Posts tagged travel

Maybe nothing has surprised and pleased me more about the response to Culture Making than the enthusiasm for my chili recipe. But Jason Panella has taken it to another level—inspired by Culture Making, he is making a year's worth of chili, and learning about the United States, and himself, along the way. I love it.

re: chili, cultivation and creation, food and drink, travel

Andy:

My year-long exploration of the United States is—so far, at least—surprisingly cost-efficient. My trip from the state of Washington to Pennsylvania, for instance, only cost around $9. If I keep this up, I’ll be able to smell the smells and taste the tastes from the Atlantic to the Pacific—non-contiguous states and the District of Columbia included—for a little over $100. And it’ll keep me fed in the process. So far, this journey has taught me a lot about myself, about discipline, about improvisation under pressure, and an awful, awful lot about chili.

Chili. Chili con carne, or “peppers with meat” in Spanish. Simply meat and chili peppers, if you’re a purist (plus a lot of other ingredients, if you’re not). OK, so I’m not actually traveling from state to state, but instead I’ve been using Jane and Michael Stern’s Chili Nation (Random House, 1999) cookbook as a tour guide. The Sterns made stops in each state and collected recipes that they felt captured some of the local flavour—coffee-accented chili from the state of Washington, chili with seafood in place of beef from Maryland, a flavourful dish popularized by some of the diners on Mississippi’s Route 61, and so on.

So, in lieu of spending a year traveling, I thought I’d let my tastebuds and stomach take a trip instead. Fifty-one chili recipes in 52 weeks. One chili a week, with one week off (which I’ll probably cash in on my honeymoon, but my fiancée likes chili too, so maybe not!)

I loved this gem from the lately-late Claude Lévi-Strauss, about the fruitless yet fascinating mind games the serious, studious traveler often plays, trying to decide what era would be the best time to visit a certain place or certain culture. Lévi-Strauss finds this ultimately depressing, but I suppose there's good news in it as well: that the best time to experience culture is always, conveniently, now.

re: anthropology, brazil, france, south america, travel

Nate:

And so I am caught within a circle from which there is no escape: the less human societies were able to communicate with each other and therefore to corrupt each other through contact, the less their respective emissaries were able to perceive the wealth and significance of their diversity. In short, I have only two possibilities: either I can be like some traveller of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveller, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality. I lose on both counts, and more seriously than may at first appear, for, while I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in the same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. I am subject to a double infirmity: all that I perceive offends me, and I constantly reproach myself for not seeing as much as I should.

I bought a used mountain bike on Craigslist three weeks ago and I've quickly become addicted to riding around my city—to work, church, the farmers' market and grocery store. As this article points out, there are plenty of dangers involved, but the exhilaration and delight far outweigh the close calls with car doors. Not to mention that my commute by bike/ferry is slightly shorter—and cheaper—than my commute by bus/ferry/subway.

re: recreation, technology and change, transport, travel

Christy:

In a metropolis known for its aggressive traffic, noise and fumes, cyclists crisscross New York City on two wheels while dodging cars, trucks, cabs, pedestrians—and even other bikers tearing around with no hands on the bar.

Despite the dangers, biking is New York City’s “fastest growing mode of transportation,” says City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who herself bikes to work in lower Manhattan, about a mile from her Greenwich Village home.

The number of cyclists has jumped by 80 percent in the past decade—to 185,000 among the more than 8 million city denizens. City officials say they’ve worked to make the city more biker friendly. They note the hundreds of miles of marked bike paths created in recent years, safety awareness campaigns and handouts of free helmets to unprotected cyclists.

The economy may be tanking, but here's one industry that is really "taking off": an airline for pets. Being a devoted pet-owner, I can appreciate this service. But with tickets averaging $250 a pop, plus delivery and overnight boarding costs, I have to wonder: when people from impoverished nations (and impoverished people in our own nation) read about something like this, what conclusions might they draw about our culture?

re: animals, family, pets, transport, travel, trends

Christy:

Dan Wiesel and his wife, Alysa Binder, remember the guilt they felt after their Jack Russell terrier Zoe had to fly cross country in the cargo area of a plane when they moved from the San Francisco Bay area to Florida. “When she came out she just wasn’t herself,” Binder said. “We thought there had to be a better way.” The couple’s answer is Pet Airways, a new airline just for cats and dogs that the couple founded. The airline had its inaugural flights Tuesday from several airports, including BWI Marshall Airport.

There are no human passengers aboard Pet Airways flights, just animals, which are called “pawsengers…”

The airline is sold out for its first two months, Binder said. Pet Airways serves Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles, but Binder said the company hopes to expand to 25 cities in a couple of years. Ticket prices average $250, Binder said. Other airlines charge $75 to $275 for pets, with prices varying depending on where the pets ride. In May, Southwest began allowing people to bring small pets on board for $75.

One airline expert said there is a niche for people who want to take their pets on vacation and other travels. But it is unclear if this airline is the answer.

It may be complicated for passengers to plan their flights with their pet’s flights, said Robert Mann, president of airline consulting firm R.W. Mann & Co. Inc.

“It’s an interesting concept,” Mann said. “There is a need for it. The key question is if this particular concept really meets that need. Time will tell, as it usually does.”

It might be a bit strong to say this "proves" there is a link between living abroad and creativity. Still, this study is suggestive, and supports one of the theses of Gregory Berns's intriguing book Iconoclast: new environments and experiences supply the brain with the raw material for innovation.

re: creativity, innovation, migration, travel

Andy:

Anecdotal evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gauguin, Samuel Beckett and others spent years dwelling abroad. Now a pair of psychologists has proved that there is indeed a link.

As they report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, William Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, presented 155 American business students and 55 foreign ones studying in America with a test used by psychologists as a measure of creativity. Given a candle, some matches and a box of drawing pins, the students were asked to attach the candle to a cardboard wall so that no wax would drip on the floor when the candle was lit. (The solution is to use the box as a candleholder and fix it to the wall with the pins.) They found 60% of students who were either living abroad or had spent some time doing so, solved the problem, whereas only 42% of those who had not lived abroad did so. . . .

Merely travelling abroad, however, was not enough. You do have to live there.

I fly all the time and way too much—I've been doing so for about fifteen years now—and the vast majority of flights are absolutely banal and boring. (And happily, none have featured the slightest bit of danger or drama that we witnessed in New York yesterday afternoon.) But three times I have had conversations with a stranger that I will never, ever forget—moments that are on a very short list of the most treasured and important events of my life. This essay by Lindsey Crittenden is a lovely and evocative reminder of the possibilities that surround us—even when they remain only possibilities.

re: airplanes, friendship, love, transport, travel

Andy:

His name was Peter, and he carried an L.L. Bean canvas bag, monogrammed and trimmed in forest green. It was December 28, 1988, and I noticed him at the gate. Preppy, but kind of cute. And then we boarded, and he took the seat next to mine. American Airlines; JFK to SFO; a DC-10, which meant a layout of two-five-two. I had the window, and he the aisle. We gave each other brief, courteous nods, he stashed his L.L. Bean bag, and I turned back to my book, sneaking an occasional glance his way.

The flight attendants did their familiar demonstration. The plane pulled away from the gate and taxied onto the runway. The plane stopped. The captain came on and made a lame joke. Peter (although I didn’t know his name yet) and I exchanged glances, rolling our eyes in shared wariness. He said something, I said something, and we didn’t stop talking for the next six hours, during which I didn’t look at my book or attempt the movie.

By the time the plane landed at SFO, we knew each other’s names, hometowns, employers, current neighborhoods, and how our mothers didn’t approve of the people we were dating—in my case, because the guy, in Mom’s words, “acted like a kindergartener,” and in Peter’s because the woman wasn’t WASPy enough, a fact Peter underlined by gesturing toward the L.L. Bean bag at his feet.

Used to be the passport was (or became, with travel) an album of other countries' weird juxtaposed iconography. For now, though, we can get the same without leaving home.

re: cultural worlds, iconography, travel

Nate:

I also admire the State Department’s evident desire to create an Album of America—a collection of snapshots that, over the course of the passport’s twenty-eight pages, catalogues the members of our national family. And I am impressed with the diversity the State Department has achieved. Aside from (i) the distant silhouettes of the passengers and crew of the Mississippi Steamer and the Yankee Clipper, (ii) a shadowy herd of cows, and (iii) the identification photograph of the passport holder, the new passport depicts American life in the following numbers:

Of the eleven men, nine are white. The other two are cowboys whose race is rendered indeterminate by their Stetson hats. The lone woman is the Statue of Liberty.