New Yorkers and Mother Nature approach spring in different ways. On the first sunny day after months of dark, dreary weather, New Yorkers will flock to the parks and break out the tank tops and sandals, even it’s 50 degrees out. Mother Nature, on the other hand, likes to take her time.
My parents came to visit in early April, their first time in the city in almost 20 years. They live in southeastern China, and seemed relieved to have passed over the desolate New York winter. I looked around for things to do outdoors and decided it would be a good time to visit to parks and botanical gardens. According to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s website, cherry blossoms were in bloom, as well as magnolia, forsythias, narcissus, and other nice-sounding flowers I wouldn’t be able to point out without placards. Perfect. We would do a nice stroll around the garden, then maybe head to Central Park and see all the flowers and trees in bloom there too.
Nothing was in bloom. Patches of stems and empty trees filled the botanical garden. The rose garden was equally barren, with a locked gate and a sign that said “Closed until April” (the month we were currently in.) We read rows and rows of signs for flowers that have yet to grow. Some visitors with DSL cameras devoted undue attention to the rock garden, the only place that wasn’t barren. And Cherry Lane, site of the much anticipated rows and rows of cherry blossoms, had just rows and rows of empty trees. Those skeletal trees and shrubs became the backdrop for about 30 family photos; after all, there’s no need to waste good natural lighting.
Central Park had the same barrenness of the botanical garden, and about five thousand extra people also trying to enjoy “spring.” Sheep’s Meadow, one of the park’s main tanning spots in the summer, was as crowded and bikini-filled as it usually is mid-August. Joggers wearing sports bras and spandex shorts ran by more sensible people in long wool coats. We took off our jackets, rolled up our sleeves, and pretended not to notice the 10 degree temperature change as we alternated between being in the sun and being in the shade.
Around 4 in the afternoon, we finally admitted defeat and exhaustion. There was only so much sun you can take if the patch of ground you want to sit on is still rock hard from the cold, and the view of trees in the shade reminds you of a Tim Burton movie.
As soon as I brought my parents home, they fell asleep on the couch, while ice cream trucks rolled by outside, ringing their merry, optimistic tune.
- by Diana Kuan of Indietrekker fame
I realized a major similarity between New Yorkers and the Chinese: they like to mind their own business. In either place you could probably stab someone, eat their heart out of their chest, and cackle while blood dripped down your chin and no one would bat an eye. Actually, they might give you a nasty look because they have to step over the corpse to get to their destination.
What proved this point for me was an incident in a restaurant in Chongqing in the south of China. Now, Chinese cuisine is rather interesting. As part of a meal you can find anything from shark fin to pig snout. The Chinese also like to show you what you’re eating, so most dishes include the head, the bones, and maybe even the feet.
My friend Jenny was eating a piece of fish when she began to have a problem. Not choke, per se, she just felt like it was kind of stuck in her throat. Options to cure this malady were offered: eat a lot of rice, drink water, stand on your head. But after a while it became clear from the look on Jenny’s face that the situation was not improving.
Luckily, Jenny’s dad was a doctor. So he had her stand up and tilt her head back, while her brother assisted by shining a flashlight in her mouth. But the poor doctor had no tools, because, well, he was on vacation. He was, however, very handy with chopsticks; once you learn to pick up individual grains of rice, a little fish bone is no problem. So in he went with his chopsticks and got the bone out faster then you can say sheh sheh. (That happens to mean thank you in Mandarin, but if you pronounce it as “shay shay” as I accidentally did once, it means gay. Who knew?) With the crisis averted we proceeded to hoot, holler, and take pictures.
Through the whole process no one in the restaurant looked up, least of all the waiters rushing around. In fact, at one point it looked like they might knock the attending doctor and his patient over.
Then again, it was nice to feel like I had a little piece of home right there with me. A girl can only go so long without hearing disgusted sighs before she starts to get a little homesick.
I heart New York (and China) indeed.
- by Emily Epstein of b’scuse me? fame.
My family’s name is recognized primarily for one thing: Murphy’s Law. 58 years ago an aerospace engineer by the name of Edward Murphy ran a series of failed tests on sensors designed to measure G-force pressures on jet pilots. Frustrated by the sensors’ improper installation, he famously lamented that if there was any way for things to go wrong, they would, and at the worst possible time. In a doubly ironic twist of fate, 58 years later my family can’t get on a plane without everything going wrong.
We have what is known as “The Worst Possible Timing Syndrome” and there is one symptom – getting sick right before you go on vacation. It never fails. It’s as though our bodies have a clock run by a small demon whose job it is to set off an immune deficiency alarm precisely one-week prior to all getaways. Like Herpes, there is no cure. You can only hope to manage the outbreaks. (Also like Herpes, your girlfriend won’t want to make out with you during an outbreak for fear of it ruining her vacation as well. But, disgustingly, I digress.)
In the past, TWTS has wrecked havoc on my traveling plans. When I was 10 I missed out on Seaworld because of a fever. During Spring Break my junior year, I had to stop drinking at 1:00 because of a sore throat. Then there was The Great British Constipation, although I think that had more to do with the food. Regardless, in my youth, generally speaking I could get by. My desire to see Shamu and get laid (different vacations) outweighed my concern for my health. Basically, I fought through it.
Then I turned 27. It was like turning a corner, only the corner was up a hill. A steep, rocky hill lined on both sides by germs. Suddenly the slightest illness is debilitating. Right now, I am on a medical cocktail including vitamins, Cold-EEZE and Airborne. Despite the fact that I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t take all these together, and that doing so leaves a taste in my mouth like weeds, I’ll be damned if I will be sick when I leave for the sandy shores of West Palm Beach on Thursday.
I’m hoping though, that despite Murphy’s Law, if only I can make it down to West Palm that another law will come into play. It is called “The Everything Gets Healed At The Beach Law” and it overrides Murphy’s Law. There are two problems however: 1. My cold cannot turn into anything requiring antibiotics, because then science takes over; and 2. “The Everything Gets Healed At The Beach Law” doesn’t exist. I just made it up. But that’s the kind of thing you do when you are desperate to leave New York and doped up on so many cold medications that you actually use the term “The Great British Constipation.”
- by Dan Murphy of [redacted] fame
It can be frustrating when you’re in a country to learn a language and everyone wants to speak to you in English. This happened to me a lot when I lived in Holland, several years ago. I’m tall and blonde, so people would automatically start speaking to me in Dutch. But once they heard my accent, they would immediately switch to English (yes, I speak Dutch – my only quantifiable skill acquired during four years of college, thanks to a sleeping dictionary in the form of a rosy cheeked foreign exchange student from Amsterdam).
It was frustrating – I really wanted to improve my Dutch, but it was constantly suffering at the cost of someone else improving his or her English.
When the same thing happens to me here in France, it tends to bum me out, too. But recently I learned an important lesson in language etiquette from an English traveler – those Brits are just so on top of their manners, I swear.
Chris the Londoner spoke great French. But when a waiter came to take our order and spoke to us in English, Chris responded in his mother tongue as if he didn’t have a drop of French in him. It was obvious, he told me, that the waiter wanted to practice his English with us. And why shouldn’t we indulge him a little, Chris said.
When I thought about it, he was clearly right.
To respond to the waiter in French – just because we wanted to practice and just because we were in France (common alibis) – would have come off as insult to the waiter’s attempt. As if we were saying that his English just wasn’t up to snuff, and wasn’t our French just so much better?
After all, there are plenty of French who can’t speak English and with whom we would find plenty of time to practice the subjunctive and all that other crazy French grammar.
- by Terry Ward
Our first mistake was packing a tent and sleeping bags. In Florida, at least near Cape Canaveral, it seemed that camping meant bringing an RV the size of a duplex. And stuffing it with all your earthly possessions and every piece of lawn furniture on sale at the local McDiscount Store. After all, you can’t possibly commune with nature without a picnic table and Weber grill.
We had our choice of two beachside campgrounds. The first was about the size of a soccer field. It resembled an RV lot, or showroom, to be more precise. There were a few square feet of open space left at each spot, occupied by families or retirees who had managed to direct their lawn chairs at a scenic view of…other RVs. Dogs had playhouses bigger than our tent. A few campers hung Confederates flags outside their doors. We chose the second campground.
But even the second had a country-club-esque quality of its own. There were sparkling clean bathrooms, and washers, dryers, and dispensers for detergent. It was a larger campground, but the size just meant we were surrounded by more RVs, full-size SUVs, and pick-up trucks. The few tents that were there seemed more appropriate for housing circus acts.
We chose a spot that had a few shrubs to block our view of the neighbors, and spent about 10 minutes pitching the tent and unrolling the sleeping bags. Then we noticed that the previous campers had left a surprise. It was a piece of carpeting, so we could wipe our feet before going “indoors”.
We gave up trying to rough it, even a little. As the saying goes: if you can’t beat ‘em… We started up the car and drove the half-mile to the supermarket. We picked up pre-cooked sausages, fixings for s’mores, and a few bottles of Negro Modelo. At the last minute, we decided against wine and brie. We still had some dignity left.
- by Diana Kuan of Indietrekker fame
Travel often leads to bouts of deep reflection.
To hell with American sneeze guards.
That’s what I found myself thinking while enjoying the conviviality of a tapas bar-hopping experience in San Sebastian, Spain this weekend. Admiring the spread of dishes lining the bar – plates piled with frittered fish croquettes, baguette slices topped with razor thing slices of Serrano ham and pudgy chorizo sausages – I couldn’t help but mourn for a moment.
At home, you could never pull this off in the same serendipitous way.
As I stretched my arm amid the offerings to pluck another treasure from the lot – toppling a precariously perched pintxo (the Basque term for ‘tapa’) with my loose shirt sleeve in the process – a vivid image of a buffet line topped with a swinging glass sneeze guard popped into my head.
Those cultural references will find you anywhere, I swear.
I pictured myself back in the States, peering over a spread of tapas through a low glass window as if they were on display in a culinary museum; awkwardly attempting to fill my plate, my mobility limited by the sneeze guard’s motive to keep the bacteria count in the food as close to Purell as possible.
Then I snapped back to Spain.
The San Sebastian tapas bar felt like the most unpretentious yet best catered cocktail party I’d ever attended. My friends and I followed the lead of the locals, who congregated in loose circles with cups of vino tinto in one hand and the thin waxy papers that pass for napkins in the other. When the inspiration struck, we’d slide up to the bar, peruse the pickings, and pluck another fine tapa from its plate prison.
A sneeze guard would have totally rained on the parade.
- by Terry Ward
Brazil has amazing views and a vibrant music scene, but muggers and prostitutes are just as plentiful. And while that adds a sense of adventure to your trip, there’s something creepy about watching a hooker hit on your father in broad daylight.
One afternoon, my family visited the Museo de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. (That’s right, I’m cultured. And while the art was fascinating, it seems that artists are a tortured bunch regardless of country of origin.) After, we walked through the financial district of the city, which on a Sunday afternoon was pretty deserted.
We passed a guy that looked to be in his twenties, and sensing that we might be from out of town, he gestured to us for the time. Being that we didn’t have any fanny packs on us, I was sad that it was that obvious. My dad showed him his watch and we continued on our way.
All of a sudden I heard a scream coming from behind me and then a thump. I turned around to see that very same man holding on to my mom’s handbag and pulling for dear life. My mother, tough woman that she is—due to her upbringing on the mean streets of the suburbs—was gripping it just as fiercely.
As soon as I saw what was going on I started screaming at the Brazilian, using every curse word I knew in combinations like “youmothershitfuckingassface!”
And then I thoroughly surprised myself. I walked right up to the guy, who was still engaged in the tug-of-war, said “Don’t touch my mom!” and then slapped him across the face. Granted, there was no force behind my slap (adrenaline works in mysterious ways) and it probably felt more like I was caressing his face, but he got the idea.
And then he did something even more surprising: he ran away.
This entire ridiculous exchange took place in about 10 seconds, but it wasn’t until after the Brazilian escaped that my father actually turned around.
“That’s okay, we can handle it,” my mom said sarcastically.
And it turned out she didn’t even have anything valuable in the bag. “All I had in there was my reading glasses and a book,” she said. “But I really liked that bag.”
Who knew it was so dangerous to come between a woman and her accessories?
- by Emily Epstein of b’scuse me? fame.
I feel your pain, Dan. – cb
You can’t swing a bat in New York without hitting a tourist. I’ve tried. They’re everywhere. Walking the two blocks from the subway station to my office on Wall Street is like walking down Main Street in The Magic Kingdom, except the guy in the Goofy costume doesn’t work there, and he might stab you. This is why New Yorkers are said to be “hard” or “rude”: because if I’m not being paid like a celebrity I don’t want to dodge flashbulbs on my way to work.
It’s not our fault if you think about it. Imagine living in Cleveland or Baltimore and you’re drunk and on your way to work and all you want is a cup of coffee, except you can’t get to the coffee shop because there is a throng of backpackers staring at . . . whatever people go to see in Cleveland and Baltimore. The point is, we don’t care because we’ve already seen it. We know all about it. In fact, we’ve seen it so many times, we’re not even surprised when someone is peeing on it. To you, seeing it superficially for the first time, it may be the most novel thing since Stonehenge. But in the same way that the Native Americans felt a oneness with this land before we stole it from them, native New Yorkers feel a kinship with the city – like a friend who acts tough and crude and eats at The Olive Garden, but we’ve seen him cry at Big Fish.
Sometimes, though, the city will surprise you. Like this past weekend when I attended a roving theatrical tour called Accomplice. Me and eight other people signed up to meet a shady man dressed in black at the South Street Seaport. He gave us photos, a tape recorder and four plane tickets, which it was now our job to deliver. From there we followed the clues to each destination, meeting our “accomplices” along the way, helping them pull off the caper of a lifetime.
What can something like this teach you, you ask? A few things:
1. The word “caper” simply cannot be used anymore;
2. If you are on the lookout for shady characters in New York, you will find them everywhere;
3. In Chinatown, you can buy a live frog for $3.00;
4. Actors from Indiana trying to do New York accents always sound like actors from Indiana trying to do New York accents;
5. Despite living here my whole life, there are still new experiences to be had in New York; and
6. When in doubt, never ask a lady in a vinyl skirt and fishnets the location of the “special package.”
- by Dan Murphy of [redacted] fame
We love sharing in experiences of adventure and mirth and we love it when folks upload videos that reflect our verve. Better even, we love it when videos make us want to travel, allowing us to escape the standard day-to-day with a little osmotic goodness.
Introducing Duzer. The latest member of the Travelistic family of producers, Ryan Van Duzer is a Colorado-based filmmaker/host and Peace Corps alum. To put it plainly, his videos kick ass. We shot him a few questions to learn a bit more about the man behind the magic.
What made you want to start making travel vids?
I love telling unique stories and when I travel I always seem to get myself into unique situations. My dream is to work as a travel host, so right now, making short travel videos is a great way to get practice.
What inspires you to travel?
I’m inspired by people. Wherever I’ve go, I always meet amazing people who are willing to show me their culture. I don’t really travel to sit on beaches, I love adventures and getting off the beaten path. I also try and incorporate some sort of volunteering into my travels. I’ve volunteered at orphanages in the Dominican Republic and recently spent two years with the Peace Corps in Honduras. Americans aren’t very popular throughout the world right now and I like to travel to show people the good side of American culture.
What’s the craziest thing you’ve done/seen on the road?
Well, getting my right bicep infested with Bot Flies was pretty funky. I was camping in a rain forest in Belize and woke up with little bumps on my arm, I didn’t think anything of it at the time but three weeks later I had little worms poking their heads in and out of my arm. I couldn’t get them out for the life of me, I tried tweezing them out, pouring alcohol on them, burning them and I even taped a piece of raw meat on my arm in hopes that they would be enticed out and into the meat…didn’t work. They finally came out on their own, two months later in a cheap hotel en El Paso Texas.
Best moment on video?
My best moment on video is when I competed in a goofy dance contest on a popular prime time Honduran Game show. I went to the show just to sit in the audience but got picked to be part of the games. I had no idea what I was doing, the beautiful models tried teaching me the dance but I ended up just going nuts like a dorky white boy. And guess what? I won it anyway.
