Category Archives: travel

The smell of diesel. Women in tailored skirt suits and demure heels. Public pay toilets. Automatic weapons. Not being able to fall asleep. Transitions are hard. Jet lag. Soul delay. The company you keep. Liminal states where no matter what you’re … Continue reading→

I was staring at a foreign city in the half light of early morning, through a gauzy curtain, from the 26th floor. I tried to go back to sleep, I tried to read. My family was somewhere else in this … Continue reading→

Teotihuacan Coyoacán Coyoacán is a little village in a big city, where Frida lived and her Casa Azul still stands, where all the families come out to the plaza near the church on a Saturday afternoon. Kids kick a soccer … Continue reading→

From the midnight sun to the city of eternal sunset. Rome, the color of dusk, the buildings a range of ochre, centuries of dust clinging to the stones. We visited the Capuchin Crypt on the posh Via Veneto, thousands of … Continue reading→

Rome, Italy June 2013

“We drank each other’s health and exchanged invitations to visit each other in our countries. After a time I went out from the brightly lighted cabin to the dark boat-deck. For the moment the night was clear and starry. I … Continue reading→

With a rental car and vague directions in Franglais, dodging the Marrakechi drivers, we made our way north. A near-accident in a roundabout and we found the highway, N9, wide and smooth, relatively empty. The surroundings were all black and … Continue reading→

We awoke early, before anyone in the family in whose house we were staying. The streets were almost quiet. Aziz picked us up in a white 4Runner and we left the city. After driving past open fields we quickly began … Continue reading→

The cab from the bus depot to our riad wound through busy lamplit streets, past the king’s home, in a land that looked like Aladdin. The driver asked where we come from, and after we told him California, he said … Continue reading→

Essaouira is the Berber name for the city the Portuguese called Mogador. It sits on the Atlantic, famous for its trade winds, named for the walls that surrounded it. Essaouira seems like onomatopoeia for the sound when the water meets … Continue reading→

We arrived in Casablanca in the rain. The train from Rabat ripped through a desert full of scrub and trash, sparsely populated, at odds with the pace of our train. It looked a little like highway 5 in California; with … Continue reading→