When you live in Manhattan, it is only natural to crave space. On weekends, residents flock to Central Park like it is Vermont. I’ve been in “huge” New York city stores that would fit in the remote corner of a Target parking lot. It’s reflexive – if humans really do want that which we can’t have, then forget happiness, I want square footage.

Which is why when I travel I typically prefer open-air settings over just another version of my own cramped hometown. So when my family and I decided to go to Italy, instead of a hotel near the Duomo in Florence or outside the Vatican in Rome, we chose to stay in rural Tuscany.

We rented a villa with nine bedrooms and five bathrooms (seven if you count the two in the one-bedroom pool house, which is bigger than my entire apartment), which cost us less than a three star hotel in a major city would cost. The villa was located outside the small town of Cetona, which boasted three restaurants, four gelato cafes and a host of other small shops that, taking riposo (the Italian “siesta”) into account, were open for about two hours a day. But if you managed to get to the food store a stock up on food and wine (which is hard because portions are about one-quarter the size of American portions), then holing yourself up in the house with a bottle of Chianti (or, at 3 euro per, a case) was the best you could hope for out of an Italian vacation.

When I first heard that Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old Atlanta personal injury lawyer, had brought a particularly strong strain of Tuberculosis into the United States with him when crossing the Canadian border, my first thought was, “How ballsy of him…”

I mean, back in college when I went to Montreal with a few friends of mine, I smuggled some Cuban cigars back home with me and thought I was the next Pablo Escobar. But even contraband from a politically sanctioned Communist nation is nothing compared to a deadly infectious disease.

Although I actually know someone who brought back their own infectious disease from Guatemala. She was there working with a non-profit organization to help the children of poor families gain access to American colleges and universities. Unfortunately, she got typhoid (which is why I always say that charity work doesn’t pay).

She didn’t know it at the time, but as she started to feel worse she decided to fly back to Boston. By the time she got to the hospital, she was convinced that she had typhoid. (It was a topic of discussion amongst the locals where she was living.) When she told this to the doctor, he replied quizzically, “Typhoid, hmm?” He proceeded to look it up in some medical books and on the internet, explaining, “We don’t see much typhoid around here.” Finally, a call was placed to a doctor who was off that day. Apparently, he was old enough to know how to diagnose typhoid. When he arrived at the hospital at 2:00AM, grumpy and in his sweats, he took one look at my friend and said, “Where have you been?”

“Guatemala,” she replied
“That’s too bad. You have typhoid,” he said.