“I’m looking for a woman named Grazyna,” I said to the receptionist of our motel in the north of Florida.
“Is she the one with the fantastic accent?” the young receptionist asked, before quickly adding: “They all have fantastic accents.”
A short while later Grazyna and Hania and I sat talking on the front terrace.
“Where y’all from?” a guest exiting the office asked.
“Poland,” Hania said.
“So how come you’re the only county over there doin' things right? France and Germany are just allowing the Muslin invasion to continue.”
Hania and Grazyna sat mostly silent while the man ranted, in part because they disagreed with his assessment and in part because they were in shock that a bigoted Southerner knew about their country and its nationalistic government.
"Are you a member?" the cashier at the Tropic Cinema asked me.
"No," I said, "we're just visiting. Is there a senior discount?"
"Just a member discount," she replied. "Everybody in Key West is a senior."
"A 'gentleman's club,'" Hania said as we walked past Teasers on Duval Street.
"I've been there," I said. "With a former poet laureate of the United States."
Ever since I was an English major in college, I have wanted to have a connection to Evelyn Waugh: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-travel-makes-us-smarter?ref=wrap
You exit the airport and call your friend, who suggests you meet her at the Rosenbach Museum and Library on Delancey Place. Just as you arrive, you see your friend crossing the street. The two of you make your way past tables set up on the closed-off street and take seats in front of a lectern positioned on a stoop. Sunlight filters through the sycamore trees. A local actor, in a colorful shawl, emerges from the doorway behind the lectern and proceeds to read, with humor and verve, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Joyce’s Ulysses.
Note: Such an arrival is only possible in Philadelphia on June 16.
Travel, at least on TV, has been reduced to an exercise in eating, narrowing one of the most broadening activities into an excuse to fill our stomachs. Contrarily, Anthony Bourdain used food to tell us about the culture, the politics, the human heart.