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I was born and raised in a beach town in San Diego by Mexican-born parents.
I have lots of family still in Mexico. This is the most famous member of my extended family.
I went to school in Boston, as they say, and studied Astrophysics. I and have lived in both San Francisco and Manhattan.
In 2008 I was married in Gibraltar to a Lisboeta.
From 2008-2011 we lived in Bloomsbury, London, UK.
From 2011-2017 we lived in the South Cotswolds.
As of January 2018, we live in Amsterdam

My legal name - like on my birth certificate and thus passports, etc - is Richard. My parents actually named me Ricardo but nobody at the US hospital I was born in spoke Spanish and my parents didn't speak much English. So, a nurse decided I was Richard.

When people ask me where I'm from, I say "San Francisco." It is the city I grew up in, in many ways. I first moved there in 1992 and have lived in (in order): the Haight, Hayes Valley, Pacific Heights, Potrero Hill, the Marina, Nob Hill, the Mission and Bernal Heights.

My partner is an Antiquarian Bookseller and an Art History nerd.
She is also a really good cook.

I am eligible for 4 passports (US, UK, Mexico, Portugal/EU)

I read a lot. I can read English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French. I am always improving my Japanese (JLPT N2-N3). I am also currently learning Dutch by immersion (B2 at the moment)

Languages are not difficult to learn over a lifetime. I learned English and Spanish as a child, French in high school, Italian in college and then Portuguese only after moving to Europe in 2008, then Japanese started in 2012 and Dutch since 2018. During the first couple years of a language from my experience you feel dumb and like you will never advance but in the third year or so there's a sort of breakthrough where everything builds on itself and you start to "think" in that language instead of translate.

My secret to keeping up and even expanding language skills is to read detective novels. Here's my favorites:
Spanish: Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett and her Petra Delicado series set in Barcelona. (Although I also read widely in Spanish, from Vila-Matas to Saer to Villoro and many others.)
Portuguese: Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza and his Espinosa series set in Rio de Janeiro
Italian: Augusto De Angelis and his De Vincenzi series set in Milan. Italian detective novels really are among the best right now, especially the Sellerio imprint.
French: Simenon of course but also Fred Vargas
Japanese: Currently reading some Edogawa Ranpo. Would love to read Soji Shimada

Other blogs:
Stroud Walks - a photo documentary of many of our favorite walks around the Stroud area in the Cotswolds.
The Eclectic British Museum - We used to live a block from the British Museum. These are some of my favorite, odd objects in the museum
The Fate of the Universe and other things at my old blog Banubula
BashoBashoBasho: My attempted translations of Basho poems