The caller ID looked familiar. The man on the other side offered me a job.
“Sixteen dollars an hour. Out-of-town work. Electrical. Ten hours a day, seven days a week, for six weeks.”
“You interested?”
I did the math.
Overtime. Double time.…
The Wrong Way to Qutb
Qutb Minar lay only a few kilometers away. We’d decided to walk.
Rickshaws continued pulling alongside us every few hundred meters, each insisting they would take us there for free. By now we understood enough about India to know that nothing was free.…
The Dragon Kept Turning
Through the windshield, Xi’an’s Bell Tower rose ahead of us, illuminated against the night.
Horns and engines competed in the streets below as drivers fought through traffic.
Months of planning had gone into this trip. Weeks of adventure lay ahead.
Yet it wasn’t the Bell Tower I found myself looking at.…
The Coronation
Eighteen months later, Dani found it—buried in the lower floors of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. Russia of all places.
The museum stretched endlessly, room after room of imperial accumulation, but the basements held the strangest pieces.
Serbian coffins carved from logs, still smelling of resin.…
Seventeen
I booked the hotel because it was within walking distance of the Louvre. It was raining on the walk over, but the clouds were just breaking as I opened the glass doors.
“Oui?”
The receptionist looked up from her desk as I walked across the marble floor, leaving a trail wet footprints behind me.…
Track 7B
Dani’s eyes flicked across the board.
A single train to Mainz was listed for the rest of the day.
It left in four minutes.
“Track two.”
The shock lasted about a second.
Then we ran.
Bags bounced against our sides. The kids’ backpacks shifted on our shoulders.…
From the Balcony
The crowd thickened as showtime approached.
We’d claimed a spot on the lawn early, but each new arrival stole another inch of our view until all we could see were the backs of winter coats.
Dani looked around.
“The Restaurant. There.”…
Thirty-three
In my hand I held a wadded ball of socks. It was the size of a softball—almost as dense.
Across it in black marker, I’d written a name.
BIG BERTHA
Beneath the words, thirty-two tally marks disappeared into the fabric.
~
For a week our campus had belonged to Humans vs.…
Blue Stained-glass
A family friend once told me about a church in Mainz with blue stained-glass windows so strange they frightened her son.
I’d been looking for them ever since we’d landed.
~
Mainz cathedral looked like several buildings pressed into one. Romanesque walls rose beside Gothic ribs and later Baroque additions.…
That’s the King
“The king could spy on his guests through the eyes of portraits,” our guide said.
I stepped closer to the painting.
Tiny holes pierced the canvas where the pupils should have been.
Davis leaned toward me and whispered.
“That’s creepy.”
Our guide continued.…
A more Convincing Picture
The minibus dropped us at Catherine Palace. It stretched away in both directions.
Three stories of blue, white, and gold.
A line ran along the side of it.
We joined the end.
~
Snow blew down from the roofline.
The schoolchildren built a snowman in the grass.…
Mainz Will Be Kinder
The hotel sat a mile away, but the distance felt longer.
Our duffel, overstuffed with both backpacks and extra gear, balanced precariously on the stroller frame. The weight bowed the frame. The wheels squeaked. We stopped at nearly every curb to readjust it.…
No Sleeper Tonight
Our sleeper train to Budapest left Munich at midnight.
We’d arrived at the train station well before and waited at the tracks.
An hour passed. The train never came. The tracks stayed empty.
We kept waiting, and a half hour later, our train disappeared from the station’s departures board.…
The Darkest Place
Corbin had only recently learned to walk.
He wandered between fallen logs and picnic tables, alternating between crawling and taking a few careful steps before dropping back onto his hands. Dry leaves crunched beneath his feet.
The entrance to the cave barely announced itself.…
Bench Seats
The next morning, my brother and I pushed our way through New Delhi Railway Station.
Fluorescent lights blazed overhead.
The smells of chai and diesel floated over the tracks.
A vendor shouted over a portable loudspeaker.
Boxes of live chickens were stacked along the platform.…
The Panda Line
We reached Ueno Zoo an hour before it opened.
It felt like we were already late.
A line—mostly of older women—stretched from the entrance and wrapped through a maze of green safety cones.
Staff members kept extending the switchbacks as more people arrived.…
The Swarm
Varanasi’s airport had three gates. None had jet bridges.
Instead, passengers reached the tarmac through a large set of double doors at the back of the building.
Chains and padlocks held them together, leaving a two-inch gap between the doors.
Outside, a storm of locusts gathered against the glass beneath the setting sun.…
It’s All Broken
The museum opened with a room-sized panorama of Hiroshima in 1942, followed by another taken from the same vantage point three years later.
Before and after in stark comparison.
My son noticed it at once.
“It’s all broken.”
~
A model of Hiroshima sat in the middle of the second room.…
Niarita
We’d been traveling for twelve hours: a trolley to Hiroshima Station, a bullet train to Tokyo, then a subway toward the airport.
We arrived in Tokyo just one minute late.
A single minute.
The conductor apologized.
~
Tokyo Station seemed to stretch for blocks beneath the city.…
Falling Leaves
The subway had left us at the edge of the Royal Castle Park.
We followed the other people along a path, then stopped at the first opening.
“Is this the way?”
Dani checked the map on her phone.
“No.”
We walked farther.…
König Calib
A sign beside the toy shop door listed its hours.
Open 16:00–18:00 Wednesday and Friday.
It was Sunday.
The town was quiet, and every other shop we passed was dark.
Then Dani stopped.
Someone was inside.
Through the window, we could see the owner hunched over a workbench among shelves of wooden toys. …
Conservation
We arrived at the panda reserve just after it opened.
The paths were nearly empty.
Without a map, we picked a trail at random and disappeared into the bamboo.
The first panda sat alone beneath a tree.
It didn’t acknowledge us.…
Where the Rhine and Moselle Met
The horse seemed impossibly large.
Even through the rain, the monument dominated the point where the Rhine and Moselle met, a mountain of dark stone with an emperor on horseback balanced above it.
Corbin wanted nothing to do with it.
The broad staircase climbing the pedestal was soaked by freezing rain, each stone step polished smooth by more than a century of feet.…
While He Slept
Avery rolled out of bed in the middle of the night.
The crash woke me, followed by the soft cry of startlement.
I scooped him into my arms, pulling him into bed with me.
He settled against my chest almost immediately.…
The Bastion
We followed our map to what should have been the next museum.
Instead, we reached a tunnel through the fortress wall.
Dani pushed. The doors wouldn’t open.
We continued to the water—shadow turning to white.
The wind coming off the bay drove us back.…