"The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it" - Rudyard Kipling
Travel dispatches from a shrinking planet

Travel dispatches from a shrinking planet

RECENT DISPATCHES
8.6.08

Like Writing on Water

In western Uganda, Christopher Vourlias met Colin, a farmer and poet who questioned the purpose of life while happily revealing the meaning of nohandika ha maiise.

7.15.08

My Senegalese Cousin, the Rice-Loving Pig

When the woman selling peanuts at a Samba Dia market learned the Senegalese name adopted by Katie Krueger, negotiations took an insulting turn

TRAVEL BLOG
SPEAKER'S CORNER
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A Tourist With a Shovel and a Hoe

When she arrived in Kenya to volunteer with the Maasai, Daniela Petrova looked down her nose at tourists there to have a good time. But was her own motivation much different?

ASK ROLF
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How Should I Spend My Time in Spain?

Vagabonding traveler Rolf Potts answers your questions about travel

Q&A
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Paul Theroux: Invisible Man on a Ghost Train

Jim Benning asks the author of “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” about his new book, aging and the challenge of disappearing in the age of the BlackBerry

HOW TO
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Eat Ceviche in Lima

Grab a Cusqueña and get comfortable. As Nicholas Gill explains, a trip to a Peruvian cevichería can be an all-day immersion in good conversation and raw seafood.

BOOKS
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Unsentimental Journeys: Wrestling With Paul Theroux

Bronwen Dickey considers “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: 28,000 Miles in Search of the Great Railway Bazaar”

AUDIO SLIDESHOW
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My Travels, My Feet

After taking one too many headless torso shots of herself, solo traveler Sophia Dembling started snapping photos of her feet around the world, from the Grand Canyon to Red Square


THE LIST
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Seven Reasons to Have a Foreign Fling

Sure, having an overseas romance is fun. But Terry Ward points out seven other benefits to cross-border love, mon petit chou.

ITEM
7.3.07

Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’: Do His Songs Still Resonate in the City That Inspired Them?

imageIn 1973 Lou Reed recorded Berlin, an album inspired by the German city that Rolling Stone called “one of the gloomiest records ever made—slow, druggy and heavily orchestrated.” At the time, the Wall cut through Berlin and the city struggled with a heroin epidemic among teens. “In other words, it was not a happy place, although it was certainly an interesting one—Berlin, in that era, had become a mecca for some of the most creative heads in rock music,” Time’s Stephanie Kirchner writes in an intriguing “Postcard from Berlin” on the magazine’s Web site.

Last month, Reed traveled to Berlin to perform the record in its entirety at the Tempodrom arena in the Kreuzberg district. Kirchner attended and asked an intriguing question: “Do these songs still resonate in a Berlin that bears little resemblance to the city that inspired them?”

One attendee called Reed’s show “worse than Las Vegas,” but Kirchner has a kinder verdict: “For some, at least, the city that inspired the songs of ‘Berlin’ may be lost forever, but the songs themselves have lost none of their power.”

Related on World Hum:
* Berlin’s DDR Museum: ‘There Must Be a Microphone Around Here Someplace’
* Border Stories: Why Do Nations Build Walls?*
* Visiting Bob Marley’s Jamaica and ‘the Government Yard in Trench Town’
* The Highs and Lows of Traveling on iTunes


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