Playa today is not exactly a small fishing village, but neither is it the Las Vegas-style high-rise strip that Cancun has become.
To reach it you walk along a low-rise strip out of 1960s Las Vegas where exuberantly finned Cadillacs are parked up at the roadside, and then past the blackjack and roulette tables of a cavernous casino, filled with all the chandeliered luxury of 50 years ago.
We're in 'NuLu' a rapidly rising strip full of bars and restaurants in the northeast of the city.
A bank-owned condo in a luxury high-rise, stripped of its fixtures, was purchased for $1.35 million in 2006 and is now in foreclosure at $599,900.
Downtown Flushing, with its pedestrians, stores and traffic all jammed together like commuters on a rush-hour subway train, is very different from the tidy, low-rise commercial strip in Kew Gardens Hills, a couple of miles to the south.
The past half decade has seen the rise of stripped down mumble-core auteurs, improvising small scale stories that use the latest in digital filmmaking to remove the layer of abstraction that filmmaking creates between audience and story.
It lies about 300 miles east of Acapulco, but there are no bunched-up high-rise hotel strips to mar the scenery, just soft sands, clear ocean, striking cliffs and dense forest.
It was chilly when we started, at 8 a.m., but as the sun rose, we stripped down to T-shirts.
Like his father, John Kennedy loved Nevada's wide-open fiscal and sexual ethos, and the close parallel between the meteoric rise of the Strip and his own political career was hardly a coincidence.
Halfway between kitschy Key Largo and commercial Key West, and barely a 90-minute drive from Miami, I expected high-rise hotels and strip malls.
See articleTension between Israel and the Palestinian authorities in the Gaza Strip rose after two Palestinian militants attacked the Nahal Oz border crossing, where fuel is carried from Israel into the strip, killing two Israelis.
