What We Loved This Week: David Foster Wallace, ‘The Oatmeal Ark’ and an Inukshuk

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

Jim Benning
I loved that, despite all our worst fears, Texas was battered but not beaten by Hurricane Ike. Texans are a resilient bunch. In fact, weeks ago I bought a ticket for a flight today from San Diego to Fort Lauderdale with a stop in Houston—I’m heading east to speak at the National Writers Workshop. Amazingly, my flight hasn’t been canceled or even rerouted.

Frank Bures
I loved these two factoids from the October Harper’s index: 1) Amount of loose change recovered at U.S. airport security checkpoints since 2005: $1,050,371.78. 2) Average number of names added to the U.S. terrorist watch list each month: 20,000.

Julia Ross
I’m digging the Wall Street Journal website redesign—it’s much cleaner and easier to navigate, and their subscriber-only content is now clearly marked from the home page. I’ll be browsing the travel section more regularly now; looks like they’re ramping up multimedia offerings, including this video on visiting remote parts of the Great Wall.

Valerie Conners
I loved the present my good friend and traveling companion gave me: a silver necklace with a small pendant in the shape of an inukshuk, a stone, person-shaped structure built by the Inuits and thought to symbolize protection and guidance for travelers. We had seen the inukshuk symbol while traveling around Vancouver this summer (it’s the city’s ubiquitous symbol for the 2010 Winter Olympics), and I immediately became fascinated by the structures and their symbolism, and wished for a little one to accompany me on my travels—ask and ye shall receive, eh?

Terry Ward
Finally reading David Foster Wallace’s cruise ship story once Harper’s made the online version available to non-subscribers following his tragic death last week. I recently endured a week on Holland America’s MS Westerdam (my first cruise), and nearly every sentiment and detailed description of Wallace’s in “Shipping Out” mirrored what I (and countless others, I’m certain) experienced as a reluctant cruise passenger. I suppose the magic of Wallace’s “brain voice” came in verbalizing feelings so many of us relate to, but are at a loss of the sheer genius that was uniquely his to articulate.

Eva Holland
I’ve just started reading The Oatmeal Ark by Rory MacLean, and so far it feels as though it was written just for me. It’s a sort of travel novel, or maybe a heavily fictionalized travel memoir, about a Scottish man who follows in his ancestors’ path on a journey from the Hebrides to Nova Scotia, and across Canada to the west coast. During my time in the U.K., my British roommates were endlessly amused by the pilgrimage I made to the Highland village that my family left behind in 1720, so it’s nice to come across a Brit who shares my interest in our trans-Atlantic connections.

David Farley
I’m in Jerusalem, and for the first few days I wandered the lanes of the walled Old City, intrigued about crossing from the Muslim to the Jewish to the Christian quarters, all of which are packed with shops selling everything from spices to shoes to souvenirs.  But I wanted to spend some time in the non-touristy part of town. I found it in Mahane Yahuda, a huge outdoor food market in central Jerusalem and a cacophony of Middle Eastern goodness: rich halvah, locally produced cheese, and seafood so fresh that a fishmonger sliced off a piece of a raw salmon and ordered me to eat it just to prove it. Best of all, I was the only non-local gawking at the screaming fruit and veggie salesmen, the orthodox Jews praying in the synagogue wedged between stalls, and the chefs rushing around to get ingredients for the night’s dinner.

Michael Yessis
The view from the window of my room this afternoon in Las Vegas:

Top photo by eschipul via Flickr, (Creative Commons). Bottom photo by Michael Yessis.

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