In case of rip current, swim parallel to shore. I should have known this at 19, but for some reason it was never covered in any swim class I had ever taken. One summer in college, I had tagged along on a trip my then-boyfriend (let’s call him T) and his family was taking to Hawaii. Apparently everyone else knew this fun fact about ocean safety, but forgot to share it with me.

We had plunked our towels and beach gear down on the sand. The ocean was unusually calm, the waves not large or consistent enough for surfing. T’s three teenage sisters decided to spend the day tanning, and his mother curled up in a beach chair with the latest thousand-page Harry Potter. T and I were more restless and decided to swim out without boogie boards. After a few minutes, I noticed that waves got bigger and T was nowhere to be found. I turned back and realized I was much farther from the shore than I thought. As I was trying to judge the distance, a wave crashed over my head.

The waves, which seemed like gentle rolls in the distance, became much larger and fiercer up close. Panicking, I tried to swim back to shore, but every stroke forward pushed me 10 feet back. Still no sign of T, and his family was now just tiny dots on the faraway sun-drenched shore. Tanning and reading about child wizards on the beach didn’t seem like such a bad idea now. More waves crashed over my head. I gulped about 5 lung-fulls of sea water. I considered yelling for help, but knew my calls would be drowned out by the roar of the ocean.

Even if I hadn’t been told about this idea of saudade – a feeling of longing or melancholy mixed with hope for finding what is lost that permeates the Portuguese personality – I would have felt it still.

My friend Gabriela, who I visited in Porto, was the first to tell me about it. She said that I would see. That there’s a certain sense of longing that permeates the Portuguese personality that I would eventually sense – despite the cerulean skies, the merrily flapping laundry in the wind and the typically European conviviality around the dinner table.

When I asked her where she thought this longing came from, she said that perhaps it’s because the Portuguese were always travelers. Always explorers in search of something better – or at least something different – on foreign shores.

I certainly sensed her saudade.

When I first met Gabriela in Morocco, she was traveling. Abuzz at the overwhelming sounds, sights and smells of the medina in Marrakech. Visiting her at home in Porto, I found her back to normal life. There were stresses at work, pressure from friends, and above all, a deep longing to return to New Zealand, where she had lived for a year.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt the weight of my own saudade in Portugal.

Perhaps it was the quietness of the cafes in the mornings, where couples sit side by side and speak in low voices as if not to disturb their neighbors. Even at a touristy seaside overlook near Lisbon, it was a busload of Spanish tourists that were gabbing away excitedly and bubbling about, injecting life into what was otherwise just a postcard perfect backdrop.

There is an overall quietness to life here that makes you reflect.

All I do is travel. My mother has always called me a seeker, and it unsettles her to some degree. She wishes I would just find what I’m looking for already, get a proper job – with benefits – and settle down.

The thing is, I don’t really know what I am looking for.

I am just looking around to see what there is, trying to learn a little of everything, and the more I look the more I get lost about where it is that I ultimately want to settle – in fact, the more I wonder if I can settle at all.

In a way, I suppose, it is melancholic, this saudade. Never being fully content where I am.

And there is longing, to be sure – always wondering if perhaps the grass is a shade greener over there. But it is what keeps things interesting to me. Never knowing what I will find over there. Even when the grass isn’t greener, well, at least I know.

- by Terry Ward

I’m in Kigali, writing on a French keyboard that makes typing seem like a game of hit-and-miss, like trying to play poker while looking through a chicken.

Overview: Kenya is full of guns. In colonial days, they tried to exterminate the elephants (whose populations are now on the rise, thankfully); today, the good guys have guns, the bad guys have guns, and pretty much every building or parking lot has a guard with a semi-automatic rifle. This includes all the little villages, not just Nairobi. Guns are everywhere in Kenya. The government seems to have just enough money for security and corruption with nothing left over.

Uganda is in slightly better shape (i actually saw a Lexus dealership, which puts it above Kenya), but ALL roads there are Jeep trails, including the main ones that look like tarmac on the map. Driving in Uganda is a contact sport – dodging potholes that are always as deep as they are long while dodging trucks that are NOT trying to dodge you.

Rwanda is France compared to the other two, though there isn’t a single movie theater in the entire country. There are smooth paved roads everywhere, as though Bill Clinton could show up at any time and there would be hell to pay if his Mercedes bumped his latte.

It’s interesting how different cultures respond to fear.

If my recent flight from Ireland back to Biarritz is any indication, certain European nationalities seem to greet life-threatening circumstances with a hearty dose of whooping laughter.

My flight had been full of mostly Spanish travelers returning from St. Patrick’s Day in the Emerald Isle. As we descended into Biarritz, the rolling mosslike landscape out the plane window took a sudden, ominous turn – namely it started rocking violently in and out of my line of sight as the plane prepared to land and the ground shot toward us in a decidedly abnormal fashion.

A few feet before we would have touched (and I use that word loosely) down, the pilot aborted the landing. I imagined him flooring it, or however that works in the cockpit, as the plane shot pretty much straight back up – engines roaring – and my seatmate gave me a weary look that translates in any dialect to ‘oh, crap.’

Then, competing with the roar of the engine, there erupted a similarly exuberant and determine drone – the low roar of scores of Spaniards hooting and hollering and patting each other on the backs as if they had just survived the first big drop on Space Mountain.

As we screamed noseward into the heavens, then leveled off and circled over an ocean that was whipped into a frenzy by the gale force winds, the hooting only quieted for a few brief moments – when the pilot came over the PA system to announce ‘There were some high winds on the ground in Biarritz, as you can see from looking out the window at the ocean, and we’ll be attempting to land again in a few minutes.’

My legs turned to jelly as it hit me just how squarely my fate was out of my hands. But nearly ever face I turned to for solace was busy swiveling on its neck, smiling at its neighbor, and, much to my awe, giggling away the fear.

When we came in, we came in hard.

There was a moment when the plane shuddered and pitched in a strong, sudden gust and I thought, right, this is the end.

It was seriously scary stuff, but what surprised me the most was how I just sort of let my eyes glaze over and rolled with the punches. Looking back, I’d have to say it was because everyone around me was just sort of rolling with the punches, too, albeit in a far more boisterous manner.

Finally the wings caught a comforting angle. The ground was right there. And a split second before we landed, I had the relief of knowing we were going to be fine.

The cheer that erupted at that moment would have competed with that in any World Cup stadium, I assure you.

And I was right there along with the rest of my fellow passengers, hooting and hollering and screaming my head off in joy that we had won.

- by Terry Ward

After a week in Scandinavia, I am in love. Not with a tall, blond Swede, mind you, but with the bike culture here. Coming from New York, where cyclists risk their lives every day dodging manic cab and truck drivers, I was thrilled to escape to Stockholm and Copenhagen. Here, drivers actually stop at stop signs. They also refrain from honking when cyclists and pedestrians cross and intersection. Every major street has wide bike lanes, and most of the time they are painted blue or are slightly elevated to distinguish them even more.

In Copenhagen, cyclists even get their own traffic lights. On almost every street there are lines of parked bikes, since about half the population rides on a given day. Subway stations need to have a section of elevated bike parking to meet demand.

Dressed in everyday clothes, I don’t feel like a fish out of water like I do in the US. Here, people don’t believe they must dress in sweatpants or spandex outfits like Tour de France racers just to ride a bike. For Scandinavians, bikes are primarily a mode of transportation, not a mode of weight loss. Young moms pedal toddlers around in stylish jeans and wool coats. Businessmen wear their suits and plop briefcases in a bike basket. Ladies-who-lunch types ride cruisers with heels on, dangling purses from handlebars. When you spend as much time riding Scandinavians do, why not look good while you’re at it?

Maybe having such a high rate of alternative transportation is why the cities have crisp, fresh air. And why even at the height of rush hour the city centers have almost no congestion. And why Americans like me wonder how easy it would be to become expats here.

- by Diana Kuan of Indietrekker fame

In the US, when you complain and send back food in restaurant, you can expect (at best) a meal discount, or (at worst) a disgruntled waitress spitting in your replacement entree. In Shanghai, it can lead to a shouting match.

On our last night in Shanghai, my boyfriend and I stopped in restaurant near the train station serving Shanghainese and Hangzhou cuisine. We were famished, and ordered a wide assortment from the glossy picture menu: fish in vinegar, sliced pork, braised mushrooms with greens. There was also an odd section for Japanese food at the end of the menu, and my boyfriend started salivating over a picture of the “fresh sushi platter”, piled high with gleaming sashimi. Without thinking, we committed a cardinal sin: ordering Japanese food at a Chinese restaurant.

The dishes came out one by one. The appetizer was good. The fish was tasty. The pork was juicy. Then came the sushi platter, arranged on a tiered tray as though the fish were wedding hor d’ouevres. From afar, it looked great. Upclose, I saw little icicles on the salmon and tuna. The other fish were equally rock hard. It seemed that the kitchen had simply taken the fish out of the freezer and plopped it on the platter without even bringing it to room temperature. So much for “fresh.”

I called the waiter over and, in shaky Mandarin, told him that the fish wasn’t fresh, and asked if we could please send it back and choose something else.

“What do you mean it isn’t fresh?” he countered. “This fish isn’t fresh,” I said. “It’s been frozen, and is still so frozen it’s inedible.”

The waiter called a more senior waiter over. I repeated myself. The second waiter shrugged and said there was nothing he could do. I asked to see the manager. Both waiters disappeared. We waited for 15 minutes, staring at our pile of frozen fish and picking at our other entrees, before the manager made his way over.

I repeated myself for a third time, saying that we could either return the entree or switch it for another.

“Our fish is fresh,” the manager assured me. “We received it freshly frozen from Japan.”

I tried to make it clear that if something is frozen, that means it’s not fresh. Either way, we couldn’t eat sashimi that still had icicles on it. Could we please have it taken off the bill?

“No,” grunted the manager. “This fish is still fresh, so we can’t take it back.”

I raised my voice. He raised his voice. Other diners stopped eating and stared. We went back and forth debating the semantics of “fresh,” until he raised his hands, and grumbled something in his Walkie-Talkie. He carried the platter into the kitchen, and came back with the same platter, the icicle fish removed but the other fish remaining, which had now congealed into a mushy mess. He also gave us the bill, which took off about 10% to reflect the fish that was removed. “There. All fixed,” the manager said proudly.

We gave up, paid, and left. I resolved to never to do 3 things again: 1. Get into a shouting match over $15. 2. Forget that the Chinese, more than most people, absolutely hate to lose face. 3. Think that the definition for “fresh” is universal.

- by Diana Kuan of Indietrekker fame