What We Loved This Week: Rick Steves, Italian Pop, Vienna Teng and More

Our contributors share a favorite travel-related experience from the past seven days.

Jim Benning
I loved Rick Steves’s new book, Travel as a Political Act, a fine distillation of the travel-with-your-eyes-and-heart-and-mind-wide-open philosophy that Steves has espoused for decades—and that we embrace at World Hum. We’ll have more on the book soon.

Joanna Kakissis
I was thrilled to see and hear the chamber-folk singer and pianist Vienna Teng in concert at the Boulder Theater earlier this week as part of a taping of the Etown radio show. Vienna is Taiwanese-American, and she’s explored the internal travel of biculturalism in her albums, including her latest, “Inland Territory.” Here’s an old clip of her singing “Green Island” (Lüdao Xiaoyequ), an old Taiwanese song composed by Yao Di and Chen Chang-shou.

 

 

Eva Holland
I finally had the chance to sit down with Brother One Cell, the Korean prison memoir by World Hum contributor Cullen Thomas. The book had been on my reading list for over a year, and it was worth the wait—I was fascinated by the combination of a completely alien (to me) prison setting with the all-too-familiar swirl of feelings most travelers experience when they’re immersed in a foreign culture: confusion, admiration, frustration and, eventually, acceptance.

Frank Bures
I loved—loved!—Putumayo’s new Italia collection. Usually, it takes a special ear to appreciate Italian pop music, which has an illustrious and poetic songwriting history, despite its sap and camp. Fortunately, all that has been distilled out in this new disc full of delightful tunes and lyrics. The highlight is “Il Viaggio” (The Voyage), by Gianmaria Testa, the “Italian Leonard Cohen,” where he talks about trying to find the “exact point where the river meets the sea.”

Pam Mandel
Annapurna, Memories in Sound. From the minute the sound filled my headphones, I started looking around to see where the bells, laughter and other noises were coming from. This audio documentary transported me from my cramped coach seat to the mountains of Nepal, so much so that I would not have been surprised to find myself stepping out of the airplane not into Seattle, but Katmandu. Gorgeous, incredible, worth every minute. If you’ve got good headphones, use them. Via the Third Coast Festival.

Rob Verger
I loved eating fried green tomatoes and ribs at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que  in Harlem. It’s a place I’ve walked past plenty of times but never visited until now. Our waiter was hilarious, and we saw on the receipt at the end that he was going by the name “Serial Thriller.”

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