For Sunday, a bit of travel writing, where others are talking about the world. This week, we're peddling the following selections:
Dominica: "Wheels of Life" - Bill Donahue, Washington Post:
We came along the sea coast in a taxi, away from the airport, the windows open to the warm evening rain as a woman's voice sounded soft and sing-songy on the crackly radio. "And they will be bicycling all over the island," she was saying, "and, oh, yes, they will be climbing the very big hills."...
Though it is only 29 miles long and 16 miles at its widest, Dominica is home to two peaks over 4,500 feet. The rest of the island is essentially a range of smaller mountains and valleys, and the roads are murderous. There is one paved hill that rises for a steady mile at a 28 percent grade. The Tour de France, in contrast, rarely offers up grades steeper than 10 percent, and almost never goes steeper than 15 percent. Virtually no one travels to Dominica to ride a bicycle... Read more...
New York City: "The Healthy Side of the Big Apple" - Yi Shun Lai, Los Angeles Times:
A recent week's schedule looked like this:
...
- Monday: Bouldering with Naomi after work
- Wednesday: Kayaking with Karen and clients after work
- Saturday: Trail running race, 8 a.m.
- Sunday: Cycling with group
IF you guessed that I was bouldering in the mountains of Colorado, you'd be wrong. If you guessed that I was paddling among the orcas in Washington's Puget Sound, you'd be even farther off. I spend most weeks like this getting to know New York City. Yes, that New York, the one whose name invokes images of pallid workers trudging through underground subway tunnels day after day. But my New York is different. The city I know intimately is not from the pavement but from the waters of the Hudson River, the mean back hill of Central Park, the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge and the steep, unforgiving trails of Van Cortlandt Park.... Read more...
HOW TO:"With a Good Bike Box, You Can See the World" - David Colker, Los Angeles Times:
There are two things I call "baby": my dog and my bicycle. For practical reasons, I couldn't take my pooch along on a trip to Florida to visit family. But I decided to take my custom-fitted road bike.
Bad enough I had chosen a sport that requires wearing Lycra.... Read more...
Paris:"Suits you, Monsieur" - Euan Ferguson, The Observer:
"What style you have?" The phrase should, ideally, have come blessed with breathless, admiring exclamation marks, awed italics all around the second word; come gushed from some adoring and lisp-heavy French actress in the sexiest hotel in all of Paris. I was, truth be told, half way there. I was sitting in the extraordinary splendour of the lobby of the Hotel Meurice...
What style I have? What style do I have? It shouldn't be that hard a question, but the circumstances make me freeze. I am about to be taught, for the first time in my life, how to shop. More pertinently, I suppose, how to dress. Natalie, who is on the phone, and whom I am about to meet in a few hours, wants to know what style I have, how I like to dress, and I am reduced, partly because of the language barrier, partly because I'm me, but mainly because I am British, to a kind of urgent silence. I don't, I realise, know. No idea. How would I define my style?....Read more...
Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico:"In the Footsteps of Wallace Stegner" - Mary Duenwald, New York Times:
In the late summer of 1880, Susan and Oliver Ward traveled by steamship to Veracruz, Mexico. They then boarded a train and finally a stagecoach, heading 450 miles inland to the state of Michoacán. Along the way, the couple passed through towns and cities that had been built soon after the Spanish conquest — with tiled domes, terraced roofs and bell towers that looked as if they might have been exported whole from Seville.
To Susan, a writer and illustrator who had been living, not so happily, in mining settlements of American West, Mexico looked “like something rubbed up out of a lamp, as different from the false fronts, cowhide boots, flapping vests and harsh disappointments of Leadville as anything could possibly have been.”
“Oh!” she told her husband on the night they finally arrived at the Hotel Michoacán, “I have never been anywhere till now!”
The scene is from Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece, which is set mostly in American mining towns and on the banks of Idaho’s Boise River. Mainly, the novel — winner of the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for fiction — is an epic tale of frontier life, the story of a long marriage, challenged by disappointment and lost hope and wounded by betrayal and compromise But halfway through, in one thin chapter in the very center, Mr. Stegner offers this sunny interlude in Mexico.... Read more...
Suzdal, Russia:"Where Unhappy Czars Sent Women" - Steven Lee Myers, New York Times:
There are rules for those who stay at the Convent of the Intercession, once the cloistered exile of the ill-fated women who disappointed Russia's czars. After you pass through a narrow stone archway, a sign spells them out: No shorts, no noise, no smoking, no photographing the nuns. Another sign admonishes you to keep out of the flowerbeds, as if the thought might cross your mind.
This is Suzdal, an ancient town of white walls and bell towers, of ornately trimmed wooden izbas, or houses, and glittering onion domes, nestled in rolling fields of wheat and birch forests. This is also the Russia of history and lore, of Zhivago and Rublev, the icon painter who worked nearby nearly 600 years ago. Suzdal managed to escape the worst of the Soviet Union's rapacious pursuit of progress - and of modern Russia's uneven efforts to make amends for it. This is neither theme park nor museum piece, but a village of 12,000 working people, where chickens peck along dirt streets and cows are apt to wander in from the fields. I have traveled extensively in Russia and have not yet found any other place quite so unspoiled....Read more...
South Africa:"Biltong: Much More Than Just a Snack" - Stephanie Hanes, Christian Science Monitor:
I was at a party when I first encountered biltong. It was in a pretty little bowl next to the crudités and brie wheel, brownish slivers of dried meat with spices stuck to the edges. I was new to the country, so was curious about these chewy, salty morsels placed so proudly on the table.
"Is that a type of beef jerky?" I asked my friend, another American, as I pointed.
She started laughing.
"Oh, my goodness, don't ever say that to a South African," she exclaimed. Then she lowered her voice. "It's biltong. They take it very seriously."....Read more...
All: I haven't written very much from Iraq. There's really not much to write about. More exactly, there's not much I can write about because practically everything I do, read or hear is classified military information or is depressing to the point that I'd rather just forget about it, never mind write about it. The gaps in between all of that are filled with the pure tedium of daily life in an armed camp. So it's a bit of a struggle to think of anything to put into a letter that's worth reading. Worse, this place just consumes you. I work 18-20-hour days, every day. The quest to draw a clear picture of what the insurgents are up to never ends. Problems and frictions crop up faster than solutions. Every challenge demands a response. It's like this every day. Before I know it, I can't see straight, because it's 0400 [four o'clock in the morning] and I've been at work for twenty hours straight, somehow missing dinner again in the process. And once again I haven't written to anyone. It starts all over again four hours later. It's not really like Ground Hog Day, it's more like a level from Dante's Inferno.
likes Singapore and chows down on the street food of its countless food stands. ("Off the Eatin’ Path", September 24, 2006. 
