Currently browsing posts tagged: Travel.

On Good Customer Service

It’s rare that I blog about a product.  I occasionally tweet (such as the time Zappos refunded me $6 after I pointed out Shoes.com was selling a pair of shoes I’d just bought for $6 less, or the time JetBlue called me after I tweeted about how long I’d been on hold), but I’m almost [...]

12.10.2010

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Ich bin in Bonn

I stumble onto the escalator heading toward the train tracks.  I feel ill; perhaps it’s from not eating, and then eating too much, but in any case, I feel as though I’m about to faint.  I shouldn’t even be here right now,* I think to myself as I collapse onto a bench, grateful for the [...]

22.06.2010

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Couscous, Djellaba, Tajine.

Originally posted at Talk Morocco Julia Roberts, McDonald’s, Mickey Mouse. This was how a young Moroccan student of mine described the United States to me. Images from his youth: Pretty Woman, glimpsed illicitly on satellite TV as a boy, or downloaded by BitTorrent. McDonald’s, which arrived in his hometown when he was eight, a beacon [...]

22.04.2010

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Discovering New Places

Authenticity keeps coming up in conversations. First it was the white people and dreadlocks conversation, followed by one about manufactured authenticity via cappuccino. In that same post, David says, “I find that for most tourists nothing is more important than seeking out the “authentic” of where they are.” I’ve been thinking a lot lately about [...]

30.03.2010

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On Frontiers

A million years ago, in a life I no longer recognize as mine, I knew a boy who was obsessed with frontiers. We would talk, sprawled out on the floor, about dreams and futures. Like me, he was terrified of commitment and we clung to a shared ideal of smashing walls and chasing the sunset. [...]

09.03.2010

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Every day on the bus, as I scan through the feeds coming through my RSS reader, I save the best folder for last.  I flip first through folders dubbed “anthroblogging” and “arabists,” ones for my Global Voices readings, and ones for work.  Once I’ve read, or at least marked all as read, I come to [...]

30.10.2009

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On Travel

I remember a time when the world felt big.  Where, as an angsty nineteen year old, I told a friend over cigarettes and copious amounts of coffee that the better alternative to suicide was to run away, lose yourself in a part of the world that you’d never even imagined.  I remembered that conversation three [...]

15.09.2009

18 Comments

Aleppo

I’ve been home from Syria for ten days, and pathetically, I have only written one blog post. I’ve been busy, you see – looking for a new apartment, catching up on work, being human…and absorbing. Since Prague, I haven’t traveled anywhere personally significant, and even Prague, even the city of a thousand spires, didn’t meet [...]

25.03.2009

8 Comments

Syria

Just three days ago I woke up in Damascus for the last time (for now). It doesn’t seem possible, sitting here in my Cambridge office, looking out the window at a still mid-winter sky, that exactly this time last week I was watching the sun set on the road between Homs and Damascus. It doesn’t [...]

18.03.2009

12 Comments