In New York the other week I had beers with a friend – Matt was the Frugal Traveler for the New York Times – who told me he had had an argument recently with a woman who claimed, not very originally, that travel broadens and opens people’s minds.
“More people are traveling now than ever before in history,” Matt told her, “and around the world there is an increase in authoritarianism, nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiments, and racism.”
Of course, there’s always the possibility that all of those things would be greater if people didn’t travel. Evelyn Waugh was once approached by a woman who had witnessed his famously curt behavior and expressed surprise that someone who called himself a Catholic would act so rudely.
“Imagine,” Waugh told her, “how much worse I’d be if I weren’t a Catholic.”
It’s banned books week, which is encouraging. Aldous Huxley worried about a world in which books had become so insignificant they weren’t worth banning.
I’m off on a little road trip, culminating Thursday with a conversation about my memoir at The Lynx, the Gainesville bookstore started by Lauren Groff in support of banned books. Back here next Monday.
PS: My book is not banned.
Growing up in New Jersey, I would sometimes take a bus into Manhattan, step out of Port Authority, and just wander for the day. It took me years to get into a museum because the streets were my museum – endlessly fascinating and educational. It was in New York that I developed my love of walking city streets.
Nobody counted steps back then but last Wednesday in Manhattan I did 14,000. Many of them were in pursuit of a place for lunch. Or, to be more accurate, the place for lunch. I have an ideal restaurant in my head – for all meals when traveling – and I always suspect that it’s right around the corner. This is workable in small towns, where options are limited; in New York, where places to eat almost outnumber pigeons, the search can be endless. And immensely annoying to companions. Hania wasn’t with me; hence the marathon.
It started at Rockefeller Center, where I asked a man if there was a good deli nearby. My heart was on a New York sandwich – corned beef, pastrami – in a bustling, well-lit place filled with New Yorkers.
He pointed me in the direction of a place called Toasties, which didn’t sound promising and wasn’t. It was full of office workers standing by a counter waiting to pick up their orders. I wanted sit down, so I walked out and headed down Madison Avenue, where I found more of the same. One deli was actually named Grab & Go.
I turned west into the theater district, making sure to stay east of Broadway and the tourist swarms. Here there were more takeaways, many of them Asian and interesting, but my hotel – in the vicinity – was fine for sleeping but not for eating. Occasionally I’d pass a nice restaurant – Greek, Italian – that was romantic and empty. Here I would have stopped had Hania been with me.
It was now after 1 pm and I was flagging. I remembered the Irish place next to my hotel, which I had heard the receptionist recommend to the couple who’d checked in before me.
It was dark but busy, and I was sat at a table close enough to its neighbors that I could eavesdrop. My waitress spoke with an Irish accent. My Reuben sandwich was perfect, just the right size, not overstuffed, and came with thick, crispy, delicious French fries. I was having lunch in New York, unquestionably, and it tasted even better because of the hike I’d taken to get to it.
Here is a link to the talk I gave last Wednesday at the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York City:
We had lunch last week with friends who recently returned from vacation in Poland. Both were born in China and have lived in the U.S. for many years; in their retirement, they have become avid travelers.
In Poland, they were surprised by the scarcity of Chinese tourists. In their previous travels – to Switzerland, Italy, even Hungary and Czechia – they had found busloads of people speaking Mandarin.
Then they thought about the places they had gone in Poland. In Warsaw, they had visited the Warsaw Uprising museum – on the 81st anniversary of its start, when thousands of Varsovians took to the streets to commemorate the ill-fated revolt against the Nazi occupiers. In Gdansk, they had spent time at the Solidarity museum, dedicated to the free trade union that was born in August 1980 as a challenge to the communist government and that led, eventually, to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain. Qian pointed out that June 4, 1989 – the date of the first free elections in Poland since prewar independence– is also the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre. There were no Chinese tour groups in Poland, she decided, because their government didn’t want them getting any ideas.
The funicular accident that killed 17 people in Lisbon yesterday hit home for me. Lisbon is one of my favorite cities, the one, I always say, in which I became a travel writer. In 1989 it was the last stop on an Iberian tour that was my first assignment as a newspaper travel editor. In Madrid, Barcelona, Seville I had had the typical tourist experiences, moments that would do nothing to distinguish my story from those of other travel writers. In Lisbon, I called a friend of a friend, a poet, and spent a long evening with him and his girlfriend that ended in a dive listening to fado music. “It smells of Lisbon,” Casimiro translated one song for me, “it smells of flowers and the sea.” That night I discovered the secret of travel writing: you experience, as best you can, in the short time allotted you, the life of a local.
A few years ago I returned to Lisbon, this time with Hania, and stayed in an Airbnb just steps from the funicular.