Yesterday I took Lyft to my doctor’s office and on the way there I reminisced with my Turkish driver about my trip to his country in 1997 and on the way home I heard from my Syrian driver about his forced exile from his homeland. As we entered River Reach, I pointed out the boat-lined canals that make it an island.
“Do you have a boat?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “I’m a writer. I don’t have the money.”
He asked me if I’d read Noam Chomsky.
Later it occurred to me that if I can’t travel abroad this summer I could just ride Lyft around town.
CBS's morning shows were all over the travel beat this past weekend. On Saturday viewers learned that Paul Theroux lives in a kind of Hawaiian Hemingway house, with geese instead of cats, and on Sunday they were shown a homebound Rick Steves playing taps at sunset from the deck of his house in Edmunds, WA, a ritual he performs every evening to the appreciative applause of his neighbors.
Jennifer Brady, the American tennis player originally from Mechanicsburg, PA, has earned a spot in the women's final of the Australian Open.
"Mechanicsburg - that storied town, my own private Mayberry! Even today it is difficult for me to recognize as a real grandmother anyone who doesn't live in a place with stout corner churches and red-brick sidewalks and gravelly alleys that all seem to lead to Rakestraw's Ice Cream, whose double-dip cones we always somehow found room for after Grandma's fried chicken and graham cracker pie. Mechanicsburg conditioned me early to expect glad rewards at the end of a long journey."
- from the introduction to A Way to See the World
Trinidad's Carnival, which was cancelled this year, has multiple personalities that reveal themselves throughout the celebration. This description of the winding down is from A Way to See the World:
"On Ariapita Street, the steel band Exodus took the lead. The soothing, unamplified music of pans. Men and women in the garb of sailors, many of them older, soft-shoed it up front. They set feet to tapping in lawn chairs strung along the sidewalk, and straw hats bobbing on wooden porches. They passed, with a certain defiance, Lapeyrouse Cemetery. The setting sun elongated their shadows as the strains of "Heavy Roller" - by the great Lord Kitchner - tickled the air.
"That night other steel bands roamed the streets of Port-of-Spain, their fatigued supporters shuffling behind them. The sound of pans splintered off in a dozen directions, like the light carried by candles from a Greek Easter Eve mass."
Published yesterday: My story about Miami's finest and most overlooked street: https://www.qgdigitalpublishing.com/publication/?m=63081&i=693114&p=18
Recently, in a lovely New York Times essay on Paris during the pandemic, Roger Cohen called the French capital the "most northern of southern cities.”
I’ve never thought of Paris as a southern city yet I guess I know what he means: it’s a city of outdoor cafes and a few well-used parks. But I wonder if he’s ever been to Krakow. In Poland’s southern city (which is still north of Paris), architectural influences range from the Moors to the Italian Renaissance. Instead of monotonous gray, facades are a mix of earth tones and pastels. People outnumber cars on the narrow streets, and nuns scurry about as if in Vatican City. In summer, Market Square becomes a showcase for la dolce vita, its café terraces filled with tourists and locals who, it almost surprises you to hear, speak fluent Polish.