad.
We started in Rome, spent one or two days there
and then we rented a car and we did a road trip through Tuscany.
I had never been to Tuscany before although I had heard so much about it and to be completely honest with you
I kind of felt like it would be cliché, you know,
just a kind of a tourist trap
and what I found was the exact opposite.
Now, I know that Tuscany in the summertime is a totally different story,
Italy in general in the summertime is a very very crowded tourist destination,
but when I visited in the early spring late winter, it was absolutely
gorgeous. I'm really big on natural hot springs as is my girlfriend
Carrie and we found two or three really incredible places for a therapeutic bath.
Not to mention the little hilltop villages in Tuscany are gorgeous
and if I had to recommend one that you should go and visit now, it's Pienza.
Travel app, I'm recommending, Bird. Now, Bird is a app where you can rent a scooter
for one dollar and then ten cents a minute. Now
it's been in the news a lot lately because
kind of like how Uber and Lyft just kind of showed up and didn't pay attention to local regulatory laws
Bird is doing the same thing. They started here in Santa Monica.
So Santa Monica and Venice are really the first places where it started,
but it's expanded now to many different cities.
Although I understand that this app and this company have been quite controversial
they will probably arrive to a city near you quite soon
and if they do or when they do
just pay attention to where you leave your scooters and make sure that you're driving in a respectable way.
You don't want to be going down sidewalks cutting off pedestrians or getting in the way of cars.
So if you want to go check it out
we'll put a link down the info box that will get you a free ride and will also get me a free ride
or Alex, you choose who you want to give a free ride to,
we're really stoked because we do use them quite a bit.
When I travel I do really try to stay in shape. My favorite overall travel
exercise app is called Strava and it's really cool, super simple to use, it's free and
it basically tracks your runs or your walks and gives you kind of an odometer.
It shows how far you run, how many calories you've burned,
it also shows different routes that other runners or
cyclists or even swimmers have done in the same city. So it's a really great way for
getting your bearings,
tracking your runs and basically trying to keep a routine,
a travel fitness routine when you're on the road.
So for travel tech I'm choosing the one product that probably has changed my life
the most for the better this year and that is the Monkii bars.
The Monkii bars fold down to nothing, is this big,
It's great.
It comes with two bars and a set of ropes and then the case itself
goes perfectly into your door so you can set it up in your hotel room.
I personally get to my hotel room and set it up right away.
It's really great to use and one of the things I love the most about it is the app that comes with it
which features the founder Monkii Dan giving demonstrations
of all the different workouts. There's a 21-day habit building part of the app
so it's like you click on the app, you go to 21-day
habit builder and there's a set of 21 workouts. You do one each day,
they're very easy and will get you in the routine of using this as a fitness routine.
The only downside of this is that it's quite expensive.
They're $200 which can seem quite a bit and if you want there's also a
$99 version of this available on their Kickstarter right now.
It's a very stripped down even even more lightweight version so go check that out as well.
This spring we've been spending a bit more time here
In Los Angeles at home and one of the things that kind of gets to me
but I never actually get around to doing is cleaning my house, sweeping, dust,
it's a nightmare.
It's one of those things that you either have to stay on top of or you just end up living in a dust bowl.
I chose the first option staying on top of it
but by not wasting any of my time doing it
and I did that with this new piece of technology called the iLife,
Robotic vacuum cleaner, it's pretty insane.
We've nicknamed him Charlie and you have to speak to him in a British accent.
It's "Charlie clean my floor" you plug him in, he charges himself and then you can set a schedule in which
Charlie just wakes up, he maps the entire floor space of your house and an hour or so later
he's back in the charging bay with a full container of dust and other, you know,
detritus that's on your house floor.
If you're a clean freak and a lazy one like me
then this little robotic vacuum cleaner is gonna change your life.
Favorite humans,
this is really hard and whenever we do these videos
this for me is the hardest part because I have so many favorite humans,
it's really hard to choose one. Chris Ramsey. He is a magician out of Montreal, Quebec.
He has a really cool channel in which he does like magic tricks and reviews and
reactions to bad magic which I found very funny,
but overall he's just a super nice guy.
He's a super talented magician,
some of the things that he did in front of me with his magic tricks were absolutely mind-boggling
so head over to his channel, tell him we sent you and check out some magic because
magic does exist.
So for my favorite human of the month it goes to my friend Dany from Spatial Solutions
she is basically a Feng Shui
organizer I would say, although she's not really traditional Feng Shui,
she kind of combines a combination of the konmari method
which is made famous by Marie Kondo
which is basically a Japanese author who recommends
removing things from your life to make it more minimal and then setting up your stuff in a very efficient way
so you never have anything out of place and your life becomes more simple.
I recently worked with Dany to organize my house and she's done a great job
so if you live in the LA area, I highly recommend checking her out and working with her.
My favorite souvenirs, my favorite memories
which I have organized into a gallery of
photography which is available
for print and you can share some of my favorite memories
and my favorite photos from around the world and from years of
travel and have it hanging in your, you know, in your house or your apartment.
This is one of the photos that I took of Marco in India. I printed it for him and gave it to him for Christmas
but there are many many more photos from many many more of our trips
available in my gallery,
so if you go to alexthevagabond.darkroom.tech, I will leave a link in the description box,
you can check out the collection of my favorite photographs from around the world and
take one of our souvenirs home with you too.
Okay so for souvenirs
I'm gonna cheat and mention a couple things within the same umbrella, basically cooking.
Cooking is a great souvenir
you can go to a country and learn how to cook something
and bring home a recipe that will keep on giving long after you're back
I recently went to Spain and did a trip to the Basque Country
and Sevilla and Mallorca to learn about Spanish cooking
And if you haven't seen those videos, you can click on the card up here to watch them now.
So after that trip
I went to Fez and brought home some spices to make tagines and all sorts of other awesome things.
You can get lost buddies here at home nowadays with globalized trade,
but there's nothing better than bringing spices back from far away
that is what is the underpinning of our entire global society,
everything started with going somewhere else to buy spices you couldn't get here,
so it's a very old thing,
it's nothing new but it's a great way to bring something home from another country.
Sticking with the food theme in podcasts
I'm gonna recommend Food: A Culinary History of the World, which is produced by The Great Courses.
You've probably seen The Great Courses in like NatGeo or some sort of magazine. It's pretty old-school,
they have basically DVD courses, but this is a podcast and it's amazing. It's taught by this professor named
Ken Albala and he is a professor of food studies here in California.
This podcast basically deconstructs a lot about where food comes from,
it's absolutely fascinating. It's more of a class than a podcast. There's like over two dozen episodes.
It starts with ancient
hunter-gatherers, moves through Judaism through medieval Christianity through the Arab worlds through
Hinduism and all sorts of different influences of food up to the present moment.
It's fascinating if you're into food or into history, you'll love it.
I am NOT a huge
podcaster but what I have recently got into is Audible. I
love reading but I find that I don't have a ton of time to do it
but I do have a lot of
passive time whether I'm driving or doing chores or whatever it is
exercising where I can actually listen to books and
consume them much faster than if I were to actually read it.
And I know it's different. The act of reading is very nice
I enjoy, you know, flipping a page as much as the next person but
there's something that is unique about listening and I think that in this day and age
listening is a skill that we all need to practice and we all need to try to implement more in our daily lives
so having someone read a book that you're interested in to you via audible is a pretty good solution.
For television, I'm recommending the Zen diaries of Garry Shandling on HBO. It's a two-part documentary
produced by Judd Apatow about the director's
former mentor Garry Shandling who is a very very famous comedian from the 70s and 1980s
but the documentary is really fascinating because Garry Shandling is a complex character
he's someone who struggled with depression and anxiety and he became very
spiritual in his way of dealing with that and talks a lot about stand-up comedy
and the rigors of that profession and hosting late-night television put on him.
When we're on the road
we don't get a lot of time to watch any television or any Netflix or any new series or movies or whatever
so when we're back in LA, when we're back home, I really do kind of take advantage of binge watching
series and I have done quite a bit of that lately. So it's very hard for me to choose a favorite show
but if I had to, I think I would recommend to all of you the show on Netflix called
Godless. 7 part miniseries, that is a Western but
the show is just so well done. The cinematography is
unreal, storyline is incredible. I won't spoil it for you,
all I'm gonna say is that Jeff Daniels, the actor who is usually known for his comedy,
he actually plays the main villain and he does such a great job of getting under your skin and
and and scaring you in a psychological way. I really like that
it has a clear beginning, middle and end and that it's a complete story.
They're not trying to make a second season,
it's a limited series. So if you have any free time, go check it out.
Okay. So for books as you know, I probably can't choose one
I've got tons of books and you know, I'm also doing the Marko book club over on my own channel
so if you haven't subscribed you go check that out, too, but for this month's book
I'm gonna be recommending a cookbook, the "4-hour chef" by Tim Ferriss.
This book is great for a couple of reasons: number one
It follows the slow carb diet, which is a way that I personally use to stay healthy by basically cutting out
carbohydrates and
Milk and sugar but more generally I think that this book approaches how to cook better than any other cookbook.
Most cookbooks are focused on a theme or a style and you just have to jump in and start learning.
This book literally starts at day one for someone who doesn't know anything about anything.
Timothy tells you what sort of utensils to buy for your kitchen, what sort of
food you should have stock in your pantry
and then it walks you through from starting with a very simple dish all the way up
to molecular gastronomy.
So if you don't know how to cook buy the 4-hour chef and you will thank me for it later.
Favorite book "The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck" by Mark Manson
Now the title alone is enough to catch your eyes and perk up your ears, but there is some really solid
philosophy behind this book and the philosophy is that in this modern world, in this day and age, all of us
give way too many Fs about way too many things
and that is negatively affecting our lives. This book really helps
you take a step back, reevaluate
yourself, your current situation, your career, your life and
decide what are the things, what are the Fs that you really need to give and
what are the most important things in your life.
Last but not least clothing item. For clothing
I'm gonna recommend a hat because most of you asked me about my hats but not one that you'll expect this spring
I'm recommending the beret. Quick history about the beret. A lot of people say that it's French.
The reality is the beret comes from the Basque Country where it's called a txapela.
Basque people wear it like this,
soldiers wear it like this, girls wear something like this. The beret started in the Basque country
but it came to France because the Basque country spills over into France and there are French Basques and
it was popularized during the Paris Commune of 1871 when it was associated with being a revolutionary.
Guys are wearing it much less than girls.
Our girls are definitely wearing it in red, beige, whatever color but whatever color you rock it in,
I say, don't be afraid to wear the beret. It's super cool. You have my approval at the very least.
I'll be real with you ladies and gentlemen out there when I'm not traveling and when I'm not on camera
I'm almost always in board shorts and sandals or sweatpants and a hoody. But what I have found
lately, this was given to me for my birthday: Allbirds. They're all
wool.
Basically sneakers, but they're designed to be worn without socks
they're clean enough to be like a smart casual look, but they're extremely comfortable.
So if you're in the market for a comfy new pair of sneakers that you can just throw on
without thinking too much
These are the ones.
All right, ladies and gents. Hopefully you enjoyed that video.
We need to do this more often, we should.
We need to sit down with you guys and girls out there
and share our favorite things and it has been way too long.
So we're gonna make it more of a priority to at least hit a favorites video every season. Okay
Yeah, let us know what else you want us to do in the favorite video
and if you guys want to check out anything we mentioned in this video,
there are links down below in the info box.
So if you'd like to give it a thumbs up,
share with your travel buddies and subscribe if not already
and turn on notifications.
Alright in the meantime remember stay curious keep exploring and we will see you on the road.
Peace.