What We Loved This Week: Barack Obama, George W. Bush and More

Travel Blog  •  World Hum  •  01.09.09 | 5:16 PM ET

Sleigh RidePhoto by Micah Clark

Eva Holland
Sleigh rides. I went on my first one in years this week, and while we weren’t exactly dashing through the snow (pictured), I really enjoyed the quiet, laid-back ride—and the cup of hot chocolate by the fire, afterward, too.

Sophia Dembling
I’ve met the the Mayor of Lajitas, Texas, Henry the beer-drinking goat. Now I want to meet Lou, the lifesaving mule in McMinnville, Tennessee. Sometimes the most interesting people you meet in your travels are not people at all.

Valerie Conners
Reading Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara. The book acts as a guide through ancient Celtic teachings, tales and spirituality. I spent a great deal of time in Ireland many years ago, and reading O’Donohue has unearthed old, dreamy memories of looming stone castles, craggy coasts and foamy pints of Guinness.

Jim Benning
Trucker Steve. I just stumbled across his videos on YouTube. Check out Steve in his cab holding forth on proper trucker nutrition:

Terry Ward
Marveling at Florida’s non-human snowbirds. The lakes near my house in downtown Orlando are barely larger than retention ponds, and they’re filling with wintering birds—ibis, moorhens, night herons. It’s amazing to watch Everglades-esque antics—like anhingas struggling to get fish off their needle-like beaks and down their gullets—with the city’s skyscrapers as a backdrop.

Joanna Kakissis
During my holiday vacation in Greece, I spent a few days listening to my cousins clinking triangles and practicing their renditions of the “calanda”—or carols. They sing versions for Christmas and New Year, and get money for their crooning. (Growing up in North Dakota, I missed out on this.) Here’s a taste of calanda cuteness.

Jenna Schnuer
While Flyover America took off on World Hum this week, I’m in, what, week eleven of being home? Sheesh. I need to get on a plane. Soon. But, through the stories at The Moth’s GrandSLAM, I did travel to several places in Europe; Phoenix; and Poe Cottage in the Bronx.

David Farley
I loved the video that surfaced this week of Barack Obama on a Chicago cable access food show in 2001 waxing about the Southern dishes at a restaurant called the Dixie Kitchen. It’s been said to the point of numbness now, but after eight years of an anti-intellectual square in the White House, I still get giddy when I hear Obama speaking intelligently about things.

Eli Ellison
George W. Bush. Love is perhaps too strong an emotion to feel for a man who should be thrown in jail come Jan. 20. But this week I begrudgingly give props to the outgoing prez for creating three new Pacific Ocean national monuments. I may never visit the atolls, tiny islands or pristine reefs that have been spared Dick Cheney’s seafloor mining drill bit, but it’s good to know they’re protected.

Michael Yessis
Tipicos El Encanto, a Mexican restaurant in Gaithersburg, Maryland. I was looking for a new, cheap lunch place near home, and I found one through the Chowhound boards. Tipicos serves the best tacos I’ve had in the Washington, D.C., area.

Bill Belleville
My friend Jen Chase told me about the progress of a musical she’s writing devoted to the contact between the early French colonists to Florida in 1564 and the native Timucua. She’d consulted a dictionary of the Timucuan language, and was using long-gone words of those Indians to describe symbolism in a dream she conjured for the play. French explorer Laudonnière returned to life, and birds and animals with Timucuan names again roamed the landscape. I thought, geez, what a wondrous gift to give to the memory of the original European visitors and “earth people” here who befriended them.

Tags: Barack Obama, Literature, Politics, Shameless Self-Promotion, News and Briefs


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