What We Loved This Week: Frontenac Provincial Park, ‘Roughing It’ and Doctor Shakshuka

Travel Blog  •  World Hum  •  09.26.08 | 3:43 PM ET

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

Eva Holland
Hiking in Frontenac Provincial Park. I’ve been staying in a village just outside Kingston, Ontario, and the park entrance is only a few minutes away. Being a pure-bred city kid, I’m not used to having such ready access to car-free, quiet walking trails. It was great to take a couple of afternoons off this week and get outdoors.

Jim Benning
Until yesterday, it would have been Dave Barry’s talk about humor writing Saturday at the National Writers Workshop in Florida; I laughed for an hour straight. But I was equally riveted yesterday, albeit in a more sobering way, by this NPR interview with Hooman Majd, U.N. translator for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and author of the new book, “The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran.” Although Majd translates for Ahmadinejad, he’s also a journalist and a critic of him. Among other things, he talked about translating—or not—phrases like “Zionist regimes.” Just fascinating.

Michael Yessis
I escaped the Mexican food black hole that is the Washington, D.C., area and ate some carne asada tacos and guac at Pink Taco in Las Vegas. Not the best I’ve ever eaten, but good enough to satisfy a craving I’d had since being in L.A. a month ago.

imagePeter Wortsman
I broke into a broad smile at the following reflection on the tantalizing allure of travel in Roughing It, an account of a journey westward by the great American wordslinger Mark Twain. “He was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word ‘travel’ had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero.”

Sophia Dembling
By August, my husband and I are counting the weeks, then the days, to the State Fair of Texas. You can see the Texas Star Ferris wheel from I-30. All year it is still, but tonight, it will light up and start turning. Big Tex will boom his greeting, fried foods will hit the grease (chicken fried bacon is this year’s news), FFA kids will parade their livestock, the hucksters will commence slicing and dicing and the Midway barkers will lay down their challenges. Our state fair is a great state fair. I never miss it.

Valerie Conners
The pervasive ‘70s and ‘80s soundtrack that infiltrated nearly every Las Vegas casino I entered while in town for a conference. I’m not even sure I can pick a top tune, when the candidates for favorite include the ubiquitous Can’t Smile Without You, Red Red Wine and Every Rose Has its Thorn, which played on some sort of evil loop from the Sahara’s bathroom loudspeakers.

Joanna Kakissis
I went on a hike early this week to Flagstaff Mountain, just outside Boulder, and reveled in the views: peaks and peaks, against the big blue Western sky. I would have stayed there all day and night, but I’m scared of running into a bear or a mountain lion, since they’ve also been known to wander into the city limits of Boulder. Bears sometimes venture into people’s backyards to eat apples, for instance. Can eco-sensitive Boulder and wild predators commune? I’m exploring the topic by reading David Baron’s book The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator’s Deadly Return to Suburban America.

David Farley
I ate my way through Tel Aviv earlier this week and the most memorable meal I had was cooked by a man nicknamed Doctor Shakshuka (pictured below) who runs an eponymous restaurant in the ancient port city of Jaffa (next to Tel Aviv), and specializes in—wait for it—shakshuka, a Middle Eastern dish of onions, garlic, sausage, spicy tomato sauce and an egg plopped in the middle. The Doctor, a rotund Libyan Jew, stands like a DJ on an outside pedestal in front of five burners while the table-strewn courtyard of happy diners mop up shakshuka with chunks of bread. I’d go back to Jaffa-Tel Aviv just to have Doctor Shakshuka feed me.

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4 Comments for What We Loved This Week: Frontenac Provincial Park, ‘Roughing It’ and Doctor Shakshuka

Julia 09.26.08 | 5:37 PM ET

Jim - I also caught that interview with Hooman Majd and found it fascinating. Interesting that so many mis-translations have fueled US-Iranian tensions.

Beth 09.26.08 | 5:45 PM ET

Hey, what happened to the link the Eva’s article? I was looking forward to seeing what she had to say.

Jim Benning 09.26.08 | 5:52 PM ET

Glad you caught that, Julia. Yeah. The power of words. I think I’ll pick up his book.

Thanks for the note, Beth. Just fixed the link—just to clarify, it was a link to the page for the park, not to an article.

Beth 09.26.08 | 6:25 PM ET

Thanks, Jim! The park website looks interesting.

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