Compiled in the new book, Airline Visual Identity, 1945-1975, yours for a cool $400. Slideshow here.
Category Archives: travel
Meet Plan Go
Last night I stumbled upon MeetPlanGo and within five minutes I was signed up for all four of their e-newsletters, had downloaded their travel planning checklist for “career breakers,” and was registered for a New York meetup designed to help people like me go boldly in the direction of their long-term getaway dreams.
The “gap year” between high school and college is a well-known and fairly well-respected concept, but I hadn’t ever heard of a “career break” before. It has such a legit ring to it. I was worried about being an aberrant 30-something who still feels the need to check out of real life every 4-6 years, but Meet Plan Go makes it seem like there are lots and lots of responsible adults who do this.
For lack of a better way to put it, I had been calling what I want to do a language sabbatical. That phrase is misleading because my intentions go well beyond language – I want to start out in Dakar to do French immersion, and then travel from country to country wherever my heart leads me, practicing French, learning Spanish, soaking up culture while living like a local, filming for love and also hopefully money, until my money runs out. Rather than think guiltily of myself as Jeff Spicoli, I am now going to imagine myself as the high-minded, long-range-thinking, experience-seeking woman Meet Plan Go believes me to be. (Even though I could actually stand to be a lot more Spicoli-like.)
[Photo: Francesco]
my New York bucket list
I finally made it to Grant’s Tomb last week, crossing one more item off my NYC bucket list. It had been on my to-do list since college, when I lived less than ten blocks away but somehow failed for four years to muster the enthusiasm to visit.
I’m more motivated this summer than I have been during other times in my NYC residency, when the feeling of being here indefinitely made it easy to put them off for another day. Now that I have a sense that I’ll be leaving the city soon for an indeterminate length of time – which, in all honesty, could be as short as a month, who knows – I’m making more of an effort to see the city as a tourist would. Which is fun, even if I end up being a New Yorker for life.
Here are the other long-neglected items on my NYC (and environs) bucket list:
- Ride the Roosevelt Island tram
- Kuykuit
- Warwick Drive-In
- Fort Tilden hike
- Vanderbilt Mansion
- slam night at Nuyorican Poets Cafe
- The Museum of Arts and Design
- WD-50 (molecular gastronomy)
- a classic piano bar in the West 50’s that does singalongs
- the old Brooklyn Bridge station
- the Russian banya
- Spa Castle
- Sammy’s Roumanian
I’ve gotten it down to a reasonable size, I think. Here’s what I’ve crossed off the list in the past year or so:
- Dead Horse Bay, where I picked through trash/treasures from the 1940’s
- Jacob Riis Beach
- the Met rooftop installation
- Mmuseum
- Riverdale in the Bronx
- the Jazz Age Lawn Party
- various classic Upper West and Upper East Side diners
- Aquavit (more on that later)
- The Campbell Apartment in Grand Central
- a concert at Carnegie Hall
- the Moth Story Slam
- Top of the Rock
- Bushwick Open Studios
- a million rooftop bars
[Photo of Broadway Restaurant, one of the many amazing old-school diners where I’ve eaten over the past few months]
balls!
I’ve been receiving daily emails with worldwide airfare deals for the past month or so, with the intention of choosing my next vacation destination based on the loose equation: farthest I can go for the cheapest amount. I passed up a $600 Seoul ticket I saw the very first day I looked, because I couldn’t get the dates to work out quite right, and I hadn’t seen anything else super great since then… until the $550 ticket to Hong Kong that appeared this week.
I asked my friend whose job sends her to Hong Kong every few years whether she’d be there any time soon. Luckily enough, she’s going for a conference over Thanksgiving. I promptly invited myself to share her hotel room, and when she said she was thinking about adding on a trip to the mainland this time I proposed that we visit the “rainbow mountains,” which look like just about the most beautiful place on earth:
She responded that she actually wanted to visit the “other” mountains, the ones in Avatar, which appear to be equally jaw-dropping, and which I also would love to visit:
Over the course of the night I went from thinking I’d maybe do a four-day jaunt in Hong Kong to planning an epic mountain range-hopping adventure. My Chinese colleague only added fuel to the fire the next day when she said that flights within China are super-cheap and I should be able to jump from place to place, no problem.
So I freaked out about this trip of a lifetime I was about to take. Except that when I looked into it further, there were plenty of problems. First and foremost, the Zhangye Danxia Landform Geological Park where the rainbow mountains are is fairly impossible to get to without a 2-day journey of planes, trains and automobiles, all of which add up to quite a bit more than the $150 my colleague had promised. The Avatar mountains – Zhangjiajie National Forest Park – are only slightly more accessible – but only from Beijing, where roundtrip airfare from New York is definitely not on sale. So my epic adventure – which by the time I finished the research had grown in my mind to include a bullet train ride to various stops along the Silk Road as well as a foray into the Gobi Desert – was over before it began.
Back to square one. 😦
[Zhangye Danxia photo: Eric Pheterson; Zhangjiajie National Forest Park photo: Viktor Lövgren]
the pleasures of uncertainty
My lease is up this Friday, and I’ll be subletting apartments on a (crazy) month to month basis so I don’t have to sign a new lease that would force me to stay in the city beyond the end of my work contract. I’ve committed to leaving for Senegal within a month of the last day of my temporary – also month to month – contract, which could be terminated any time between October 1 and April 19. This means that if I stick to my guns, I will be in Senegal in no more than ten months. (The hope is that by writing this in a public forum, I will stick to my guns out of pride, even if courage fails me.)
Apart from a hefty dose of fear and dread, the thought of traveling on a one-way ticket to West Africa also fills me with a sense of freedom and excitement that I haven’t felt since right after college when I decided to move to Los Angeles on a whim, sight unseen, with one suitcase, without friends, without job prospects, and without knowing how to drive. That heady mix of euphoria and nausea is back, baby!
[Photo: Tarik Browne]
I don’t know if I’m coming or going
I started my new job on a six-week contract, which ended last Friday, and now I’m on a four-week extension until the end of June. When my boss told me last week that he would try to get me a six month-long extension this time, I found myself telling him, “Actually, I sort of love the short-term contracts. Can you see if you can get me another four-week one?” I have since come to regret – and retract – that wholly short-sighted request, but I am still in thrall to its motivation: to feel that I can get up and go wherever I’d like, whenever I’d like (or rather, four weeks from whenever I’d like). My lease is up soon – August 1st – and the only other contractual obligation I have in New York is my job. Which means that as soon as it ends, I’m free as a bird – geographically if not financially speaking. I promised myself after my trip to Argentina a year and a half ago that I’d leave for an open-ended language-learning sabbatical in Senegal within two years. If I went in August I’d be six months ahead of schedule.
At first that thought was exciting, but as it sunk in I realized that I’m not yet ready to leave town – mentally, financially or in any other way. And there’s no good reason to leave a job this interesting and challenging before I’m forced to. So I decided I should embrace the longest contract I can possibly get – only to find out two days later that my preferences are entirely irrelevant, since the rules for my particular job designation prohibit me from getting a six-month contract. I’ll be month to month until I leave here, whether in August or next April (another big question mark).
So the roller coaster of uncertainty continues… as do my attempts to enjoy the rush and stave off the mental motion sickness.
[Photo: Bit Boy]
May your heart be free whatever the weather may be
Rather than deleting the cities I’ve programmed into my Weather Channel app while traveling, upon my return I like to periodically set them as my current location – to remind myself how lucky I have been to visit these places, to feel a little bit closer to them digitally if not geographically, and to torture myself with how much better it is everywhere outside of New York.
Case in point: here is the week’s forecast for the cities I have been to within the past year and a half:
Alright, I admit that Paris is the weak link. But what it lacks in weather it amply makes up for in ridiculously good food. And the other two cities have NYC beaten by a long shot.
So, when it’s barely fifty degrees out after months of frigid temperatures, talk foreign weather to me! During the slow ascent out of winter, the Buenos Aires forecast reads like erotica.
my favorite items from the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list
When I fell down the rabbit hole of the UNESCO cultural heritage list last week, these were my favorite gems. Make sure to check out the slideshows and videos!
Polyphonic singing of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa
Isukuti celebratory dance of Western Kenya
Czech dances (from the land of my father)
Humanity is incredible.
[Photo: Santi Terraza]
why learn Spanish, part 4
Because the average temperature in the Hispanophone world is 70.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
The average temperature in the United States is 52.9, and the average temperature of this winter in New York is cold-as-fuck.
With God as my witness: I WILL LEARN SPANISH AND MOVE TO WARMER CLIMES.
Paris Je T’aime
The only vignette I enjoyed in “Paris Je T’aime” is also one of my favorite pieces of film. “14e Arrondissement,”Alexander Payne’s contribution, so perfectly and beautifully captures the unexpected jolts of emotion when traveling alone – the moments of feeling simultaneously connected and cut off, joyous and contemplative, full of wonder and full of solitude. It’s a fairly addictive experience.
The movie is old but I was reminded of it upon my return from Paris, where I didn’t get much alone time but nevertheless found myself in the headspace of a solo traveler, in all the best ways.
talk foreign to me 