Category: Travel
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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,…
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Cars and Drivers
Publication: Worth magazine The road trip has been an American passion since 1903, when automobile pioneers Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall Crocker lit out cross-country from San Francisco to New York in a cherry-red Winton. More than a century later the lure of the open road remains, but the cars are faster, safer and a…
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