Travel

I arrived in Berlin just in time for the cottonwoods. Their seeds drifted through the air in such numbers that it looked as though God had taken a giant dandelion, blown on it, and forgotten where the fluff landed. The fluff collected along curbs and in doorways. Little tumbleweeds of summer. A breeze would gather them up and send them skittering down the street again. Every city has something it would rather not talk about, but Berlin seems incapable of changing the subject.

I’d avoided Paris since I was twenty-four, when a night of too many beers ended with me peeing a hotel’s feather bed. It seemed like the sort of city that deserved a better memory than that. Nearly thirty years later, Paris finally got its revenge. I don’t speak a word of French. When I get nervous, I sometimes default to bad Spanish. Still, everyone was kind. The city opened itself up to me in a way I hadn’t expected. Then, somewhere between the museums, cafés, and wrong tur

Kraków is tricky, especially shopping at the flea market where the treasures of those slaughtered are now available for a bargain. The Nazis didn’t obliterate this pristine Medieval town because they chose it as the General Government, an Eastern outpost of the Third Reich. And they built their largest and most efficient extermination camps on the outskirts, the place where they perfected murdering thousands of people daily. Without diminishing any number of horrifying atroci

Buffet sushi in Bogota. Raise your hand if you think that’s a good idea. What? No one? I’m always so careful with what I eat on trips. Cheese and french fries and scrambled eggs. Oh, and pasta with cheese. You can find that stuff almost anywhere, right? But while I was reading up on my upcoming trip, in some random article with a throwaway sentence, it said that Bogota water wasn’t so bad. You know how you can latch on to some fact and it becomes your override for common sens

The British colonized Api Api, an exotic port on the South China Sea and named it Jesselton at the dawn of the 20th century. During WWII, the Japanese seized control for its strategic geography until the Allied Forces bombed it into rubble and what was left, the Japanese burned to destroy any evidence. Only four structures stand today from its pre-war period. And that goes a long way of explaining why this country is still very much at the tail end of development. Sidewalks a