Category: Travel
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Something marvelous / Some monstrous thing
The highway leading out of Mexico City to the pyramids at Teotihuacan is eight lanes, four to a side, that wrap around the subway and then the railroad and are braced by inner and then outer city buses. The peseros run on diesel, still, and are both charming – boxy and enameled in cream and…
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Whether with images or words or sound
A thin strip of sand-edged road, fast eroding, separates the Vineyard Sound from a large salt pond the Wapanoaug named Sengekontacket, place where the brook flows. Here, the cormorants scritch scritch from the opposite bank, and a flock of blue-white gulls rear up in a wild, undulating fracas, but the water is still and temperate,…
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The Fourth Mom
The sky and sea were the same color, lapis shot through with malamute steel, an open mouth with a hangnail moon under which I mostly drifted, though occasionally I stood to get the full, battering force of the incoming tide. Yards away, my friend was chanting up at the sky, “flourish,”relish,” some pleasant, sybillant incantation…
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whether to call myself I or she
One Monday evening before the clocks change, I fly to Florence to attend the wedding of an old college friend. I’d arranged everything at the very last minute, and travel alone and somewhat circuitously, leaving Boston just before midnight on a Monday and arriving in Florence some eighteen hours later. None of this is interesting…
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Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is
I have an office now. A genuine room of one’s own. It has walls of planked pine painted periwinkle blue and a ceiling that only just clears the top of my head. Most of the walls in the house are stone plaster, meaning you can’t just go hang up any old thing — but not…
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All Languor Leads to Colonialism, or Something
I found out I was pregnant the day I got back from Portugal. As a result, the trip holds a special sort of poignancy, fine and silken and sun-bleached. While my pregnancy was its own sort of slow, that vacation was the last times in my life I was ever truly languid. It was also…
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When It Lifts, or Some Scattered Thoughts on Summertime in Newfoundland
I bought my copy of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News in a bookstore in New Orleans’ French Quarter (‘ol’ E. Annie,’ the owner called her), right before I had to leave for the airport. I don’t remember what drew me to the book (I had not heard of ‘ol E. Annie, nor seen the film…
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Exhaust, Water Buffalo, and Ye Olde Lakeside Gentility: Stories of Running in Vietnam
Vietnam was my first really far-flung trip, and my bravest one – not because of the near-antipodal distance or the language barrier or the constant ribboning rush of motorbikes, but because it threatened, and sometimes succeeded, to fuck with my daily exercise. In the fall and early winter of 2007, I lived in Paris. If…
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Wake Me Up Before You Glow, Girl (or, Coffee in Vietnam)
My god, the coffee in Vietnam! Iced, that is. Here’s how you have it: Wake at 6:30 or so (because that is when you normally wake up. just kidding!). Dress yourself in whatever, something airy, not too strappy (conservative dressers here). Spring out into a back alley milky with sunlight. The alley is not yet…
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Lime for Days, and More Layers than a 10 Generation Matryoshka (or, What We Ate in Vietnam)
Vietnamese food is typified by bright, fresh flavors and an abundance of textures, jumbled like a yardsale or neatly layered, depending on the dish and the eater’s predilection for stirring. The lightness and price point – $1-3 per meal – is conducive to experimentation: we tended to order by sight or smell or queue size,…
éclaircissements 