Posts in: travel

Day 2 in Istanbul, finding out that the coffee we had been ordering from Amazon for years started out within walking distance of Hagia Sophia.

People are standing in line outside a shop called Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi Mahdumlari.

A cabin made for Waldenponding, even for those of us who are in theory against it.

A rustic wooden cabin stands surrounded by greenery, with a weathered trellis in the foreground under a clear blue sky.

It is 28°C with 30% humidity and a cool breeze coming from the east. This is one of the many reasons we are again spending the summer in Serbia.

A garden with neatly arranged plants and small trees is set against a backdrop of houses and a bright blue sky.

A few good links to start the week:

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.