On a recent flight overseas, I opened a copy of the International Herald Tribune to find the "World's Most Traveled Man" grinning at me with a chiclet smile.
Eats, sweets and idle feats Whirling dervishes and belly-dancers are past tense in Istanbul. Yet it is commonly said that Turks have an identity crisis in which tradition is in constant conflict with more cosmopolitan sensibilities.
"Even the most passionate man will go crazy in this city," wailed cab driver Abdullah Ayaz as he stomped on the accelerator, swiped the shopping bag of a pedestrian and shot a glance at his crowded rear-view mirror.
In one week, thousands of co-eds will flood Spring Break destinations like Panama City, Florida and Cancun to swig bad booze and "party with Real World celebrities," only to return to school with a few blurred photos, a Margaritaville shot glass and a re-mixed version of the same hangover they had before they left.
The saucy South Whether it was to the croon of Edith Piaf, the swoon of James Brown and now the globo-dance-pop of Kylie Minogue, Saigon -- make that Ho Chi Minh City -- still swings.
Vietnam is red, hot and ready for you. Nominally communist, but unabashedly capitalist, these days it's rockin' from the Delta way beyond the old DMZ thanks to free market reforms that have attracted foreign investors and budget travelers.
San Franciscans don't really care. Whereas a cabbie in Queens with an Italian flag dangling from his rear-view might insist that he lives in the best damn city on Earth, it's likely that the Mexican-Filipino cable car conductor on Powell Street would quietly go about his business. To accept the tag that San Francisco is the most "European" of American cities, as is done all too often, is shallow.
When vacation season rolls around I prefer self-improvement to be incidental, much like how eating an ice cream cone also happens to be high in calcium.
After a midnight bus ride with Chinese workers to New York, a flight to San Juan that we should have missed, an hour-long van drive to the port of Fajardo and a ferry connection that seemed to move vertically more than horizontally, a white van pulled up to the Dewey pier with italicized cherry letters that read "Playa Flamenco." We had come to Culebra to confirm a rumor: That 17 miles off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico lies an island virtually unknown, alleged to shelter the best stretch of sun-kissed bliss this hemisphere has to hide.
The hands get you first. You don't actually cross the eastern Thai border into Cambodia; you are yanked inside.
