You meet the damndest people in a second-rate graduate school. Mine was near Preston, England, not far from Manchester, slightly closer to Blackpool. If you’re not familiar with Blackpool… you lucky bastard. The main administrative building on campus flew an English, a British and a Chinese flag. This struck me as odd for about an […]
Read more "Everybody Chen Wang Tonight"For once I was in constant contact with my AirBnB host and she knew when to expect me. For some reason phone service was working again. Her name was Anke, Danke without the D, and she was just delightful. A strong, independent feminist type so I was completely comfortable in her badass penthouse apartment near […]
Read more "Hanover. Or Hannover. No One Knows."Toronto sure is something. You ever see people looking at movie posters for other movies before their theater opens? Or standing semi-uncomfortably in a random lobby, not really paying attention to anything, just kind of existing, checking their phones repeatedly even though we all know no one has texted? That’s how Toronto struck me at […]
Read more "Toronto: It’s Just Kind of There"barcelona “What are all those flags I keep seeing?” you may ask yourself upon arriving in Barcelona – if, like me, you didn’t read much about it before you arrived. They hang straight down off of balconies all over the city. Yellow with red stripes, a blue pennant at the top end, a white star […]
Read more "Barcelona: Not “Barthelona”"Italians have no time for you. I’ve overheard at least fifty non-Italian people say, “You go to a store or a café and they act like you should feel lucky they’re serving you!” And I understand where they’re coming from but once you get the rhythm of things, you see how it works. Even though […]
Read more "Rome. If you want to."If you took Des Moines, Iowa, bombed it, took away everyone’s Prozac, supplied them with only beets and sporadically functioning electricity then added 100,000 gypsies, you’d have Sofia, Bulgaria. My first thought at the train station was, ‘I’m most definitely going to be kidnapped, murdered and my organs harvested.’ “Happy-go-lucky” is not a term I […]
Read more "Bulgaria. No… just… no"[Ignore the dateline, this was actually published today, Sept. 9, 2020. Making me interact with computers is like making Shoshanna have strudel with Hans Landa.] For 40 Euro, you can take a delightful 90-minute ICE (fast train) ride from Leipzig to Berlin. Or you can be a dumbass and try to save a few bucks […]
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The Neighborhood 