Mar 14
By Joshua Richman
Most folks who fancy becoming travel writers don’t want to write. They want to travel. Jaded, I ride on a bus, notebook handy as emerald rice fields and angular mountains slide past. A dream has come true. I am living it. I am a travel writer. An in-flight magazine is paying me $750 to write up Kwangju, the fifth largest city in South Korea. After publishing stories on South Korea in newspapers and harassing the editor of the in-flight, finally, I get monthly assignments.
Nov 27
Toon by Lee Scott; Writing by Iwazaru
As one of the busiest holidays in America takes place with millions of people traveling, the new airport screening rules have people up in arms. At all 450 of the nation’s commercial airports the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is using the new front-of-the-hand, slide-down screening technique for passengers who opt not to walk through full-body scanners, in addition to passengers who set off metal detectors at checkpoints without the scanners. The TSA also picks random passengers for the searches.
Nov 15
By Jake Reed
You can waste away in a pub on a bender or walk the earth. Not the worst dichotomies to face on the subject of a vacation. Two weeks off in the middle of summer and nowhere to really go. My base of operations, Suzhou, the famed Venice of the East (a swamp with canals) had me marinating myself in my own juices since the beginning of June and the wanderlust was threatening intellectual blue balls if I didn’t think of somewhere to go and get lost at. Then I remembered being in a conversation with a coworker on the subject of not having a girlfriend due to what I called my unwillingness to indulge in the superficiality of trend. (I am cheap.)
“I think you should go and find a girl in Chengdu. They are wild, like to drink and dance and have really good complexions. It’s because of the spicy food they eat.”
Nov 15
By Suki Kim
On February 16, 2002, the sixtieth birthday of the Great Leader Kim Jong Il, I was standing in front of a group of Workers’ Party leaders in Pyongyang, singing a South Korean protest song called “Morning Dew.” It was a strange situation for a fiction writer from New York’s East Village who is neither a political activist nor an entertainer. I am South Korean by birth and an American, having immigrated at thirteen. The American in me dismisses North Korea as off-limits, the bastard child of the cold war. But I am often haunted by the photographs of famine there that I see on the evening news.
When friends ask me whether I think the two Koreas will ever be reunified, I never know what to say. I know as much as they do, or as little. The one thing that sets me apart is that I am certain, no matter how evil North Korea is supposed to be, that I could never hate its people.
Oct 18
By Remo Dello
Most of my students had never been to the Statue of Liberty and/or Ellis Island. From a class of 30, 20 decided to come, the group including students from Albania, Yemen, Palestine, Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico China, Korea (of course) and Vietnam. Working with so many different ethnic groups was challenging but after while you know what to expect and my strategy was to try to get them thinking about that now they are here in New York and for better or worse all part of the same world.
So on the day of the trip, on my way down to Battery Park on the subway, I am on my cell calling the tour agent to tell her exactly how many of us will be there in one hour! Funny thing is she kind of expected that last minute dash—like she was used to it. I kept telling myself this will be worth it. These students better get something out of this for all the headaches I am dealing with.
Oct 18
By Tony MacGregor
I had been living in the Thong Poon Hotel in room 95/904 for about a month studying for an M.A. degree in Buddhism at Kasicorn University in Bangkok when the presence came.
I wasn’t upset when I began feeling something beside me in the icy water of the cold pool in the sauna. It felt benign, even kindly, floating beside me, translucent and imageless. It was there and yet not there. I felt it but why was it there?
I had made an impulsive decision to come to Bangkok to study Buddhism after three years of working in Seoul, Korea. In Korea I had worked too hard for too long, slept too little, pushed myself too hard and finally became exhausted. I had originally intended to study Buddhism in Myanmar but the military government wouldn’t let me in because I’m a journalist so I ended up at the Hotel Thong Poon.
Sep 27
By Fiona Isobel Jackson
Read Part 1
In all we traveled in parts of five states, and mostly people were fairly cool (although in general quite bossy, even the little children). We had both come across far more persistent beggars in certain parts of SE Asia. On one memorable occasion a woman on the street in Delhi asked us for “chapatti” (bread/money). Restaurant servings would make any North American proud, and we got into the habit of taking the bread we didn’t eat with us to give to the numerous street dogs. So I had a fresh stack of them with me and she was genuinely delighted. Then a child with her group chased after us and asked for an ice cream, which I obliged at a nearby stand. The kid was so happy she ran after us a second time to shake our hands.
Sep 19
THE URBAN PLUNGE
By Mizaru
Again, I had no idea what was to happen with the “Reds” protesters, and later in the police station and then the immigration holding cell and finally at Discovery Lodge inside room 332, yet I feel it that for all that happened this summer I need the good karma and will give advice about what I can and just for starters: showing up for a first day of back-to-school training at Chichester College wearing New Balance tennis shoes and Dominican Rep. baggy clown-pants is not a good idea. The heat is the only harness that Bangkok really lays on you but man you got to button up if you’re going to teach English in this part of the world. It’s something about signifying yourself as an urban professional and not another sidewalk scooter dog or run of the mill sex tourist with a funny accent and jaundiced yellow eyes. Changing your surrounding tableau from mouth breathing tourist to a temporary foreign resident in Thailand requires a little copycatting of Asian protocol and always wearing slacks and a tie is how to start.
Sep 19
By Fiona Isobel Jackson
Part 1
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We spent a few days in Tibetan Buddhist Leh, which was probably my highlight. With prayer flags and wheels everywhere, the vibe is a strong feeling of being in a different universe. Every local single person wanders around in burgundy coloured monk-like garb. The landscape is a stark, moon-like desert with mountains poised behind, that would be freezing in winter. Sadly it was the only place where I got sick (food poisoning), as it was the most time consuming and expensive to get in and out of. My mother was altitude sick for about a day, which is very common when you’re 3500 metres up, and I too felt disoriented.
Aug 16
Words and pics by Hannah Stuart-Leach
With mornings free, I went to help paint science lessons on the walls of the nearby school he taught at. But instead of boarding a heaving bus for 30 minutes, as I had in Seoul to get to work, I was treated to 15 windswept minutes on a motorbike. The narrow, dusty road up the mountain, offered a spectacular view of the sheer drop into the clear, sun-tinted water below. It was an addictive start to the day.
One morning on my way back, I bumped into Erna, one of the women from the craft group, who invited me into her home, insisting I eat mounds of fresh watermelon, washed down with coconut milk. No matter what predicament they found themselves in, the Filipinos I met were always cheerful and endlessly hospitable. She told me the money from her first jewelry sale had gone to purchase the chickens that clucked their way underneath the stilts of her wooden house – rebuilt since a devastating typhoon had destroyed her previous one. She beamed with pride as she told me this, and the craft shop suddenly became a whole lot more meaningful.
Jul 12
By Justin Thoreau
“Ma. Hi it’s me. No, no, no, I’m in Cambodia. CAM-BO-DI-A!!!! Sorry, it’s a bit loud. I’m in a bar. Listen something happened. No, I’m not in jail. No, I’ve got enough money. Listen, we’ve kind of declined. We’ve gone back a few steps in evolution. How? I don’t really know how all I know is that Jim and I are now primordial ooze and we’re going back to where we came from so I don’t think I’ll be home for a while…
Jul 05
By Justin Thoreau
A half hour after we’d downed some slices of “happy” pizza, Jim and I found ourselves at the market in Siem Reap.
“You feel anything yet?” Jim asked me.
“Maybe, I can’t really tell,” I responded. “Give it another ten minutes.”
We were waiting for the worm to turn. With the sheer force of will we tried to summon the high, as if pure mental concentration would stoke the green flecks in our stomachs to life. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, still nothing. “I think we’ve been got,” I said, “like junior high kids purchasing a bag of Oregano. Smoke this and it will really get you out of your body.”
Mar 22
By Tony MacGregor
I dream often in the Thong Poon Hotel. It is always the same dream. My father, his frantic face and shrunken body enclosed in a transparent egg, rolls and twists on a riverbank. His maddened blue/gray eyes shriek out to me. He is trying to warn me of something — but he can’t say what it is — and I am floating comfortably on the river, disconnected — while the egg twists and rolls and my father’s face grows more and more frantic.
Mar 07
By Fiona Isobel Jackson
A leap of faith I am mastering is getting into a strange man’s car. I thought that the dudes who rolled around in the big old yank tanks were so cool that they always had lots of friends. However, ALL cars in Cuba are potential taxis (illegally but very widespread), and these cars have more seating space than newer ones. So when you want to go somewhere, unless you want to pay in CUC and almost certainly have a wee fight about the cost and possibly get ripped off with the change (you ALWAYS have to check the change, or as another student commented: “Cubans aren’t very good at math”) [...]
Mar 01
By Fiona Isobel Jackson
Hola mio amigas
160km an hour. I kid you not. This was how my summer trip began. At the airport bus stop, as is often the case as my stop is the last one before they hit the expressway, a cabbie rolls up and offers to take you out for not much more than the bus. As is also often the case, I’m running slightly behind schedule. What does a girl say? Of course! The guy was beeping his horn at buses, and overtook 3 cars on the edge of the road! I was too scared to remember the Korean word for scared and too petrified to interrupt his [...]
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