I logged on.
The train’s website froze.
Then I logged on again.
Five hours. That ought to be enough.
The voices of my friends and roommates filtered through my bedroom walls.
I made my selection, bought my tickets, and went downstairs.…
The Pattern
The airport line didn’t move.
Clothes hung from open office windows, lifting and falling like flags in the air conditioning.
A booth opened.
Then closed.
A coworker stopped to talk to the attendant.
A vendor walked through the line carrying a pot of chai.…
A Griddle among the Eggs
The street toward the temple was packed.
Cars pushed through gaps between pedestrians while storefront speakers blasted the same electronic beat. Vendors stepped into the crowd holding up wool hats, silk scarves, and imitation electronics.
“Hello! Look!”
“Good price!”
“Come see!”…
The Photograph
My stride was sure. The grass was wet.
The kids were back at the apartment watching a movie.
Dani was asleep.
I had promised her forty-five minutes.
Then I slipped out the door.
~
The vineyards climbed the hillside in five enormous terraces, each held in place by a stone retaining wall nearly six feet high.…
Bear Season
The hotel looked grander than I remembered.
Chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Red carpets muffled our footsteps. Even the restroom urinals were motion-activated waterfalls.
Outside, snow whipped across the inky Baltic.
Near the restaurant entrance, a framed menu advertised the seasonal buffet.…
Too Tired to Tour
The subway carried us back into Chengdu.
We passed beneath a carved wooden gate and into a narrow alley where scooters threaded between pedestrians and women sat beside buckets of turtles. They lifted them toward us as we passed.
Dani blushed and waived her hand away.…
A Cathedral Apart
We came to Roskilde for the Viking Ship Museum.
The cathedral next door changed our plans.
Its brick towers rose above the square, drawing us closer until we found ourselves standing before a heavy bronze door covered in runes and royal symbols.…
The Ship Grew Larger
An hour into our walk, the park narrowed against a freeway.
The snow had returned despite the forecast. Cross-country skiers glided between the trees while traffic hissed somewhere ahead.
I knew our ferry terminal sat beyond the highway, somewhere along the harbor, but I couldn’t see a way through.…
The Blue Tiles Stayed Blue
A sea of photographers stood atop Jingshan Hill, tripods planted against the wind.
They faced south.
Waiting.
Someone beside me checked the time.
Another adjusted a neutral-density filter.
Nobody spoke much.
We all looked down toward the Forbidden City, waiting for sunset—waiting for the palace lights to come on.…
Zoji-la
For hours, we’d been driving past barren landscapes of brown dirt separated from the highway with barbed wire and chain-link.
Soldiers and army vehicles rolled by in the distance.
Signs every few miles warned:
NO STOPPING.
NO PHOTOS.
We kept going.…
Four Kilometers from Kideksha
We reached Boris and Gleb just as the sun touched the horizon.
The church was nearly nine hundred years old.
A single room. One display. Interiors already growing dark in the falling light.
We spent less than ten minutes there.
The attendant had already put on her coat and gloves by the time we were ready to leave.…
Seven Pierogis
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.…
One Day
“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.…
When I Found a Sloth
Most visitors turned back after the beach nearest the gate.
A narrower trail disappeared into the forest, and with every bend the voices faded until only insects and surf remained.
The crowds had stopped within a mile of the park’s entrance.…
Wonderland
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.…
My Backpack
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.…
Peace Hotel
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.…
Singing to a Book
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.”…
Thursday Edition
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.…
It Was the Ask
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.…
Düsseldorf
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.…
The City Changed
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.…
Holy Week
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.…
The Rooflines Didn’t Match
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.…
The Surface Looked Frozen
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.…