I watched the semi-final of the European Championship - Germany vs. France - at a bar in Old City, sitting next to two citizens of Switzerland. Severin was from the German-speaking part and Caroline was from the French-speaking part. I assumed that their loyalties would be divided along linguistic lines, but they were both rooting for France. Severin explained to me that Swiss Germans always support whoever is playing against Germany. Germany, during the current refugee crisis, has been a model of benevolence, but old animosities die hard.
They were in Philadelphia between visits to New York and Washington. I was glad they'd stopped in the least glamorous of the three, and they seemed to be as well. After Washington, Severin was heading back home to Zurich while Caroline was continuing on to Costa Rica, where she would add Spanish to her already impressive arsenal of languages. (She moved easily between English with me and German - and English - with Severin.) After Costa Rica she would travel on to South America, returning to the States in the spring.
I have a theory about big countries and small countries, and it is that the latter are often the more rewarding to visit. Their residents are less self-absorbed, more outward-looking, than those who are products of large, monolithic cultures, and as a result they're more open to outsiders. I wondered, sitting at the bar, if this same innate curiosity, and lack of arrogance, also make them better travelers.
I mentioned to Caroline that one of my favorite travel writers was Swiss: Nicolas Bouvier. She told me her high school in Geneva was named after him.
"Loafing around in a new world," Bouvier wrote in The Way of the World, "is the most absorbing occupation." Or even, sometimes, loafing around in an old, familiar one.
When people ask me my favorite place, Turkey is always among the handful of countries I name. I spent three happy weeks there in 1997; this passage about my visit to Selcuk is from my second book, A Way to See the World (2003):
"Nearby stood the train station, with its own cafe tucked under branches and a fountain where a girl, with a little red wagon full of empty plastic bottles, graciously motioned me to go ahead of her to get my drink. And here it was again: not just kindness, but that instinctive radar for detecting a stranger's need for it. I thought of the wine merchant in Cappadocia who opened a bottle to give me a taste, the woman in Ankara's old town who emerged from nowhere to hand me a warm loaf of bread, the van driver who made sure that I caught the right bus, the sweets seller who knew I wanted more nougat. ...Turkey was proving my theory that there are countries that treat you as a tourist and others - often the less celebrated ones - that receive you as a guest."
The automated check-in told me it was too early to check luggage, which was strange - I had arrived a little before 7 for an 8:30 flight - but, because I had no bags to check, I gave it little thought. When my boarding pass appeared, it didn't carry the desired, and customary, "Pre-TSA Screening," which was annoying.
Once through security, I walked down the corridor and checked the status of my flight. There was no JetBlue flight to Philadelphia at 8:30. There was no JetBlue flight anywhere at 8:30. This was strange, and worrisome. Anxiously, I dug in my bag for my printout and discovered, with a mixture of shock and alarm, that I had mistakenly booked a flight for 8:30 PM, a flight I could not take because I was traveling to give a talk at my alma mater the next morning and needed to arrive before 7 to obtain the key to the dorm room in which I was staying.
In two decades of booking flights for myself I had never confused AM and PM. I wandered about in that dream state we experience when something bad happens that we hope is a nightmare. Then I searched for a JetBlue agent not beseiged by passengers.
"I need help," I said plaintively to a bearded man at a dormant gate. I told him of my predicament, and he punched at his keyboard. There was a flight to Philadelphia at 1:10, he told me, and I could fly standby or pay $50 to guarantee a seat. I paid the $50.
I called Hania, who told me to take a taxi home. But that would mean spending even more money, and enduring another slog through security. I'm a travel writer, I told her, I can kill six hours at an airport, even Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International.
I found a quiet section, took a seat, and jotted down notes for my morning talk. I had been given a time limit of 10 minutes. (I was to be part of a panel.) Not wanting to draw attention by talking to myself, I took out my cellphone and, for ten minutes, delivered my talk as if having a conversation. A completely one-sided conversation.
The Q&A after a reading is like the figure skater's post-performance interview: unplanned for and out of one's control. I always think of things I should have said, for instance, to the man who asked what places were on my bucket list. I told him Russia (outside of St. Petersburg),and southern India, but before either of those places I would like to see Iran.
I’d been in downtown Los Angeles for three days and, like most conference attendees, I hadn’t seen much of downtown. Unlike most conference attendees, however, I had written about downtown, back in 2000, when I stayed at the Hotel Figueroa and every morning set out on foot – a small miracle in LA – to see the sights and interview sources, the principal one being Tom Gilmore, a property developer whose dream was to make downtown a vibrant, attractive place to live. He had already begun converting some of the lovely old office buildings into lofts.
So Sunday morning I headed off on foot again, past my old hotel now undergoing renovation, the Original Pantry Café (“Through a door that has no key, you will enter a cafe that has never closed.”) and, farther along, Engine Co. No. 28, a former firehouse-turned-restaurant that serves dishes inspired by foods from firehouses around the country.
The Central Library, an Art Deco masterpiece, and the Biltmore Hotel were two more personal favorites, the latter enlivened this sleepy Sunday morning by the shooting of a pilot for the TV series Training Day. I walked past actors playing dead in the street and police cars parked at odd angles next to manicured puddles of broken glass.
“How can you tell the real police from the actor police?” I asked a man in blue standing on the sidewalk. He pointed to his sleeve and explained that it lacked the official city seal. I thought he might say: “We’re better looking.”
Grand Central Market, a few blocks away, was no longer the visceral mercado it had been in 2000 – with bloody carcasses and hairy hooves – but you can still find, among the oyster bar and the Thai street food counter and the falafel joint and the German wurst place, a mole merchant and a maker of tacos who fills them with your choice of skin, tongue, heart, liver, kidney, snout, ears, or feet.
I crossed the street and walked into the Bradbury Building, continuing my tour of greatest hits, and found a tour guide telling his group about Tom Gilmore and how he’d revitalized the area around Spring Street. I headed over to Spring, recognizing what I thought was the building Gilmore had told me 16 years ago that he was going to live in, and found on the ground floor a rustic Mexican restaurant, a Belle Époque restaurant advertising evening jazz, and a gourmet chocolate shop that was offering free samples of chocolate chip cookies. It was part of a special Sunday promotion put on by neighborhood shops.
The farmers’ market on W. 5th Street was a weekly event, a pleasant young woman told me across a crate of lettuces. I didn’t linger, because it bordered a place called The Last Book Store and something about the name caused me to hurry inside. Large round columns rose to a two-story-high ceiling, crowded bookshelves formed a multi-veined arrow, and overstuffed couches furnished the center. I felt as if I had walked into a photograph from the series “The World’s Most Beautiful Bookstores.”
On the second floor I was greeted by a Dali-esque bookcase from which a dozen suspended, flopped-open volumes protruded, resembling cartoon drawings of birds in flight. Making my way to the travel section, I entered a tunnel created in part by an archway of books. It was like wandering through a dreamworld Powell’s.
By the time I emerged (from the store, not the tunnel), the farmers were packing up their market, so I headed back to Broadway and entered one of the old movie palaces, now the Catedral de la Fe. An evangelical service in Portuguese was in full swing. I found a seat in the back and settled in as if for a double feature.
"Where do you stand on the circumflex?" I asked our friend Jane, who was visiting from Ohio, where she teaches college students French.
"I'm for it," she said without hesitation, adding that she is always against spelling reform, and anything that distances a language from its history.
For me it's about aesthetics, and their ability to evoke. I don't want my three-star lodging in Paris to go from being an hôtel to a hotel.