Where Were You on 9/11?
. . . . . Photo from bobbyshred.com It’s been ten years since the planes hit the World Trade Center in New York and Pentagon in Washington, D.C., yet everyone around the world still remembers where they were and what they were doing. Now, Sept 11th marks a day of remembrance for U.S. citizens and their global friends. Ten years later, we still step back on this day and think about all that had happened and all that has emerged from it,... Read More
Flight Frustration
Courtesy of the BBC News article "Heathrow passengers 'waiting for a miracle'" To help me get my two suitcases and whatever else I managed to acquire during this past semester–and because I convinced them this was the perfect time for the long-awaited trip to Europe–my parents had booked a tour of Europe. At the end of my classes I was supposed to fly to Rome to meet them. Heathrow had other ideas. My first flight out... Read More
Review: A Week at the Airport
Review on the Go: Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport, a slim book about a week the author spent living at Heathrow airport and writing about what he observed, is at points revelatory and remarkable, and at other points overly ornate and self-indulgent. Though de Botton’s prose occasionally bothered me, the book is an illuminating rumination on many aspects of airports and the people who work in and pass through them. Not a bad way to spend... Read More
The Hardest Jobs
Here begins my list of the hardest jobs in the whole world. Subject of today’s post: Airport workers. I was thinking about this while stuck in Lisbon Airport on a Friday afternoon. I was near tears after a missed flight and going from balcony to balcony, talking to this person and that person, being transferred to another desk, another long line of frustrated travelers. In my despair, I found perhaps the slightest hint of comfort knowing that... Read More
Friends All Over the World, Part 2
I will not go into the reasons for me not being allowed to board my flight home– God knows if I talk about it again I might begin to throw things. I had just come from São Tomé and was in transit to Boston. But let’s just say I found myself in limbo, otherwise known as Lisbon, Portugal, at 3pm on a Friday, $300 poorer and with a new flight booked to the States on Sunday evening. And man, was I not happy. Breathe in, breathe out. Things... Read More
A Tourist…by Accident(s) (Part 1 of 2)
It’s midnight on the morning of Friday, June 25. I’m in the airport in Lisbon, ready for my 12:15am flight to São Tomé e Príncipe. It took some time (and effort) to get here- I had left on Wednesday afternoon from the comfort of my dad’s cute apartment in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and now it was Friday. I was stressed but had made it out alive. A couple of these properly-filled suitcases and I'm ready to go. Traveling with... Read More
Cloud Gazing
I’ve always been a cloud gazer. When I was younger, I spent my lazy late summer afternoons on my back in the grass, looking upwards. Sometimes with my sister, sometimes alone, I’d lie there for hours at a time, keeping watch as dogs and fish and automobiles disguised as clouds wandered across the sky. As I grew older, clouds became less magical. They became distractions, something to look at out classroom windows, indicators of wind or rain,... Read More
My Australia in Review
Sydney from Milson's Point If you’ve ever hesitated about the long flight to Australia, don’t. The great land down under is worth every bit of the long journey and the memories I’ll never forget. After almost five months in Australia, having sneakily avoided winter, I’m settling back into London life. When I think about my most recent travel adventure, I suppose I was able to see quite a lot of Australia, but really, I didn’t see half... Read More
The World is a Big Place After All
One of the inevitable truths of travel is that things will go wrong: trains will be missed, reservations lost, sunglasses, toothbrushes and the occasional shoe (among other, more important things) forgotten in hotel rooms or hostel lockers. There’s a saying that a person’s true character is only revealed in moments of crisis, so if you’d like to ascertain the true nature of a friend’s (or of your own) character, your best bet may be to start... Read More
Nan Avyon An
At this point I have been in Haiti for one day. In my experiences in São Tomé, I have found many similarities. Perhaps more similarities than differences in the food, culture, geography and biodiversity. Although the language is different. So different. We spend the night at the house of John Engle, the director of Haiti Partners (www.haitipartners.org). He is an American who has been living in Port-au-Prince for some time with his Haitian wife... Read More
