I was talking to a very wealthy man the other day about his trip to Italy. He and his wife were sitting at a cafe, in some small city, when a singer with a guitar appeared to serenade the customers. The couple, impressed, hired the man for the day and had him walk behind them playing music as they went.
Where to go in 2018? Oh, just go back to where you went last year.
Watching the insipid Weekend in Havana last night I did learn one new thing: You always toast with your left arm (faster to the heart).
A German friend emailed the other day to tell me that she’s going to Mallorca to celebrate her 50th birthday. She felt a little sheepish, she said, because the island is so popular with her compatriots that it’s sometimes called “the 17th state.” (She wondered if she were the only German who hadn’t been there yet.) This delighted me because it gave credence to my claim in The Joys of Travel that the Germans are the world’s greatest travelers. The closest thing we Americans have to a 51st state is not an island that we flock to but one that, as Doug Mack suggests in his excellent new book The Not-Quite States of America, we colonized.
Sunday I met a man whose business used to take him to Jordan. One day visiting the American embassy in Amman, he noticed a group of people gathered in a room reading Bibles. He asked if they were part of a Bible study group, though it seemed an odd thing for the embassy to host.
"Oh no," he was told, "they're just trying to figure out where to go for the weekend."