Budget vs. Bourgeois
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 06.28.01 | 11:43 PM ET
Lisa Anne Abend has traded crowded buses for taxis, youth hostels for hotels she used to deem decadent. Meals of bread and cheese are student-travel memories; she now reserves tables at fine restaurants. Do these changes make her travels less ‘real?’ She adds her two cents to the ‘What makes for authentic travel?’ conversation in a New York Times essay. Abend offers insight into the evolving mind of a longtime traveler, and fills the page with some charming, vivid anecdotes: “I remember a long hike from the bus station into one Greek town (having brushed off the clutch of waiting taxi drivers) that took me past groves of olive trees at harvest time. After stopping to watch one family at work—the men beat the trees with long sticks, the women and children collected the fruit that fell—I asked if I could help. The two hours that followed were perhaps the most memorable of my trip; the swig of ouzo that one man offered me as I prepared finally to leave still burns in my mouth.” Note: After June 30 the story will be available only in the New York Times archives.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
