Theme: Travel

I went to Albania to try and get back with an ex-girlfriend, though that is only half the story. The trip had been planned in advance; Anna, a Swedish girl I had been seeing for about eighteen months, gave me as a birthday present a plane ticket to Tirana to accompany her on a visit to her parents — her father was then working there for the EU. That was six weeks before we were due to go but the day after the birthday the relationship came to what seemed to me to be an abrupt end.Read more

What was more dazzling, my view of the Bosphorus with the Aghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque or the conversation? In Istanbul last month I rediscovered what I treasure whenever I go abroad: the well-roundedness and cosmopolitanism of intellectuals in comparison with whom we here appear narrow and specialized. Read more

"A book like mine, which outs the Germans as anti-Semites," Tenenbom said with an indulgent smile, as he took a drag from his cigarette, "this sort of a book, as several people I know have assured me, should never have been published in Germany."Read more

An academic career has a peculiar arc to it. When one is young, and first begins travelling around to various cities for conferences, it is as if one is Axl Rose or something, on tour, in hotels, where ordinary morality does not apply. One feels larger than life, and worthy of a biography or two.Read more

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Many travelers still seek solitude among the tourists, the luxury to communicate personally with the ruins. They long to leave their minds on idle, while they enter the vista before them, undisturbed by the other souls striving for the same illusion. I often feel this contradiction of being alone with others when I travel.Read more

At the end of the meal, I’d given the waiter CUC $80 and received CUC $10 in change, and as I stood there with the ten-peso note in my hand Antonio grabbed and pocketed it. I shot him a confused look, and he responded with a half shrug that seemed calibrated somewhere between What’s it matter? and You know the score. Read more

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There are two plaques at the entrance to the Machu Picchu sanctuary. The first reads, in part, Hiram Bingham, scientific discoverer of Machu Picchu in 1911. The association of the word ‘discoverer’ with Bingham is stretching it. This is undoubtedly why the author of the plaque thought to tone it down with the adjective ‘scientific.’Read more

Near Land’s End in Cornwall, the westernmost point of the island of Great Britain, where the rocks and cliffs of terra firma put up a heroic resistance to the incessant waves of the Atlantic, the landscape ends with some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet.Read more

When I moved to the Hudson Valley from the desert southwest, where I had made my home for five years, I knew I would miss those wide western skies—a cliché, I know, but a good one—under which I could hike for hours and not see another person. Read more

If one noteworthy thing has ever occurred in my hard and insipid life, it was to have been one of the passengers on that extra flight, the one from Boa Vista to São Paulo. Read more

In the spring of 1990 I packed up as much of my life in London as would fit into a suitcase and four large plywood boxes and flew to Seattle to set up house. It was a selfish and irregular move. Read more

I have a good poker face because I am half-dead inside. My particular combo of slack features, negligible affect, and soulless gaze had helped my game ever since I started playing 20 years ago.Read more

Every year brings a stream of new works on Paris—always an appealing subject for writers and film makers. Last spring’s output was exceptional in several regards. Read more

To say one is missing is to talk of perspective. You say, she is not with me. You say, he is not where I want him. There are footprints on the trail, & they lead somewhere you are nervous to follow.Read more

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Before the Danes took it over, Greenland’s inhabitants have ranged from the Paleo Eskimos to the Saqaaq, the Dorset culture, the Thule. Read more

In the lobby of the cinema in Istanbul's Nisantasi district, salon-tanned kids stretch out on sofas overlooking the lights of the city, before a blue-lit cocktail bar.Read more