The article in Sunday's New York Times Style/Travel magazine (what do you call that thing?) about New Orleans was written by a woman who had moved there from Manhattan with her husband, as if the presence of former New Yorkers in the city was what made it worthy of coverage.
My dismay over the changing of the guard at Conde Nast Traveler is more professional than personal. Klara Glowczewska had a nice long run, as did I in a far less luxurious branch of the business. When mine came to an end I wrote to her and proposed a column reflecting on the world and Americans’ often touching, sometimes comical, efforts to get to know it (a monthly version of the biweekly column that I had been able to pull off for 19 years in the Sunday Travel section of a midsized newspaper in Florida). She declined, saying that front-of-the-book space was extremely tight, the front-of-the-book being the part of the magazine devoted to products that often had only a tenuous connection to travel. This came from a woman who, in her spare time, translated Ryszard Kapuscinski. Now we wait to see how the magazine will fare under the direction of a woman who, in her past life, edited Martha Stewart.
The nostalgia that normally accompanies a return to a former home is magnificently tempered when that home was formally communist. (One of many lines cut from my story about Warsaw that appears in the August-September issue of National Geographic Traveler.)
Every time I return to the city it looks better than it did the last time I saw it, with the exception of the carved wooden figures at Cepelia. The themes are still the same - angels, saints, nativity scenes, wedding parties, Christ worrying - but the execution seems a bit mass produced. They've lost a little of the naive quality that made them so attractive. I'm glad I collected when the collecting was good.
Overnight flight from Miami to Frankfurt, sitting in the last row of the next-to-last section, just by the galley where, when the flight attendants weren't banging carts, passengers were stretching their legs and vocal chords.
9 a.m. breakfast in Frankfurt - all the tables around us held tall glasses of beer, delivered by a cheerful waitress from Thailand.
Arrived in Warsaw at 1:30. Hania's new brown suitcase was the first to fall onto the luggage carousel. It had bright new ribbons I assumed were tied by TSA after they opened it and found nothing suspicious inside.
Her cousin Jurek and his wife Monika took us to their apartment in Muranow, a block from the new Jewish museum. I carried Hania's heavy suitcase - no elevator - up to the third floor. We were shown around the apartment, then Hania went to get something from her suitcase which, it turned out, was not her suitcase. So I carried the heavy thing down two flights of stairs and we all drove back to Chopin Airport as if having quickly decided Poland wasn't for us.
Inside the airport we explained the problem to the man at the information booth. With a wry smile, he gave us a number to call. Shortly, a man in a tie appeared and walked us through a passageway that led back to the luggage carousels. He disappeared into the lost luggage room and reappeared with Hania's suitcase. We gave him the one we had taken.
The next morning we woke up to sunshine, turned on the radio, and heard a man singing: "Vamos a la playa."
I had dinner the other night with a fellow travel writer who had recently taken her niece to Key West.
"There were all these Russian girls on bicycles," she said.
I told her about the story I wrote several years ago about the Eastern European workforce on the island. But she had noticed something I hadn't.
"The way they ride bicycles," she said with awe. "No American girls can ride bicycles like that."