Travel writer Rolf Potts has concluded his Busan, Korea homecoming with two more excellent dispatches over at Slate: “Fishing Indoors With a Former Member of the Korean Army” and “A Quest for the Musical Russian Triplets of Texas Street.”
Previously: Three Korea Stories of Note.
Bangkok’s brand-new airport. That’s the subject of my latest Gridskipper post.
Two of my pals have recently published excellent stories about Korea. Rolf Potts has got two articles on Slate — one’s about the Busan International Film Festival and an upcoming action comedy film called “Expats,” and the other’s about returning to the city after having spent two years teaching English there in the late 90s.
Elsewhere, Busan resident Aaron Tassano’s got a great article about the PIFF over at Trip Master Monkey. (Lil’ Kim? Lil’ Kim!)
(The image above is from my trip to Seoul to visit my brother last January.)
(Rolf Potts stories via.)
Austin Considine and I have a story in today’s New York Times travel section about Thailand, tourism, and the recent military coup.
I’ve got a new story over at Tripmaster Monkey. It’s called “My First Coup.”
In my latest Gridskipper post, I take a look at Matt Gross’s final dispatches from his round-the-world journey as the New York Times’s Frugal Traveler.
Related: World Hum’s Mike Yessis recently published an interview with Matt.
[Photo: Matt Gross/NYT]
I am very conspicuous in Thailand. I’m very tall. I’m white. And I constantly do silly farang (foreigner) things — like sit on the ground and eat my lunch.
A captured this excellent 30-second video of me today at an outdoor market about 500 meters from my apartment. (Click on the image above or go here to watch it.) I’d bought some chicken with roti and decided to sit on the ground to consume my snack. Unfortunately for me, a gaggle of Thai ladies saw me do this and were consumed with laughter — why would I sit on the dirty street when there were tables nearby? They found this to be hilarious. They guffawed and pointed at me, which I quite enjoyed. Then, with characteristic courtesy, they directed me to a table to sit down.
Indeed, making a fool of myself in Thailand is something of an inadvertent past time. Longtime newley.com readers will recall that I did this for the first time way back in 2001. And I wrote about it in an essay called “Soup to Nuts.”
Thomas Swick has an exceptional travel story about Cuenca, Ecuador in Sunday’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel. As many of you know, I lived in Cuenca for a year and I can tell you this: Swick nailed that story. He captures the essence of the city in a remarkable way: the colorful characters, the bohemian feel, and the languor that pervades life there.
(Via.)
Times have changed, and I know this because I have children, two of them, one born in the old days and one in modern times. One was born back before seat belts, when a child might ride standing up in the front seat next to Daddy as he drove 75 mph across North Dakota, and nobody said boo, though nowadays Daddy would do jail time for that and be condemned by all decent people. My younger child rides in a pod-like car seat, belted in like a little test pilot. She likes it.
The older child grew up inhaling clouds of secondary smoke, and the younger one lives in a house in which nobody ever thinks about smoking, though sometimes a guest has lurked in the backyard like a convicted sex offender, and consumed a cigarette. The elder child was raised on hamburgers and hot dogs; ground meat was our friend; melted cheese made everything taste better. The younger one lives in the House of Organic Leaves, where beef is viewed with suspicion, as if it might contain heroin. The younger one’s rearing was guided by a ten-foot shelf of books by psychologists. The older one was raised by pure chance.
I don’t miss the old days. Well, actually I do, sometimes. I miss the jolliness. We had lovely illusions in the old days. We felt giddy and free in that speeding car. The cigarette was a token of our immortality. We chowed down on whatever tasted good. We thrived on ignorance. We all were a little jiggly around the waist and didn’t worry about it. My in-laws were suburban Republicans who kicked off family dinners with hefty Manhattans, which eased the social strain considerably. After two, my father-in-law and I got almost chummy. He knew I was a Democrat and a heretic in suburbia; in the gentle mist of bourbon, it began to matter less and less. They won’t tell you this at Hazelden, but alcohol can be a real mercy sometimes.
Read the whole thing.
My pal — and Malaysia traveling companion — Matt Gross recently published what I think is his finest New York Times Frugal Traveler column yet: a moving story about volunteering on an organic apple farm in Turkey. Don’t miss it. (Here’s the archive of his stories from the last two months of his round-the-world journey.)