Friday we drove with friends to Palm Beach, where we visited The Breakers and then strolled Worth Avenue. The place is always something of a shock – the pristine streets, the manicured lawns, the gleaming mansions – and I tried to imagine what it must look like to the visiting president of a war-torn country in Eastern Europe.
Yesterday I remembered my first Thanksgiving away from home – in France. I was spending the year learning French, at a language institute in Aix-en-Provence, and eating my meals in the dreary university cafeteria. The meal that Thursday, as I recall, was liver and lentils. As usual, I filled up on baguette and cheese (La Vache Qui Rit) and, on the long walk back to my dorm, treated myself to a Toblerone bar, biting off each triangle, one by one, and then letting the chocolate dissolve between my tongue and the roof of my mouth, without any further contact with my teeth. That was the year I discovered the perfect diet plan: Walk a very long distance to a very bad meal and then walk back.
Yesterday I arrived at Philadelphia International Airport, for my flight home, looking for something to read. I went into a small bookstore, checked the magazines in an all-purpose store, and browsed the magazines at a kiosk in the concourse. Each carried the same two “serious” magazines: The New Yorker (which I subscribe to) and The Economist (which I bought). There was no Atlantic, no Harper’s, no New Republic. Though People and The Oprah Magazine were prominent in all locations.
Philadelphia is a major city with excellent colleges and universities in its vicinity: Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Swarthmore, Penn. Students at these institutions are probably too busy with course work to read periodicals, but presumably a number of graduates still live in the area. Wouldn’t they appreciate more stimulating reading? Or is it assumed that, when traveling, everyone’s IQ drops a few notches?
The cool weather this week has been good preparation for our trip tomorrow to the cold northeast. Will be back here next Wednesday, or Thursday - depending on flights.
There can be no better illustration of the disdain editors now have for travel writing than the appearance in the New York Times Magazine’s special Voyages issue of a story about a three-day retreat in an all-dark room.
Yesterday the New York Times Magazine published its special Voyages issue. The lead story was about a father-and-son trip to the Badlands and it began with a scene of the son spilling gasoline on himself at a gas station. This was followed by the father’s description of the boy’s personality. Turning the page, I read the father’s reminiscence of a mugging he'd experienced at the age of 13, an event that, clearly, had left its mark.
The next story was about a three-day retreat in an all-dark, sensory deprivation chamber.
The next story, about the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, might have been interesting had it not been a photographic essay.
The final story was about a skateboarding park in Sweden that had been imported from Philadelphia.
So I finished the magazine knowing only a very little more about the world than I had when I started it.