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

Julia Ross
My first trip to Jerusalem overlapped this week with Orthodox Easter, a coincidence that gave me immediate appreciation for what the city means to pilgrims worldwide. Walking through the Old City last Saturday, I found myself shoulder-to-shoulder with Ethiopians, Greeks, Armenians and Russians making their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (pictured), revered by Catholics and Orthodox Christians as the site of the crucifixion and resurrection. Halfway up the Via Dolorosa, the Armenians erupted in a raucous celebration, chanting, singing, swinging large knives, and waving Armenian flags to what sounded like drums and bagpipes. Nothing like Easter at home, for sure.

Michael Yessis
William Finnegan’s excellent and sobering look at international human trafficking, specifically the organizations and people fighting sex trafficking of Moldovans. It’s frightening how prevalent it is in many parts of the world. “Many legitimate businesses share, unwittingly or otherwise, in the profits—travel agencies, hotels, tour-bus companies, night clubs—along with accountants, lawyers, doctors, landlords, forgers, and a large, indispensable contingent of corrupt police officers, border guards, and embassy personnel,” Finnegan writes in the New Yorker. “Everybody seems to be making money except the trafficked women and girls.”

Joanna Kakissis
I may live in Greece, but I’m obsessed with the race for the U.S. Democratic presidential nomination. I’m checking the blog of The Politico’s Ben Smith 10 times a day and then prattling on about the news. Naturally, this tends to bore people. My Greek friends and family say, It’s spring, Joanna! The flowers are blooming, the outdoor tavernas are beckoning and Barack and Hillary are far, far away. But in the spirit of cross-cultural political understanding, I still made them watch SlateV’s hilarious seven-minute recap of this long and winding road to the nomination. They laughed, they pondered and then they told me to get a life (and some sun). Okay, I’m putting on my sunglasses now.

Eva Holland
This year at Christmas, I strategically gifted a number of travel narratives that I was also interested in reading myself. So during a visit to my dad’s place in Barbados, I was finally able to pick up Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between—not exactly beach reading, but I learned a lot about the various peoples and landscapes of Afghanistan, a country that gets a pretty one-dimensional treatment in the media.

Jim Benning
I’m fascinated with a book called A Billion Lives: An Eyewitness Report from the Frontlines of Humanity by Jan Egeland, former U.N. under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs. It explores the problems faced by a billion people on the planet, in places like Darfur, Zimbabwe and the tsunami-ravaged coastlines of East Asia, as well as the challenges faced by humanitarian workers trying to help. Egeland’s interview on “Charlie Rose” this week doesn’t seem to be online yet, but a March interview from public radio’s “Fresh Air” is available. One thing I particularly liked: Egeland has confronted the world’s worst crises in recent years, yet he remains an optimist. That’s encouraging.

Kristin Luna
I made the cross-country journey home to Tennessee, where my family still resides. Even though I’ve lived in many places since growing up in the South—Scotland, New York City, Arizona, Denmark, the Netherlands, now California—something about the familiarity of revisiting your roots is simultaneously exciting and comforting. And I find the late Southern spring weather oddly appealing—it’s pleasant without being too hot, muggy without being too suffocating. While there, I ran in the Country Music Marathon and saw Nashville in a whole new light: 30,000 people came out to partake in the event, and more than 70,000 others were there to cheer them on. When I viewed the race results, I was surprised to find that most of the top finishers were foreign. Sure, I realize that many of the world’s best runners come from countries like Kenya, but I hardly expected athletes to travel as far as my under-the-radar home state to run a hilly 26.2 miles.

Photo by mockstar via Flickr, (Creative Commons).