“The one with the trees.”
Brian was pointing above the rooftops.
It was still the second week of the semester—just days after I’d first come to stay with him and his family in their spare bedroom.
We sat in a bench, taking a break from playing football with his friends.…
Everywhere we went in Kraków, Dani looked for pierogi.
On our first afternoon, she spotted a milk bar and stopped at the door.
“Pierogi. We have to go inside.”
Inside, the room was narrow and bright, with Formica tables and a counter running along one wall.…
From the Bund, the river looked like a sheet of hammered metal.
Across it, Pudong’s towers blinked through haze.
On our side, the buildings sat shoulder to shoulder in pale stone and dark windows, their facades lit from below like someone wanted them to look older than they felt.…
The rip opened another inch when I lifted my backpack.
I set it back down.
One side had split almost completely open.
~
On my first weekend trip that semester, I went with friends to Playa del Coco.
My backpack came with me.…
Dani had carried an Alice in Wonderland dress across China.
For three weeks it stayed buried at the bottom of her backpack while we climbed mountains, wandered temples, and rode overnight trains.
Shanghai was the only place it belonged. It didn’t matter it was freezing.…
We entered near the Vasa’s stern.
The lion-crested figurehead, the emblem of Gustav, jutted over the lobby and over our heads.
From here, a cascade of masts and cannons receded into the distance.
The hull was dark from centuries underwater, interrupted by patches of fresh wood.…
The newspaper warehouse buzzed with people waiting for trucks that hadn’t arrived.
The Thanksgiving edition was packed with Black Friday ads. The trucks were late.
I shivered in the cold and yawned.
Mom had woke me at three, shoved a bowl of oatmeal into my hands while I was still half asleep, and hurried me into the car.…
We arrived at Gurdwara Bangla Sahib just after sunrise.
Buses hadn’t started bringing tourists yet. For now, the worshipers outnumbered visitors.
As we stopped outside the entrance, an Indian man overheard us talking.
“You’re American?”
“California.”
He smiled.
“Me too. I’m from Sacramento.”…
I’d stayed here years earlier, sleeping in a twenty-person dorm.
This time Dani and I had sprung for a private room.
It was late, and we were ready for bed.
“Let me plug in your phone.”
I rummaged through my pack for the charger.…
The train never left the station.
The sun beat down through the windows, and the air-conditioning had stopped sometime before we boarded.
An announcement crackled overhead.
A language I didn’t understand.
I looked around until the German exchange student beside me smiled.…
A ferry waited at the docks outside the market hall.
We jogged the last hundred meters, stopped long enough to buy transit passes from a ticket machine, and boarded moments before departure.
The harbor appeared frozen.
A narrow channel of dark water cut through the ice toward the islands.…
We followed a procession of guides carrying colored flags through a maze of hutongs.
Every few minutes another group merged into ours, then peeled away again.
Neither of us seemed to know where the mansion was. We simply followed the flag in front of us.…
I phoned the hotel from a pay phone in Heredia.
The line crackled so badly I could barely tell whether someone was speaking or whether the connection had dropped. Every sentence became a negotiation.
“¿Tiene… habitación?”
Static.
“¿Cómo?”
I repeated myself, slower this time.…
“Do you know how to get to the Sagrada Família from here?”
My feet sweltered inside my winter boots as we climbed out of the Barcelona metro.
Three weeks in Russia had left us dressed for snow.
Dani smiled.
“Turn around.”…
A hostess led us through People’s Park to a large pavilion and handed us a pot of jasmine tea.
The advertisement had called it a teahouse among other things.
Our seats sat high in the back, but a raised platform put us above the rows in front.…
Most of the passengers who stepped off the ferry climbed straight into taxis.
We kept walking.
Dani followed her map through the quiet streets of Tallinn’s old town.
Snow dusted the cobblestones.
Gothic churches rose above shuttered cafes and dark shop windows filled with wooden toys.…
I stepped off the subway and looked around.
I knew this station.
Ghost Street.
We’d ended up here by accident our first day in China.
Then, I’d had no idea where we were. Now I knew which way to turn.
~
Ghost Street blazed with neon.…
Before this trip, I couldn’t have told you what a Faberge egg was.
On the walk to the museum, I asked Dani.
“Is it a real egg?”
She laughed.
“It’s just around the corner.”
~
The museum occupied a nineteenth-century mansion whose name was written in Cyrillic across the entrance.…
I climbed into my bunk just after sunset.
For the first hour, the train retraced the Rhine Valley I’d spent the previous days exploring by bicycle.
Vineyards and church steeples drifted past the window until darkness swallowed them one by one.…
We stepped off the train into falling snow.
It came down harder here than anywhere else on our trip, reducing everyone exiting the cars to the same hunched shape.
We followed them up a metal staircase over the tracks and into the station.…
We reached Ambrai just before sunset.
The old hotel overlooked the lake, and an army of waiters in white tuxedos drifted quietly between the tables.
One led us to a table at the water’s edge.
We opened our menus, then forgot about them almost immediately.…
“Are you coming today?”
Grammy’s voice was frail, though she tried to make the question sound casual.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
She waited until the words appeared on her phone.
“Where are we going today?”
“It’s a surprise. We’ll be there at eleven.”…
The conductor wore a cowboy hat and sported a handlebar mustache below his aviator sunglasses.
Even before climbing aboard, he’d taken special interest in Dani and me.
Making sure we found the right bus among the parking lot.
Making sure we bought the right tickets to Ranakpur.…
A railroad tunnel crossed beneath the Yangtze.
I had wanted to ride it ever since I saw a photograph of its swirling lights years before.
Only now did I realize the tunnel belonged to Shanghai.
I stood outside its entrance reading the signs.…
One of my college roommates had studied abroad three times. He’d traveled much of Europe and had no shortage of suggestions for me.
Among them, he insisted I attend a “show” while in Amsterdam.
I hesitated. This wasn’t really my sort of thing.…
