Posts in: travel

Credit where it’s due: the Mobile Passport Control app was super-easy to set up (provided your passport or green card are more than 4 years from expiration) and cut down my entry at Dulles Airport by at least 30 minutes. I was pleasantly surprised.

Two good travel-adjacent articles that recently came out:

Here is Ganesh:

Travel is enormous fun. Besides that, it can be an educational top-up, if you arrive in a place with a foundation of reading. (And if you don’t over-index whatever you happen to observe in person.) But a connecting experience? A reminder of the essential oneness of humankind? If it were that, we should have expected national consciousness to recede, not surge, in the age of cheap flights, a dissolved Iron Curtain and a China that became porous in both directions. 

To explain this away, some will insist on the difference between crass “tourism” and real “travel”. Please. This has become a class distinction, nothing more, like that between “expats” and “immigrants”.

And here is Arnade:

It is primarily we intellectuals and elites who culture shop, picking and choosing what works best for us. That’s true in Europe and the US, where each group of elites is inoculated from the least admirable qualities. Well-to-do Americans can escape the banal landscapes, either through travel or by living in the exclusive US neighborhoods that share European qualities, and find belonging in communities formed from their careers that cross national and cultural boundaries. Highly motivated Europeans can move to America, or work in a large corporation and escape European provincialism, while not giving up the aesthetic and communal benefits it offers.

It is the ‘normies,’ working-class, back-row, or whatever you want to call them, who make up the vast majority of citizens, that are tethered to live within their culture. That isn’t who is engaged in this debate, but it is who it should be about, not us cultural chameleons.

I am writing this from Zürich where I have spent a lovely spring day flaneuring in between business meetings. So, yes.

“Through mutual understanding and good will the policy set forth by Richard Rush and Charles Bagot in this treaty has resulted in an unfortified boundary between Canada and the United States”

At Old Fort Niagara, with Toronto in the distance.

A large stone plaque overlooking Lake Ontario under a cloudy sky.

After getting an unexpected upgrade to United’s first class on a red-eye trip from San Diego to DC, I can report that a 4-and-a-half-hour flight is too short to get any meaningful rest no matter where you sit. The only bonus was the blanket.

Happy Friday! A few links for the week’s end:

Weekend mood (taken yesterday at the Norfolk Zoo)

A close-up of a blue and black lizard resting on a textured, rough piece of wood. The lizard’s front limbs are gripping the wood, with its claws visible.

Chris Arnade: Walking in Beijing

A great one today from Chris Arnade, about Walking in Beijing. I will quote a few paragraphs but there is much much more:

To someone who has been raised on horror stories written in foreign papers, there is a surprising anything-goes attitude in China, outside of a few institutions. The internet firewall is annoying, but everyone gets around it, and everyone knows everyone does. Very bad things do happen in China, but the overwhelming majority of people also go about their daily lives much like anyplace else, focusing on daily tasks, local gossip, sports, family matters, career advancement, love lost and love wanted, rather than the political maneuverings of the political class. The Chinese are chill, fun, and open—at least about as much as you can be when living in a city with the aesthetic of an overly engineered corporate business park.

There is, when you look closer, a great deal of chaos in Beijing, some of which is simply about incompetence or a lack of care from the vast array of minor officials and bureaucrats, but most of it is from the surprisingly optimistic attitude of the residents. China doesn’t feel like an oppressive police state the way the Soviet bloc once did, because the Chinese, rather than being corrupted by anger, are sincere, thoughtful, grateful, happy, warm, efficient, genuine, and caring. To the degree that they are cynical (an attitude that dominates most oppressive authoritarian states) there is a playfulness to it, not a bitterness. An “Oh, did you see what silly thing the party did again?” rather than a sense of living through an existential terror.

So far so good. But:

Simply put, it’s unclear what China’s ultimate goal is beyond accumulating wealth and expanding its cities—eventually stretching its metro system to the 98th expressway ring, then the 400th—until the entire country fuses into a single vast urban sprawl. What is the end game? What is the Chinese guardian class working toward? Anyone who still believes it’s the old Marxist vision of eliminating capitalism and creating a classless, stateless society is deluding themselves.

[…]

I’m currently writing this in Korea, and the contrast between Beijing and Seoul is fascinating, mostly in an unflattering way to Beijing. Despite what I wrote above, I am happy to be out of Beijing and in Seoul. It is refreshing to be able to quickly read whatever I want and talk to whomever I want without having to jump through all sorts of hoops, regardless of how ineffective and symbolic they are.

Some good photos there too. Seems to be a place that’s better for living in than visiting — the anti-New York.

Visiting San Francisco and just had my first Waymo ride. It was the most obedient, defensive, proper driving I have ever seen, at once frustrating and uplifting. The world would be a better place if every car was fully self-driving and I can’t wait for them to come to DC.

The one thing to read this weekend is this NYT interview with Rick Steves. His answer to “what you would do if you couldn’t travel any more” was pitch-perfect:

I would welcome the day, strangely, when I could not travel anymore, because it would open a gate of things that I’ve not done because of my love for travel.

Which is my feeling as well. You can love what you are doing and still be OK not doing it any more because, and this is Rick again, “[t]his world is such a beautiful place to experience, and there are dimensions of experiencing this world that I have yet to try.”

Mozi is a splendid idea for making serendipitous encounters happen. On the other hand, can you truly call these encounters serendipitous if they needed an app? (ᔥMatthew Haughey)