Tomorrow will mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It had great significance for me, having lived east of it for two and a half years. Also, as a recently-hired travel editor, I knew the thrill of a suddenly opened up world.
David Owen, speaking on NPR about his book Volume Control, said that as our hearing deteriorates we start to miss high frequency sounds, which means that in conversations consonants disappear.
So, visit Poland while you’re young.
The last night of our trip we stayed in a cheap motel whose doors all faced the parking lot where, returning to our room after dinner, we heard a loud altercation between a man and a woman. As we were leaving the next morning it occurred to me that one of the pleasures of such places is that you wake up in the morning thankful you weren’t murdered during the night.
Since the phrase “to travel like a local” is now in disfavor, perhaps we can replace it with “to travel like an expat.”
Speaking of which, I'm off for a week to a city that John F. Kennedy described as mixing "the charm of the North and the industry of the South."
Once again, The New York Times Magazine’s “The Voyages Issue” contained no travel writing. The five subjects – Namibia, Virginia, Borneo, Norway, Singapore – were all presented through photographs and a short introductory text. It seems less a testament to the power of images than a rejection of the beauty and the importance of language.
The company that gave birth to the age of tourism, Thomas Cook, perished in the age of overtourism.