What’s that one thing?

I’m going to Portugal.

Why Portugal? Well, other than its close proximity to the first place I ever traveled when I was 21 years old and the country that stole my heart almost immediately (hi, Spain!), Portugal has always, always, always been on my lifelong hope-to-travel-to-someday list. It’s on there with places like Cuba, Egypt, Japan, and Nepal, places I’ve never been but long, someday, to see with my very own eyes. (And, actually, there are a lot of places on that list, let me tell you). But to be perfectly honest, I don’t know exactly why Portugal. As in, what exactly has enraptured me. I can pinpoint why I want to visit a place like Cuba: it was off-limits for so long! Or Egypt: those pyramids! Or Japan: that sushi! Or Nepal: those mountains! And yet, Portugal has always been on that list, too, so much so that when I initiated the idea of doing another trip with Viking River Cruises and they asked me where I’d like to go and I immediately said to myself, “Oh, that’s easy – Portugal!”, I realized that I had some work to do. What was it about Portugal?

In European terms, Portugal is, well…it’s kind of remote. It’s not Mediterranean, although it seems like it should be. It’s not connected to five other little countries like so many other countries in Europe, although it really isn’t that far from the rest of the continent. It’s not Spanish-speaking, although I suspect I’ll be able to fumble my way through at least 45% of the time (Ryan is gunning for 60% since he maintains, erroneously, that Portuguese and Spanish are basically dialects of each other…we’ll see how that pans out).

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the reason this little country has always held my attention is because I’m simply curious about it. I’m curious because although I’m familiar with it, there’s so much I just don’t know about it. It’s always been just out of reach.

For instance: I am fascinated by the language of Portuguese, but can’t really speak it. I know people probably eat a lot of sausages and seafood there, but I don’t know that much about the cuisine. I have heard fado music through its descendant the bossa nova, but I’ve never actually heard the guitarra in its original form. I can recite some of the history of the Iberian Peninsula (thanks to my undergraduate degree in Spanish Literature), but I don’t know a whole lot about contemporary Portugal or its politics or recent history. I’ve read a ton of poetry and plays from the Iberian Middle Ages, but never a Portuguese author. See what I mean? It’s kind of like this place that I just never quite got to–but not because I didn’t want to; more like because I was never close enough to pop over to it but always kept it on the list because I knew I’d get there sometime.

And here we are, packing up for our Portugal’s Rivers of Gold trip. I’m taking Ryan with me (oh, the perks of him being married to a travel writer, am I right?!) and we leave tomorrow morning for our journey to Lisbon. Once we’re there, we’ll spend two nights at the Hotel Tivoli Lisbon (it’s a gorgeous 5-star resort in the heart of Lisbon…I can’t wait to slip into the fluffy terrycloth bathrobes and slippers that I am sure await me there!), and then we’ll hit the Duoro for our week-long cruise.

And then we get back and we’ll have one day to recover from the jet lag before school starts again. And that’s just how our life goes, crazy as it is.

Portugal’s River of Gold

In case you’re considering a trip to Portugal, here’s the scoop on where we’ll be headed and what my plans are while I’m there. Keep in mind that I’ve crammed in a couple of side trips/journo stuff for my own writing (you wouldn’t necessarily be trailing along on a walking food tour just so you could try and find the best pastel de nata chef or chasing after giant paper mache dolls in a parade you heard is going to be happening in a small town you’re cruising through while you’re there….well, you might be, in which case, let me know!).

Anyhow, here’s the lowdown on where we’re headed:

Lisbon (Days 1-3)

After our first night, we’ll get up early and start with a half-day tour of Lisbon. From what I’ve read online, we’ll begin at the super cute Belém district and check out the Jerónimos Monastery, one of the most important and breathtaking examples of Portuguese late Gothic architecture (it’s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site!). Then, we’re heading off on a walking tour through the Alfama District where we’ll get some history lessons along the way.

The next day, the only thing we have scheduled is a walking food tour called “A Taste of Lisbon.” We’ll walk over to what our guide is calling the “working-class district” of Graca and pop in to no less than four local restaurants, pubs, and bakeries. What I love about walking food tours is that you can really experience two things at once: the rhythm of a city by foot and its culinary wonders, one after the other.

This tour is where I hope to talk to someone about making the pastel de nata, a fancy egg tart that’s supposedly creamy inside and crunchy outside. We’ll see what I find!

Porto (Days 3-4)

On Day 3, we board the ship and start the journey to Porto! As we start the cruise, we have a stop at an old university town on the way – Coimbra – where we’ll get to check out Portugal’s oldest university (it’s been open for SEVEN centuries….I’m serious). As a teacher, I’m really excited about this, and I’m especially curious to see if I can pop in and see anyone in the English department while we’re there. Also, there’s something I absolutely love about visiting other campuses in other countries–it’s one of my very favorite things to do when I’m traveling.

The next day, we’re doing a city tour of Porto itself, which, in addition to being known as the home of port wine, is also an adorable riverside community whose historic center is (you guessed it) also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We’re planning on visiting a local port wine–making facility and then heading out for lunch. That afternoon, we’ve signed up for an excursion to the nation’s first capital, Guimarães, which is (is there a pattern here yet?) yet another UNESCO World Heritage Site. Guimarães has a medieval quarter with narrow streets, a main square and palaces and monasteries dating back to the 10th century. In the 12th century, it was Portugal’s first capital and home to its first king, Afonso Henriques. It should be spectacular.

Regua & Pinhao (Day 5)

Today, we cruise through Regua and Pinhao, two riverside cities along the Duoro River. Along the way, we’re going to stop at Mateus Palace, a baroque palace was the home of the last count of Vila Real. Then, the plan is to visit one of the area’s port wine–making shops (can’t complain about that, am I right?!). Everyone also gets to do a private tour of the vineyards.

Also: Did I mention that Ryan and I figured out that we are going to be in Regua during the annual Day of Assumption? This means that we are going to be there on exactly the same day as the gigantones parade, where people march in the streets with giant paper mache dolls. I am SO excited to catch this!

Barca d’Alva (Day 6)

Another sailing day! Today, we keep going east. Along the way, we pass through Portugal’s most dramatic cliffs, terraced vineyards, and bridges. We’ll arrive at Barca d’Alva, not far from the Spanish border, in the mid-afternoon.

After lunch, we get off the ship to take a tour to Castelo Rodrigo, which is located 2,200 feet above sea level and is purportedly surrounded by lush almond trees. While we’re there, we also plan to stop at historic Sinagoga Street, the part of the city where Jewish refugees escaped and made their new home during the Spanish Inquisition.

Salamanca, Spain (Day 7)

If you know me at all, need I say more about this day? We’re crossing over into Spain!!!! (And yes, in case you’re wondering, Salamanca is another UNESCO World Heritage Site). I have always, always wanted to visit this city, not only because it hosts a huge population of international students and is home to Spain’s oldest college, but also because it’s literally called La Dorada, or, The Golden City, because of its sandstone buildings that seem to glow in the sunlight.

During the day, we have free time to set off and explore. I’ve already told Ryan: we’re heading to the university and spending the afternoon at a cafe. That’s all I really want to do–just sit, and be. You don’t get to do that a lot when you hit up a new city every day.

Cruising Back to Porto (Days 8-9)

This morning, we sail west along the Douro back to Porto, and along the way, we’ll pass some of the area’s quintas (vineyards). We make a stop in the little village of Favaios, where we will visit one of the last traditional bakeries in the Douro River Valley. We get to take a tour of the kitchen and taste freshly-made loaves straight from the oven.

For lunch, we’re going to Quinta da Avessada, a centuries-old winery in the heart of the Douro Wine District (yep, another UNESCO World Heritage Site), and we get to try some local varieties of port, such as moscatel. I’m seeing two trends here: a lot of wine, and a lot of really old places.

Porto (Days 9-10)

Days 9 and 10 are the perfect ending: Day 9 is a visit to Lamego, a small town known for its baroque sanctuary and which is still a pilgrimage site for many Catholics today. That evening, we have a lovely farewell dinner, prepared by Viking, to send us on our way.

Day 10, we fly.

Yours in travel,

Kristin

—

All photographs from Flickr’s Creative Commons. I thank them for their generosity and I hope my photos turn out just as beautifully!

I’m excited to be traveling to Portugal and Spain with Viking River Cruises on their 2017 River of Gold tour from Lisbon to Porto.

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There is one place, however, that doesn’t fit into the whole mint-and-pink color scheme. It’s a long stretch of street, aptly named Calle Ocho (because it’s on 8^th Street), and is known famously as Little Havana. Calle Ocho isn’t exactly flashy; it doesn’t look a thing like the other Havana; it’s not even pedestrian-friendly, really. Upon first glance, it looks like little more than a regular strip mall, the kind built in the 1960s, without any attention to aesthetic or architectural flair. When I think of Calle Ocho, I don’t think of muted pastels at all—I think, instead, of brilliant turquoise, of canary yellow, of cherry reds and grassy greens. I see murals (in Little Havana, it’s not graffiti), splashed on the walls of the aging American storefronts, murals of women dancing, of Spanish words and phrases, of flowers in bloom and evocative scenes of Havana as it might be, because so many of these artists have not actually been to Cuba in a very long time.

I went to Calle Ocho in June on the heels of my first trip to the Dominican Republic on a new cruise line called Fathom. It wasn’t your typical kind of cruise: over the course of the week, one of my best friends, Alison, and I had planted baby mangrove trees along a swamp to help with pollution, helped build water filters out of clay and silver for needy families, and played with at-risk children at a summer camp in a small mountain town. Now, we were in Miami for two days—and, because I’ve never tried Cuban food before, I’d signed up for a food tour to do just that.

*

The tour started inside Augustín Gainza’s personal art gallery. After I go in and let him know I speak Spanish, he shows me his paintings, many of which depict food customs in Havana in the 1940s. His Havana—the one he so clearly remembers—is stuck in his childhood, as he was born in Havana in 1943 but escaped to the U.S. as a man in his early twenties. He has lived here, in Little Havana, ever since. We chat in Spanish, my gringa Spanish still a little tongue-tied, his a rapid-fire, consonant-swallowing Cuban Spanish, and I ask him if he paints from photographs like Ryan, my husband, sometimes does. Agustín tells me no, never—he paints only from his memories. His work is evocative, reminiscent of Matisse, rendered like a sophisticated child, with lumpy chairs and off-kilter horizon lines. But it is also elegant, depicting taro root and plantain fields, queens of the water, Chinaman working in the sugarcane fields. I love it.

As we have been talking, the other seven participants have entered, awkwardly, as if on the first day of school, wondering if they’ve gone into the right classroom, unsure how to introduce themselves to everyone else. Jennifer, a Miami local who will be our guide for the next two and a half hours as we walk in and out of Calle Ocho together, walks in the door, and I wonder: Am I going to be tasting Havana as it once was, or will this be Havana as it is? Or, has Little Havana evolved into its own evocation of memory and, in turn, come into its own?

1. Medianoche:

   a pressed sandwich, cousin of the Cuban, with soft challah bread instead of a baguette; eaten at midnight in bars in Havana

We start with picadillo empanadas. Our server brings them out, piled up on a plate, still steaming. Inside is sofrito, a hearty mix of ground beef, peppers, onions, cumin, and oregano, tomato sauce, green olives, and a bay leaf. As we eat, we introduce ourselves—there’s me, travel writer with her notebook out and camera around her neck, a single mom from Miami who just wanted to try some new food, a young recently-graduated couple from Brooklyn who work in international relations, a French couple, who are also journalists, and a couple on vacation with a basically newborn baby. As we eat our empanadas, we talk about what brought us here: wanting to write stories about Cuban food, wanting to try Cuban food, wanting to see a different part of Miami, etc. We all share our favorite foods.

Then comes out the medianoche, a sandwich sliced diagonally on what looks like flatbread. Jennifer tells us it’s called the “midnight sandwich” because it used to be a popular food to serve at midnight in Havana nightclubs. Though it’s not beans (another food I loathe!), I’m a little nervous about this one, because I know what it’s buttered with: yellow mustard. And I hate yellow mustard. From what I’ve read, to make a medianoche, the sweet Challah bread is swabbed in mustard, filled with roast pork, sliced ham, and slices of Swiss cheese, and topped with mini dill pickles. It’s usually served atop a plate of tiny slivered French fries.

So, it’s down to me and mustard. I know I’ve got to hold up my fearless travel writer self, and so, holding my breath, I pick it up and take a big bite. All I taste is mustard—that awful, smelly, freakishly yellow stuff—but I smile, say “mmm” like everyone else, and swallow.

Then I basically run back to my picadillo empanada, my sofrito and puffed pastry respite.

2. Croquetas and café Cubano:

   where you eat small fried croquettes out of a window and drink small, thumb-sized coffee that has more caffeine in it than a large cup of American drip coffee

Our next stop is a window, literally. Here, though, it’s called a ventanilla (“little window”) and the idea is easy: since there are no food trucks here, people pop by little ventanillas to grab easy-to-eat bites like croquettes, coffee, empanadas, and other finger foods. Jennifer takes a large round tray filled with little fried ovals and tiny plastic cups from the woman behind the window and passes them around. We much on the croquetas de jamón first, little fried bits made of a kind of “ham paste.”

“These are pretty classic snack foods,” Jennifer says, “but this is my favorite thing in the whole world.” She nods at the row of dark-colored drink in the little glasses. “It’s café Cubano.” Café Cubano, apparently, is a type of thick espresso that originated on the streets in Cuba after espresso machines were first imported there from Italian immigrants. What makes it unique, though, is the stream of sugar the Cubans pour into it as its being brewed.

“You can have it with a little bit of steamed milk,” Jennifer tells us as we all tip our cups and take the shot of espresso in one sip. “That’s called a cortadito.” The ratio is either 50/50 or 75/25 espresso to milk, and it always comes pre-sweetened with sugar.

When you taste café Cubano, you’ll see exactly what I mean. It’s candy disguised as coffee.

3. Mojito:

   a mint-infused cocktail that reminds me of my first travels and of tropical islands

Normally, I wouldn’t swing from super-strong espresso to an alcoholic beverage in the time it takes me to cross the street, but today, that’s exactly what we do. We go from the ventanilla to a well-established bar across the street called Ball & Chain—a place that, in its heyday, featured such national acts as Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, and Chet Baker. Its storied past, too, evokes the same kind of odd nostalgia that this whole area has: during its first 25-year run (after it opened in 1935), the place was often filled with bootleggers, gamblers, felons, and artists, meaning that its music acts—mostly jazz and blues musicians—filled the clubs every night. It reopened in 2014, with new owners committed to restoring the glory of the early Little Havana nights.

Inside, there is a live drum band and a Cuban man in a hat shaking maracas and dancing in a circle. He’s also wearing his sunglasses, but I can’t figure out why—not only is he inside, but he’s inside a dark bar.

We order a round of mojitos, drink them quickly, and imagine what it would be like to be here at night, amidst both criminality and greatness.

4. Pastelito guayabo:

   sweet guava-filled puffed pastry, served in workplaces on Fridays to celebrate the start to the weekend

Our next stop is to an unassuming bakery, where we munch on fresh guava pastries.

The walls are bare and the Challah bread is wrapped up in paper with Cuban flags printed on them. Jennifer tells us that people often serve pastries like this on Friday afternoons. I stuff an extra pastelito in my purse for Alison, who’s back at our hotel working on her novel. I know she’s going to love it.

5. Sugarcane juice:

   in which you drink the world’s natural sweetener, all on its own

From our brief stop at the ventanilla, I knew Cubans liked sugar, but I did not know they liked it so much that they drink pure glasses of it. Here, in a frutería filled to the brim with boxes of plantains, guavas, mangoes, papayas, pineapples, mamey, and sugarcane stalks, we watch as the man behind the counter pushes the long grassy stalks through a machine and turns them into sugar water.

He fills each glass with ice and pours the sweet liquid into each one. The drink, called guayapo frío, is a pineapple-yellow color, foamy on top. Its sweet (no surprises there) but not in the way I imagined: it’s sweet in a generous, natural way, like water that has been tinged with a light agave syrup might.

As we sit outside in the shade and sip our drinks, I think about how strange it is that I’m exploring Calle Ocho with seven people I’ve never met. We’re sharing this intimate experience of eating new foods together—one of the true joys of life—and yet, I don’t really know anything about any of them.. We’ve all fractured back into our original partnerships (if we had them) and those of us who are here by ourselves talk about our travels, our favorite foods, and where we want to visit next.

6. Abuela María ice cream:

   to cleanse the palate, a guava, cream cheese, and cookie ice cream does just the trick

We come to the end of our time together at an ice cream shop. Jennifer mentions we might want to try the Abuela María, a Cuban ice cream flavor made from vanilla, guava chunks, cream cheese, and galletas María, crunchy sweet butter crackers. The line is literally out the door, so as we wait, I watch the people around me: young Cuban families, young American families, foreign students all wearing backpacks with their school’s logo on it, college-aged students, and couples. They are all here, like me, for the very same reason.

Because we all love ice cream.

There’s something magical that happens around food—no doubt about that—and even more when you experience it like window-shopping, trying individually-sized samples along a historic street that runs for 12 city blocks in Miami.

I get back to my hotel and give Alison her pastry. As I suspected, the restaurants, cafés, and window shops in Little Havana are not just a piece of history. They are continuing to make their mark, every time one of us takes a bite.

Yours in travel,

Kristin

—

In case you’re interested, we visited the following restaurants in Calle Ocho during our 2.5 hour food tour: El Pub Restaurant, Exquisito Restaurant, Ball and Chain Restaurant, Yisell Bakery, Los Pinarenos Fruteria, and Azucar Ice Cream. All are on SW 8^th Street in Little Havana in Miami, Florida. The Miami Culinary Tour – Little Havana Food Tour is $59/person and includes all food and drinks.

Special thanks to Fathom Cruises and to Miami Culinary Food Tours for sponsoring my trip to the Dominican Republic and, respectively, the aforementioned food tour. All opinions are, of course, the author’s own.

The post Walking Calle Ocho with Croquetas and Cafe Cubanos appeared first on Bon Touriste.

Since I started teaching, I’ve been doing all kinds of advocacy work, getting my students and me involved in literary projects, immigrant and refugee centers, and no-kill cat shelters, setting up writing partnerships with at-risk high school students, and helping generate writing materials for startup nonprofits. It’s one of the most rewarding and meaningful kind of experiential work we can do as writing teachers–to take our talents and bring them to the world.

For instance, here we are this past semester, reading books to kindergarteners in downtown San Pedro, Los Angeles.

Yet, I realize that even as I’m writing this, there’s another side to me.

At the end of the day, I’m not just a public servant–I’m also a die-hard, unabashedly selfish travel writer bent on seeing as much of the world as she possibly can. I’d give up a class in a minute for a trip to Israel; I’d put aside grading if inspiration hits and I have to bang out the stirrings of an idea for a new travel essay; I’d rearrange my summer to accommodate for a trip (actually, I just did that).

It’s not lost on me that these are selfish things, but there’s also a part of me that whispers, timidly, that knowing these things doesn’t make me a bad person. I don’t have to dedicate myself to others all the time; after all, my heart needs to flutter every once in a while, too. And I’m still at a point in my life where I can do these things, where my freelance career, my teaching career, and my personal life have aligned ever-so-perfectly for these months so as to allow me a little time to heal from a spectacularly bad professional year and and to come to grips with the fact that, come end of summer, I’ll be moving–and starting all over–again, on the other side of the country.

So, public servant and traveler. In the past, I have traveled in ways that stroke both of these egos, teaching English in Colombia, working with international students in Malta, shopping only at local markets and buying local handmade goods. But I have never done it short-term; I have never taken a trip that emphasizes volunteering. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know if it works.

On the one hand, I’m thinking through the ethics of travel (ALL THE TIME), grappling with whether or not we as “gazers” can “gaze” without exoticizing another, and at the same time, I’m coming around to the idea that travel is often a joyous act. I don’t want to feel guilty for loving it. I want to feel invigorated by speaking about it, by asking questions about it, by participating in it as fully and completely as I can, with open eyes and an open heart. I want to share the messiness and beauty of meeting others, of experiencing new ways of being and living, with my world, because I believe it is crucial for us to have these conversations.

So that’s the question I’m asking myself today. Can combining public service and travel work short-term? Can I eat a ton of really delicious food on a cruise ship and then build a concrete floor?

Carnival Cruises’ newest project, the Fathom line, believes I can. Next week, I’m taking one of my best friends–grad school roommie, fellow writer, and traveling partner-in-crime Alison–to find out.

Alison and I have met in 2008 when she moved to Tucson, and since then, we’ve traveled all over the Southwest together, hiked all over a bunch of mountains, swam in seas and oceans, met up on the East and West coasts on more than one occasion, and headed down to Mexico in our cars with nothing but an Airbnb reservation and a vague idea of where we were going. Our husbands co-wrote their first book together. We’ve done a lot of cool stuff together.

So, I knew she’d be the perfect person to take along. (Plus, we’re supposed to keep each other on our summer writing schedules….we’ll see how well we stick to it when the beach beckons us;)).

Fathom’s Intended Mission

In this, their inaugural season, Fathom has set up journeys to both the Dominican Republic and Cuba (both sailing out of Miami) in the hopes of blending the surreal and temporary life of cruising with the harsh realities of life in the parts of the Caribbean past the golden sands and turquoise waters through something they call “impact travel.” Of course, I’m no stranger to the different sides of the “voluntourism” debate, the one that questions the ways that identity, privilege, class, and race intersect in complicated ways when white Westerners go to places of color and try to “save” them. I’ve talked with friends around the world who have been the “recipients” of said programs, who’ve experienced how terrible it feels to see tourists come in, work for a few days, take a bunch of photographs of them, and then leave feeling good because they believe they’ve made a difference.

So what is Fathom doing differently?

Here’s what they say on their website: 

“Every Fathom journey is based on our sincere belief that the person-to-person connection is among the strongest catalysts for transformation. What sets Fathom apart is the long-term, systematic partnership approach with its partner countries paired with the unique business model that allows for sustained impact and lasting development.”

Their formula is People + Passion + Partnership = Enduring Social Impact. The site goes on to state that participants will “work side by side with local residents (my emphasis) in existing programs that focus on improving the lives of children, families and communities.” This interested me, especially the use of the preposition “with” and the focus on collaboration with “existing programs.” There was no mention of “saving,” of “poor people,” and there were no exploitative photographs of people of color being stood over by white people. But who were these local partners and these existing organizations?

On the “Meet Our Partners” page, there are links to the two lead impact partners, Entrena and IDDI, two nonprofit organizations that work exclusively in the Dominican Republic to enhance local well-being and social projects. I looked up both websites, and here’s what I learned:

Fathom’s Partners: Entrena & IDDI

Recently, Entrena, who has been in existence for 25 years, has hosted students from Texas A&M who are working on global heath initiatives, held employment fairs for local youth through the Alerta Joven (At-Risk Youth Project), funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), hosted summer camps for young children of refugee and expatriate families in Caribbean nations, and partnered with the Major League Baseball Association to create a program called MLB en la Comunidad that is focused on improving the lives of Dominican youth who hope to become baseball players. Their projects have generated 30 million dollars in sustainable development for the Dominican Republic, a number that seems very impressive to me. I clicked around some more and learned that the organization was started by John Seibel, a Peace Corps volunteer after he spent time living and working in the Dominican Republic in the early 1970s, and that Entrena is now run by both he and his wife, Sobeya. On their staff page, too, I noticed something else I particularly liked: they not only list bios and photos of their office workers, but they also feature their drivers and concierge staff. Too often these critical members of an organization do not get recognized, but on Entrena’s site, their names and bodies are included.

The other main partner, IDDI, el Instituto Dominicano de Desarrollo Integral, only has a website in Spanish, so I’ll sum up what I read for those of you who don’t speak Spanish. The Instituto was started in 1984 as a nonprofit dedicated to “amortiguar la pobreza tanto en las zonas rurales como urbanas,” or, eliminating Dominican poverty in both rural and urban areas. Roughly translated, their mission is similar to Entrena, in that they wish to contribute to the well-being of Dominican society by creating new opportunities, promoting dialogue across constituencies and create long-lasting social change, to identify and tackle not only problems but find their underlying causes, and to create a space where people can live productively and creativity. Their projects and partnerships are generally focused in the areas of public health, climate change, sustainability, biodiversity, youth, and humanitarian aid, and their website highlights plenty of these projects and how they’ve met (or are still working on) their goals.

These are organizations I can get behind. In fact, I’ve already starting thinking: How can I get my students involved in these projects next year, too?

Where We’re Headed

Over the course of a week, we’ll be cruising out from Miami, spending 4 days in the Dominican Republic, and then cruising back. Here’s the map as it appears on Fathom’s website:

During the days we’re cruising, we’ll be doing things cruisers do–attending lectures, sunning ourselves, taking yoga classes, and eating…a lot. Fathom serves small servings of local, sustainable food, which makes me happy, as I’ve never been comfortable with the amount of waste generated on the bigger cruise ships. The Adonia holds about 700 people, so it’s still going to be the biggest cruise ship I’ve ever been on.

Projects I’m Signed Up For

Every traveler can sign up for three “impact activities,” or day excursions that are focused on health, education, or business. Since I’m already a teacher, I decided against working with children or volunteering to practice English with students and instead chose activities that I thought would be both thought-provoking to me and helpful to the community.

On their website, they offer a sample itinerary, and it looks a little something like this:

Here’s what we’ve chosen to do with our mornings:

Cacao and Women’s Chocolate Cooperative

This local women’s cooperative is actively involved in the cultivation of organic chocolate (cacao) plants, an important source of income for the Puerto Plata region. We’ll be spending the day working on the complete production cycle, from planting and cultivating the organic cacao trees, to preparing the raw materials, to producing and packaging the final product for sale. Fathom’s website states that by participating in this project, we can contribute toward helping hire more local women and providing critical income in a region with limited employment opportunities.

Concrete Floors in Community Homes

In the homes of poorer communities, the common basic dirt floors are a genuine health risk. They pick up dust during the dry season and retain dampness and puddles in the rainy season. And they’re impossible to clean, which means that anything spilled on the floor or tracked into the house, however unhygienic, tends to stay put.

Every month, homes in a different small area of a community will be chosen to be upgraded with new concrete floors. There are also plenty of other tasks at hand: painting the house, fixing broken furniture, cleaning and improving the outside surroundings, making improvements to common areas in the community, or planting fruit trees as part of a beautification effort that can also provide long-term nutritional benefits. The overall project will also include the addition of latrines and mosquito screens to reduce the prevalence of waste-borne and mosquito-borne diseases. Fathom’s website states that we’ll be working alongside the homeowners and other members of the surrounding community, including children and teenagers, helping them create surroundings they’ll be proud to maintain and take care of.

Water Filter Production

One solution already being implemented is the production and distribution of clay water filters, which mean far fewer children and adults will miss school or work due to water-borne illnesses. On this day, we will help out with the entire filter-making process: gathering and mixing the raw materials, working the clay, shaping and firing the filters, testing the quality of the finished product, and distributing the finished filters to needy families.

Thoughts So Far?

I’m pretty excited. For one thing, I get to spend a week on a new cruise line and I get to spend a week with one of my best friends. (Though, seriously, we could be hanging out in the kitchen cooking dinner and it would be amazing). We’ll have our afternoons and evenings free to explore, so I’m hoping to squeeze in some city touring, some waterfalls and some hiking, and some local restaurants.

More than that, though, I’ll get to meet some new people, eat some good food, do some interesting work, help out where I can, and see more of Puerto Plata than just those heart-stopping sandy white beaches. I’m hoping to make some lasting connections with the organizations Fathom is working with and set up a service project for my students next year.

Have any of you been to the Dominican Republic? Can you share any tips or must-sees for me?

Yours in travel,

Kristin

–

Come join me in the DR! Booking a Fathom cruise is super easy and they’re offering amazing deals for their inaugural season. I don’t get a commission or anything if you book with them, but I thought I’d include the link in case you were interested, too!

The post Bathing Suits & Boots in the Dominican Republic appeared first on Bon Touriste.

In other words, here’s how to cram 52 items into a carry-on that’s about the size of my cat (photo evidence below).

The Items

To begin with, I needed to actually think through my itinerary, something I rarely do when I travel (I know, I know…). My usual process is to dump a bunch of clothes I like wearing into a suitcase and then sit on the poor overstuffed thing to try and zip it up. Anyone who knows me personally knows this to be true.

So for this trip, I looked at the average weather in each country I’d be visiting – Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, and Hungary – and then thought about what I’d actually be doing there. Temps would be ranging from a chilly 55 to a balmy 89. Because I was traveling with Viking, I knew I’d be doing a lot of walking on the city tours, so I knew I’d need some city-appropriate clothes with sleeves (for cathedrals, synagogues, and the like). I’d also signed up for a couple of excursions to the Croatian and Bulgarian countrysides, too, so I knew I’d need some comfortable, warm-weather clothes with good hiking shoes. From past experience, I also knew I wouldn’t need a lot of formal clothes or high heels, as the dress code tends to be incredibly informal on river cruises.

I perused my closet and decided on a color scheme: monochromatic with a splash of pink. Why pink? Who knows…I pulled out a pink top with polka dots and thought it’d be cute for a city walk, so I decided to base things around that.

Then, the hard part: anything that didn’t match this color scheme didn’t make the cut. Here’s everything, laid out, so you can see exactly how everything fit together. As you can see, I could pair any shirt with any pair of pants and any pair of shoes. Four splashes of pink helped to “lighten up” the greys, blacks, and blues.

This was my master list:

• 2 jackets – one jean and one faux leather
• 2 pairs of pants – blue jeans & light khakis
• 1 pair of yoga pants
• 2 pairs of shorts – blue jeans & khakis
• 3 dresses – one cocktail dress, one sundress, one t-shirt dress
• 2 cotton cardigans – black & blue
• 1 sweatshirt
• 1 sweater
• 1 long-sleeved shirt
• 6 short-sleeved shirts
• 2 spaghetti-strap undershirts
• 1 silk bathrobe
• 1 infinity scarf
• 1 romper
• 1 bathing suit
• 4 pairs of shoes – ballet flats, nice sandals, hiking sandals, flat tennis shoes
• 13 pairs of underwear
• 5 pairs of socks
• 3 bras – 2 regular, one sports

And here’s how I got it all into a 19-inch carry-on.

The Process

The first thing I did was use a small packing cube (thanks to my friend Molly who let me borrow one of hers!) to roll up all my t-shirts:

Then, I folded my shorts in half and put them on top of the t-shirts:

The next step was to start putting items into my actual suitcase. I folded my dresses in half and laid them in the bottom of the flat side of the suitcase and put the packing cube on top. Then, I filled the rest of the space up with black ballet flats and the two undershirts:

Then, I moved over to the other side. Because there’s a locking mechanism and two poles running down the length of the suitcase, this side is a little trickier. I started by rolling up my pants and cardigans and lined the sides with those. In the middle, I folded my sweaters. On the outer edges, I rolled up the romper and the bathrobe. Once everything was in, I peppered the socks around the edges wherever there was room.

Then, I folded up the jean jacket and laid it flat on top of everything. All the underwear, bras, and bathing suit went into the zipper pouch on the other side. I left out the other jacket, the scarf, the yoga pants, a black t-shirt, and the tennis shoes–I wore all of this stuff on the plane.

The last step was to toss in my hairbrush, makeup bag, and toiletry kit. I knew from sailing with Viking before that I wouldn’t need a hair dryer (thank goodness, as I have no idea how I would have fit that in here), so I found it pretty easy to cram all the bathroom stuff in there.

Then, all I had to do was zip it up.

Voila!

The End Result?

Overall?

AMAZING. I NEVER, EVER thought that 1) I could be so discerning and well-planned with my packing, or 2) that I could pack that much stuff into one tiny suitcase. I used almost everything–the romper never made it out, sadly–and I was really happy that I’d brought two jackets and a couple different kinds of tops. Because Viking is a really casual cruise, I knew I wouldn’t need a lot of fancy clothes, so I really cut back on the “nice stuff” this time around. As I suspected, I only needed one nice cocktail dress for my aloha dinner with Ryan in Budapest.

Was it a perfect list?

Not completely. I would do a couple of things differently next time. For one thing, I’d bring an extra pair of jeans, as it was cooler than I thought it would be and ended up wearing those jeans probably eight or nine out of twelve days. I’d also bring more underwear, just so I’d have a few extra pairs, and would probably leave the bathrobe at home (I only wore it a couple of times on lazy mornings in our cabin). Also, I’d probably take out one cardigan and add in two more t-shirts to give a little more variety to what I wore on top. Things were feeling a little repetitive by day ten….

Anyway, thanks to Delsey, I think it’s safe to say I’ve changed the way I pack forever. No more cramming a million clothes that I think I *might* need into a giant suitcase that will almost always weigh more than 50 pounds, leaving me tossing out items at the last minute at the airport. Those days are SO over. From now on, it’s lightweight traveling for me!

(Here’s me at the Hilton Budapest, wearing the same outfit I flew over in!)

Also, as a side note, I think two little furry guys in my life were pretty happy to see me get home yesterday. This is Giuseppe and Luigi

Do you have any packing tips that have worked for you? I’d love to hear them!!

Yours in travel,

Kristin

The post How I Packed for Two Weeks in Eastern Europe in a Carry-On appeared first on Bon Touriste.

You’ll probably hear that Budapest is supposed to be nice. Or that coastal Croatia is just as beautiful as its other Mediterranean neighborhoods and still super cheap. You’ll probably hear some jokes about goulash.

Yeah…that’s exactly why I’m going to Eastern Europe.

Last year, I whetted my appetite for the post-Soviet world, spending two wonderful weeks exploring Russia with my mom and getting to know a part of the world that, for a long time, had been completely shrouded in mystery to me. It was exhilarating. During those two weeks, my mom and I discovered how onion domes are made, how devoted to the arts and literature Russians really are, and how complicated the everyday lives are for people who live, day in and day out, under Vladimir Putin’s rule. We saw the commingling of Communist-era blocs—homes still owned and lived in by the families who were given free housing back in the 70s—and we saw the intense contrast between that world and the elaborate palaces, cathedrals, and summer homes of the Romanovs. We visited the island of Kizhi and witnessed a cathedral that was built in the 1700s completely out of interlocking wood pieces –no nails or glue of any kind. We sat outside at midnight under the large, low sun and imagined what it must be like to try and sleep during Russia’s white nights if you don’t have pitch-black curtains. We took a little boat down the canals of St. Petersburg, and we wandered the cosmopolitan streets of Moscow.

More than anything else, our trip broke, reinforced, and fractured every stereotype I had about Russia (except the whole “polar bears on the streets of Moscow” thing …sadly it was 70 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny). Just like the United States, Russians, too, find themselves in a globally powerful country that politically doesn’t always jive with their interests, and most of them want to be heard, understood, and respected.

I’ve been thinking about it all year. With every article I wrote about my trip, I realized that I wanted to know more—I wanted to learn more about what life was (and is) like in the countries and societies that were also affected by Russia and by Communist rule. I wanted to meet more people, hear their stories, and better understand a part of history that is still so elusive to me.

Basically, I wanted to see more of Eastern Europe.

And what better way than to sail with Viking again? One of the best parts about taking trips with Viking is that you really can cover a good bit of ground—and you’re surrounded by experts who live and work in the countries you’re visiting. After Russia, I felt like I had such a deeper and more profound understanding of the culture there because I could ask questions and talk to our tour guides about their own experiences. Plus, they held a few “round-table” sessions where we could come and ask questions about education, housing, politics, and anything else that was on our minds. People did come, and they asked hard questions. The tour guides were ready for all of them and answered each query honestly and openly.

Plus, Viking’s philosophy is centered around three different kinds of immersion experiences:

• Culture & leisure (such as attending Swan Lake at the Hermitage Theatre in St. Petersburg)
• Work & everyday life (such as attending a cooking class or visiting the home of someone who lives in the community)
• Access to points of cultural or historical interest (such as a privately-curated tour of the Peterof Palace)

I looked through the itineraries online and quickly decided on the one that would be most beneficial to me:

Passage to Eastern Europe

The 11-day cruise covers 5 countries, including Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, and Hungary. It offers a number of offshore excursions, too, that sound like they would really give me a diversity of perspectives on life in both the city and countryside. I signed up right away.

Then, I went to the store, bought a card, scribbled a note to my husband about how much I wanted to celebrate the beginning of our new chapter together (more on our spectacularly crappy professional year later), and I invited him to join me. He opened the card and looked at me in the way he always looks at me when I’ve concocted up a new way for us to travel together. He could see that my eyes were sparkling in a mix of anticipation and excitement.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

So here we are. We leave tomorrow morning for our long voyage to Hungary. Once we’re there, we’ll spend a few days at the Radisson Blu Hotel Bucharest (sounds swanky…I hope they have those fluffy terrycloth bathrobes and slippers!), and then we’ll hit the Danube for our cruise.

In case you’re considering a trip to Eastern Europe, here’s the scoop on where we’ll be headed and what my plans are while I’m there. Keep in mind that I’ve crammed in a couple of side trips/journo stuff for my own writing (you wouldn’t necessarily be interviewing a Magyar horseman, investigating the history of paprika as a colonial food, or visiting Memento Park to see gigantic Soviet-Era statues….well, you might be, in which case, let me know!).

Here’s the lowdown on where we’re headed.

ROMANIA (Days 1-2)

The first leg of our journey will be two days in Bucharest, Romania’s cultural capital. From what I can tell, Bucharest seems to be relatively underrated as a tourist destination, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In our first two days, we’re going to check out the French-style boulevards, public gardens (I have heard marvelous things about the Bucharest Botanical Gardens), and visit a few of the city’s palaces. We’ll be spending an afternoon in the historic Lipscani district, which, from what I can tell, is a European beauty—full of cobblestone streets, boutique inns, art galleries, and shops and restaurants.

We’ll also be checking out a few of Bucharest’s tourist “hot spots:” the monastery where Prince Vlad is rumored to have been buried, and the Palace of the Parliament, which is said to contain over 3,000 rooms. Now that’s a house.

BULGARIA (Day 3-4)

Our first stop will be the town of Russe, Bulgaria, otherwise known as Eastern Europe’s “Little Vienna” for its historically critical port, mash-up of neo-baroque, neo-rococo, and Renaissance architecture, and its relaxed, European waterfront lifestyle.

We’ve signed up for a day trip to Veliko Tarnovo and Arbanasi, two medieval towns renowned for their handicrafts and local artist colonies. We’ll have coffee at a rooftop café in Veliko Tarnovo, overlooking the Old Town, explore Samovodska Charshia (one of the art districts) and visit castle ruins. Then, we’ll head to Arbanasi, where we’ll have lunch and meet with a merchant who makes products out of the essence of roses.

I’m not sure we’ll have time for the Russe City Walking Tour, but if we do, it will take us to the old city center and to a couple of museums, including the Museum of History (which houses over 140,000 artifacts—I can’t to dig into the archives on some of these objects!) and the Ethnographic Museum, which houses objects and artifacts related to people’s everyday lives in historical Bulgaria.

The next day, we’re planning on heading to the Belogradchik Rocks, a trip which will no doubt inspire the archaelogist inside me. The Rocks are not only a geological wonder, the result of millennia of erosion, freezing, and weathering, but they are also home to the Ottoman-built Belogradchik Fortress—a maze of rooms built into the cliffs.

IRON GATE (Day 5)

Today, I think we’re just sailing through the Iron Gate, an area renowned as one of Europe’s most stunning natural gorges. We’ll see the Carpathian Mountains on one side and the Balkan Mountains on the other.

SERBIA (Day 6)

Today will be devoted to exploring Belgrade, described by Lonely Planet as “outspoken, adventurous, proud, and audacious” (sounds a lot like the kind of person I’d want to hang out with) with a “gritty exuberance” (where do they find these adjectives?!). We’re planning on taking a city tour and then hopefully catching at least a happy hour. I mean, if we’re going to be in one of the world’s hottest places for nightlife, we have to at least have a Serbian cocktail, right?

CROATIA (Day 7)

Now, it’s really too bad that I can’t skip away for a day or two and head to the Mediterranean coast of Croatia, but I’m actually kind of excited about where we are going: Osijek. I don’t know exactly what this excursion will entail, but we’re planning on visiting a family and then walking along the promenade on the Drava River. I’m imagining a relatively relaxing day in this small Croatian village—which is perfectly fine with me.

HUNGARY (Days 8-11)

To be honest, Hungary is one of those countries I’ve wanted to visit since I was a little girl, and I don’t know exactly why. Maybe because I always laughed about the name—how could a country share a name with my language’s word for wanting to eat?!—but also because I’ve always heard such magnificent things about Budapest, the country’s capital. Our journey will end here, in Hungary, a place I am so excited to meet.

We’ll begin our three days in Kalocsa, a place I’ve learned is not only where the majority of the world’s paprika is harvested, but also where the Hungarian Puszta, a community devoted to preserving a non-motorized world and who get around on horseback, live, work, and play. I’m hoping to interview one of the horsemen before or after their show (which is rumored to be both acrobatic, artful, and death-defying) but I’m not sure we’ll be able to communicate with each other. I’ll have my Google Translate app with me, but it’s not always so easy to do an interview when you’re both typing into a smartphone what you’d really like to say. But we’ll see—I really want to learn more about their attitudes against motorized transport and modernity.

Our last two days will be in the lovely city of Budapest. We’ll hop on a city tour one day and head to a Roman thermal bath, but the rest of our time in Hungary will be spent running around trying to fit in all the places I’m writing about. Though I don’t know exactly how I’ll get there yet, I’m planning on finding Memento Park, where, according to their delightful website, the “ghosts of Communist Dictatorship” live. The park is basically an open-air museum where, after the fall of Communism, people dumped a whole bunch of gigantic Communist statues. I can’t wait to see this place.

I’m also interested in visiting the Central Hall Market, which I’ve heard from some other travel writing friends is a photographer’s dream. Because of my nerdy interest in public spaces and rhetoric in the world, I’m also trying to fit in a trip to the For Sale Pub, a bar that encourages drinkers to leave their words on the walls, floors, chairs, and ceilings. They can leave their “personal advertisements” anywhere they like. It sounds magical, and weird, and the perfect place for me.

With that, then, I’m going to start packing. Typing these words has started making my heart flutter just a little bit faster…oh, travel, how you ignite my soul, time and time again.

If you’ve been to Eastern Europe and have any tips for me, please leave a note for me here or get in touch with me on social media! I can’t wait to share this journey.

Yours in travel,

Kristin

—

All photographs from Flickr’s Creative Commons. I thank them for their generosity and I hope my photos turn out just as beautifully!

I’m excited to be traveling to Eastern Europe with Viking River Cruises on their 2016 Passage to Eastern Europe cruise from Bucharest to Budapest. 

The post Why I’m Spending Two Weeks in Eastern Europe appeared first on Bon Touriste.

*****

I’m in love with a new suitcase. If you know me, this won’t surprise you, as I’ve been carrying around one suitcase or another for the past ten years, but the story of how I became a suitcase girl is a little more interesting (more on that in a second).

But first, what do I love about my 19-inch champagne-colored Delsey Chatelet suitcase, this new little love of mine?

For one thing, the size: it’s the international carry-on size (which means, to my delight, that it will fit in the overhead compartment (and under the seat) of almost all international airlines). Also, like all of Delsey’s Chatelet collection, it features a TSA-friendly combination lock (which means that airport authorities can still open and rummage through your bag with a special key if needed but that a normal person can’t open your suitcase). And, it has these nifty spinner wheels you can lock so your suitcase won’t roll away from you if you’re standing on an incline. Yes, this has actually happened to me before (thanks, San Francisco).

It’s rounded shape is also adorable.

Over the years, a lot of my friends and fellow travelers have looked at me with skepticism when I’ve arrived, suitcase in tow, instead of toting around a large backpack on my shoulders.

What they don’t understand is that I’ve always been a suitcase kind of girl.

And here’s why.

When I was twenty-two years old, my parents did what most supportive, loving parents do when their child graduates college: they bought me a graduation present. But it wasn’t a briefcase, a suit, a plaque, or a new laptop computer, the kinds of sensible gifts my friends and colleagues at school were getting. It wasn’t jewelry, a commemorate necklace, a class ring, or a fancy diploma frame.

My parents knew me well: they bought me three pieces of blue luggage.

The afternoon of my graduation, my dad rolled the big one out into our family’s living room and presented it to me with gusto. He called it “big blue,” the same name bequeathed to my roommate Mary’s eponymous couch that followed us through four apartments. The day before, we’d given the couch—along with a bunch of other stuff I didn’t know what to do with—to the pizza delivery guy who, delivery box in his hands, saw us moving out and confessed he’d just moved to town and didn’t yet have any furniture.

Dad had even tied a big red bow to the top of it, where my hand would, for so many years, press down and lift up on the retractable handle. Inside, he’d piled in the smaller pieces like Russian matroyshka dolls, all zipped up into each other. I gasped in joy and pulled each one out, lovingly, running my fingers along the strong navy blue cloth and imagining the world at my twenty-two year old feet, the world that had become increasingly larger during my college years after I discovered what happened when a single girl goes out into the world. (In case you’re wondering, magical things happen).

Later that evening, once the flurry of the celebrations had given way to contemplation, I sat in my room, opened my mom’s card to me, looked at the three blue suitcases, all lined up like my little army in my childhood bedroom, and let my eyes well up with tears. In her elegant, curly handwriting, my mom had written a line from a hymn she’d repeated to me many times since I’d left home to pursue a college life four years ago: roots hold me close….wings set me free. Though I’d suspected it before, I knew it, in that moment, to be true: my life was never going to be the same.

That fall, this Southern girl from Georgia took a leap of faith and moved with all of my new luggage to Cartagena, Colombia to teach English. When I got there, wide-eyed and surprised that I’d actually done it, I opened each one to find letters and cards from my family nestled inside the t-shirts, pant legs, and tucked into the insides of my shoes, telling me how excited they were for my new adventure.

*

A few years—and a lot of travels—passed. In the meantime, I returned home to the U.S., moved to Tucson, Arizona, met my husband-t0-be, and stayed there eight years. I left home with nothing but those three blue suitcases, all of which I hauled on the plane with me and my dad.

I went to graduate school for creative writing, I started teaching, I decided to keep on going until I reached the furthest point I could really go in my academic life—to get that elusive Ph.D. after my name—and I traveled a lot as a solo female traveler. I took my blue suitcases everywhere, even after they started looking heavier and clunkier than the newer, sleeker models with their rolling wheels and lightweight aluminum bodies, even after the TSA changed the weight limit to 50 pounds and rendered the giant one effectively useless. They tread over continents, rolled over cobblestones, highways, and side streets, and sat in many a cargo pit. The dark cloth, thick zippers, and leather flaps over the corners stayed intact and never weathered.

I know the stereotype: the girl who totes around a suitcase leaves for her travels burdened. She isn’t really devoted to the cause. She’s a tourist, not a traveler. She packs too much (which, ok, yes, is true in my case). It’s the backpacker who deserves our respect: she’s the one who doesn’t care if her toenails are painted, if she remembered to pack her favorite perfume, if her shoes would look right with the pants she packed. She sports sandals with straps, leaves the makeup at home, and can wear and re-wear the same outfit twenty-five times if she needs to. I tried taking a backpack with me once, borrowing my friend Leen’s on a trip from Ghent to Amsterdam to visit friends, but I simply couldn’t convert—all my clothes got crammed into weird places in the pack and everything came out wrinkled and flat. Together, we took trains all over Europe; we stayed in hostels, on floors, and in hotels; we hopped around unencumbered.

And at the end of it all, I was still in love with my three blue suitcases.

But then, in 2013, someone took a very large knife and hacked open our outdoor storage shed. He stole all of my luggage, inside of which were all my summer clothes, and dumped the clothes onto the street before running away with all three bags. For a while after that, I was too scared to buy any nice luggage, so I bought a $19 carry-on from the clearance rack at Wal-Mart. A few months later, after it fell apart, I asked for a new suitcase for Christmas—and my parents came through again with a gorgeous, lightweight 26-inch baby blue number, one that, even though it has a bent zipper and a tear in the front, I still carry with me today.

*

In March of this year, exactly ten years after I took that first trip to Colombia, I taught a writing workshop at the Women in Travel Summit in Irvine, California and found myself swapping suitcase tales and packing tips with a new friend of mine as we walked through the conference tables. By the end of the conference and after walking by the Delsey Luggage table about 600 times, I decided to celebrate the fact that ten years later, I was still taking off, flying solo–while balancing a husband and an academic job–and relishing in my bag of belongings chasing behind me instead of piled up on my back.

After all, I’m still that girl.

I took one home, convinced it would completely change the way I packed. I was smitten with the sleekness, the sophistication of the lines, the ease with which the suitcases rolled around the floor, the locking mechanisms, the lined compartments inside.

I was even smitten with the idea of a sophisticated piece of luggage, something that would announce my presence before I even came running down the terminal. Something that would dance to the tune of those of us who, despite our wanderlust and freedom-seeking ways, love the feel of a handle in our hands and not a strap around our waists. Something that acknowledged my twenties and said a proper hello to my thirties. Plus, at $230, it’s not exactly a suitcase I would have planned on purchasing for my past self anyway–like a sturdy purse or a well-made pair of pants, this is a true travel investment.

“What do you think?” I asked my husband Ryan, spinning it around on its delicate heels and whirling it in his direction.

“It’s stunning,” he said, and paused to smile. “But how in the world are you going to pack the way you pack in a suitcase that small?”

Of course, Ryan is right—I honestly have no idea how I’m going to pare things down into a 19-inch carry-on for trips longer than a few days. But, I leave for two weeks in Eastern Europe with Viking River Cruises next week, and you know what? This girl is going to do it. I’ve got a wedding to attend in Tucson, Arizona next week, so I’ll do a quick test run and let you know how things go. In the meantime, if you’re interested, they’ve got a 50% off sitewide sale at the moment and are offering free shipping–lots of cute bags and suitcases to choose from!).

Stay tuned (and please send me packing tips!) 

Yours in travel,

Kristin

—

A special thanks to Delsey Luggage for providing me with a 19-inch Chatelet carry-on for purposes of writing this story. Right now, you can purchase one on sale for $230 using the links above!

The post Delsey Chatelet, I’m Still Your Suitcase Girl appeared first on Bon Touriste.

These key facts about one of the most innovative, praised, and renowned chefs in Jerusalem are well-known and documented.

But what those who know Moshe Basson might not know is that he credits his unique cooking method, one grounded in ancient cooking techniques and centering dishes around what is known to some as simply “the accoutrements,” to the women in his young life—and, perhaps even more surprisingly—to a couple of humdrum weeds and roots.

Moshe Basson is not a shy man, either: ask him about his weed-foraging days in the glowing Jerusalem afternoons and he will regale you for hours (he did with us!). When he talks about the ingredients he’s rescued from nearly being forgotten, he seems to glow–it’s clearly his most favorite thing in the entire world.

His menu is full of wild-growing herbs, “sidewalk weeds,” and herbaceous plants and shrubs with names I’ve never heard of, like malva and purslane and hyssop.

If you ask him, Basson will gladly pull up a chair at his elegant al fresco restaurant in the Artist’s Colony near Old Jerusalem—which, though it’s gone through many iterations and locations over the years, still faithfully sticks to the name Eucalyptus—and will tell you all about the Arabic, Iraqi, and Syrian women in his neighborhood who taught him about the beauty of the earth’s overlooked horticulture. As a little boy, he followed these women, fellow refugees from war-torn countries themselves, around the hillsides and abandoned gardens between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and he helped them forage, sort, and cook with the new foods of his new land.

Because his family was nearly penniless when they arrived in Israel, they experimented—a lot—with the foods they could find in the wild. In the kitchen, Basson watched his Iraqi mother play with foods completely out of her cultural repertoire, foods like the herbaceous plants he was bringing home and homemade olive oil, neither of which were popular at all in the Iraqi kitchen. His mother, he says, only knew of hyssop as being a medicine and preferred oils made from sesame seeds. While his dad faithfully whipped up the same menu of Middle Eastern pastries and cakes at the bakery each morning, every meal at home was an experiment.

Though he is often called Israel’s Biblical Chef for his devotion to using local ingredients and excavating old cooking techniques and recipes, Basson will confess that it was never his intention to be connected with Biblical cooking. “So I was just cooking the food of my mom and her mom and others from the region,” he says, gesturing widely at the tables and tables of patrons around him, and, though he has always known that “a big part of the food [at Eucalyptus] is poor people’s food,” he didn’t know that he and his mother were making nearly identical recipes to what was described in the Bible and other ancient texts until years after he opened his first restaurant.

Basson knows, though, that there are certain and unavoidable difficulties with popularizing food that has complicated histories, foods such as the Jerusalem artichoke, a root vegetable (with no relation to the green globe-like artichoke that shares its name) that he uses to make one of his celebrated soups. He tells the story of a time when a French family came to dine and he horrified the grandma at the table when he told them their next course would be a soup made of something many Westerners call a sunchoke. “She shouted and said, ‘No!’ and everybody—I mean, this is a small restaurant under a tree—looked up and she said, ‘No! This was the food in the war. I cannot eat it.’ So everybody was saying OK, they don’t want it, they don’t want it. She said “No, no, no, no, you eat it. It’s wonderful. I cannot.” Then, he laughs. “And then she ate it.” He did not know, he confesses, that Jerusalem artichoke soup—the topinambour in French—was many peoples’ daily rationed food when the Nazis occupied France in World War I. Now, he tells all his French patrons what they’ve eaten only after they’ve eaten it.

Dinner at Eucalyptus is a many-course event, prominently placing roots, stems, spices, and homegrown leafy greens like purslane, chubeza, olesh, and malva at the center of the table. The night begins with freshly-baked focaccia bread and five delectable spreads: aioli, pesto with hyssop, red pepper, sumac-dusted tahini, and garlic mayonnaise.

From there, a soup trio, complete with the infamous Jerusalem artichoke soup as well as lentil and tomato-mint, comes out, and after that, his elegant signature dishes: gnocchi with fresh chubeza, a wild herb slightly reminiscent of spinach, mixed into the potato dough; figs stuffed with roasted chicken and drizzled in in a sweet tamarind sauce; maqluba, the upside-down casserole of rice, chicken, and vegetables, seasoned with fresh saffron and topped with yogurt; fire-roasted eggplant served with tehina and pomegranate seeds; grilled duck breast with mashed potatoes, carrot coulis and berry relish; and thinly-sliced steak served with a mix of ancient greens from his garden.

Dessert is no less extraordinary and no less attentive, with dishes like semolina cake served with wine-soaked pears and jelly or pate-stuffed macaroons drizzled with sweet raspberry sauce.

Though Eucalyptus has been in its current home—a collection of wooden tables, hanging pots, and old-fashioned lamps on the terraced steps of Hutzot Hayotzer, just west of the Old City—for six years now, Basson hasn’t forgotten his long journey to find home. In 1962, he planted a tree he hoped would bear fruit to feed his family. Twenty-five years later, in 1987, he opened the first Eucalyptus restaurant near the eponymous plant he raised as a child. Today, after three additional moves, the walls around which his restaurant now sits, made from the same stone as his home in Iraq, nurture his business, his family, and his future.

A future, he tells me, as we clean up after making maqluba together, that includes his young grandchildren, his family of chickens, and a garden made of beloved, complicated vegetables.

Yours in travel and good eats,

Kristin

Most gracious thanks to Weill and the Israel Ministry of Tourism for hosting our stay in Israel and for introducing me to some of the world’s most incredible places. If you’re interested in visiting Israel, they are a fantastic resource!

The post From Roots to Soup: A Night with Chef Moshe Basson appeared first on Bon Touriste.

We had beautiful moments, too, of course. For one thing, I just returned from 10 days in Atlanta for the holidays, where my family and I crammed our week full of get-togethers, long walks, good restaurants, day trips, and late-night conversations–all the accoutrements connected with quality family moments. I reconnected with the stark beauty of the Appalachian forests. I breathed in the crisp, cool air in the early mornings and looked for abandoned birds’ nests in the trees that had lost their leaves. These are beautiful moments.

The year also marked a lot of changes for me. For one thing, my life went into upheaval in May when I finally finished the dissertation on feminist approaches to digital travel writing that I’d been writing for the past two years. Though it was one of the proudest moments of my life–nearly 300 pages of well-researched, painstakingly revised discourse on my favorite topic–it also meant that a huge stage, a transformative, difficult, and beautiful stage, of my life was over. That stage where, although I was poor as dirt and living off $15,000 a year as a graduate student, I finally had to face the hard reality that the degree I’d been working on for five years didn’t have a resulting job for me in our sweet desert home in Tucson. That if I wanted to put my degree into practice, it meant moving away. It meant that Ryan would have to leave his student job as a writer for the President’s Office and bring his dissertation along with him, wherever we went. It meant I’d take a job that would hopefully lead to professional fulfillment and spiritual growth and that would also still afford me the time to travel and to pepper my year with the occasional press trip or international voyage. It meant facing the reality that I had to do things like sign up for health insurance and a retirement plan for the first time in my adult life.

As I sit here today, in front of my computer screen, just three blocks from the beach (something I thought would bring me a permanent sense of happiness but which, in fact, has been a mere backdrop to the difficulties we’ve had here so far), I can’t help but feel a little bit cynical. I miss our desert home more than I ever thought I possibly could: the striking sunsets, the walks Ryan and I would take around our neighborhood as we learned to identify the strange plants of the Sonoran Desert, the mountainous hikes we took so often and their surprising streams and unusual flowering cacti, the community of writers I’d come to see as family (and still do!), the dear friends we had to leave behind, the students who worked diligently with our nonprofit community partners and the difference I felt I was making by bridging writing and advocacy work. By August, when we’d packed up our house on the dreams of a good life in California, I still felt unsure that moving was what I wanted. Today, on December 29th, five months after we left, I still feel that way.

But that’s for another story for another time.

New writing topics, too, entered into my life: I wrote about Rasputin’s man parts, which are supposedly preserved in an itty-bitty erotica museum in the middle of downtown St. Petersburg (verdict’s still out on whether or not it’s a horse organ or the poor man’s 11-inch member, but still.) The piece was picked up by Jezebel Magazine, which still strikes me as unbelievable but amazingly awesome. I also wrote about a museum of still-functional Soviet-Era arcade games and the whole thing went viral–I learned what it meant to have a piece of writing truly go public, and I had more emails and comments from readers than I could have ever imagined. I covered the story of a child behavioral therapist-turned-chef in a tiny hummus kiosk in Tel Aviv, and I wrote about impromptu New Orleans street music. I wrote about my usual suspects, too–odd and quirky objects, feminist approaches to travel writing, and I took a lot of pictures. In fact, at last count, I’ve taken over 10,000 this year alone (I know, I know, where am I going to put all those photos?!). I started doing more on social media, reaching out and commenting on other people’s work, and I went from 0 followers on Instagram at the beginning of the year to 3,000. My column in En Voyage magazine all the way over in Taiwan is still going strong, and I’m moving away from more advice-heavy pieces and branching out into more narrative memoir-driven pieces. I’m still writing creatively in those few spare moments.

And, I just had a birthday, one that seems particularly odd because it doesn’t really mean anything except that I definitely can’t claim I’m still in my 20s and I can’t claim that I just turned 30. What happens, really, when someone turns 32? Or 33? Or onward from there? I don’t know what life has in store for me (I mean, who does?!), but I know that I’m going to be facing some big decisions in the next year or two as I grace through the early part of this new decade: where (and if I want) to set roots, whether or not to have a family, how to finish my book, where to place my professional energies, my time, and my emotions, how to keep myself in balance mentally, spiritually, and physically, how to fit travel into my life in a way that doesn’t zap me of my passion but that keeps the little wanderlust who sits on my shoulder, like a tiny angel and devil wrapped into one, happy and playful.

Though those questions are certainly for another time, here’s a metaphorical celebratory toast to the incredible people and places I met in nine very awesome places in 2015. In and amongst everything, I still found time to set my feet aloft, and here are just a few of the places they landed.

Victoria, B.C., Canada

My first trip of the year this year was to Vancouver, Canada, and let me tell you: What a gorgeous place to be in the wintertime. I had the wonderful pleasure of working with Tourism Victoria while I was there, and they kept me–and my writing fingers–very busy! I hopped a sea plane at dawn from Vancouver to Victoria (on Vancouver Island), and spent the day visiting the Royal B.C. Museum, where I arranged a private tour with a docent there so I could see two incredible artifacts: enormous Chinese freemason masks and one of the world’s only remaining tapa cloth books compiled by Captain Cook on his last voyage to the Pacific. From there, we walked over to the Grand Pacific Hotel and had a three-hour long West Coast high tea session. Before the sea plane took off for our sunset ride back to Vancouver, we took a quick jaunt to Victoria’s Chinatown and a lovely walk around some of the pretty tree-lined, European-style neighborhoods. I could absolutely see myself falling in love with Victoria and living here, very, very happily.

Boston, Massachusetts

In March, I held my first creative workshop for professional travel bloggers at the 2nd annual Women in Travel Summit in Boston. It was the perfect city for a get-to-know-you networking event, as it was small enough to walk around with new friends and full of things to do. I’d never been to Boston before, and though I only had a little less than a week to explore it, what I found–quirky cafes, cobblestone alleys, tons of amazing Chinese dumpling shops, a million universities, and more Italian restaurants than I could count–filled my heart and spirit with joy.

I even stayed with 5 women I’d never met before in one room filled with bunk beds at the super cool Hostelling International Boston. It was delightfully throwback to my years as a hostel-goer but trendy (and clean) enough to feel like a funky loft apartment. Totally a do-again.

New Orleans, Louisiana

In May, I visited another American city that I’d never been to before: gritty, spunky, sweaty New Orleans. Two of our friends had decided on New Orleans for their destination wedding, so, as you can imagine, their entire day was completely destination-driven. From their sweet ceremony at the Irish Cultural Center to the mile-long second line parade down the streets of the French Quarter (led by, of course, a three-piece brass band and over 100 guests waving white handkerchiefs) to the shrimp and grits on the wedding menu and the reception in a loft-style warehouse, I felt completely and utterly taken by the city. As part of my ongoing work with the New Orleans CVB, Ryan and I stayed in a garret room–aka, a room with no windows–in the famous Degas House, where generations of artists and writers have come to find solitude and inspiration from the city.

I loved it. The trees with huge swaths of moss hanging from them, as if suspended in time, the white wraparound porches, the humid, thick air, the delectable gumbo, the rebuilding and resistance of the city and its people in the wake of Katrina, the fact that so much of the city still needs care, the kind people with their particular New Orleans lilt, the musicians with their dreadlocks, mismatched clothes, coin buckets, and joyful faces….it all felt, so, surreal and yet entirely natural, like the whole history of one place was wrapped up in one moment, existing unilaterally.

St. Petersburg, Russia

May held the magic of Russia. This trip was truly the trip of a lifetime, because 1) I was lucky enough to travel with Viking River Cruises on their Waterways of the Tsars outreach and 2) I got to take my mom, who, before May had never had a passport, with me. You really have to see St. Petersburg to understand its undeniable magic and its complicated history, and you’ll never meet prouder people. It’s a city of canals, of world-renowned art, of cafes and restaurants featuring global cuisine, of winding streets, of onion-domed cathedrals painted in brilliant candy colors, of street markets, a mishmash of Renaissance architecture, Communist-Era blocs, and modern Western-style apartments. It’s also a weirdly quiet city by day, making it perfect for leisurely strolls and long conversations over cappuccinos. Our three days here were three of the most unforgettable days I’ve ever had, as so much of what I thought about Russia got flipped upside-down, turned on its head, and refined. St. Petersburg reminded me why travel is so critical to our lives.

Chandler, Arizona

In late spring of this year, I was invited to attend the Wild Horse Pass Resort and Spa’s grand re-opening of its restaurant, Ko’Sin. In the Pima language, which is the native language of the people who historically lived on the river here, ko’sin simply means kitchen. At the Ko’Sin restaurant inside the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort & Spa just outside Phoenix, Arizona, where veh pug means beginning, hai chu hugimeans main course, and wamichtha means fry bread, food takes on whole new meanings here. As homage to the magnificent Sonoran desert landscape and the decadent restaurant menu, the Wild Horse resort is committed to local culture and preservation. Not only was the entire resort designed to be a place of honor and respect for the Gila River Indian heritage and culture, the architecture, design, art, and stories of the Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh tribes were celebrated in every detail imaginable, indoors and out.

A small group of bloggers, writers, and PR people joined the culinary team and the rest of the Wild Horse Pass staff for a lovely night of sample dishes, marshmallows and singing by the fire, and a hauntingly stunning sunset over the Sierra Estrella Mountain Range. As we sat and talked to the flute player, a many-generations old member of the Pima tribe and a man who makes all his own instruments, I realized that in my seven years in Tucson, I’d never really given Phoenix a chance. I’m so glad I did.

Puerto Penasco, Mexico

When people think of going to Mexico for holiday, most people don’t think of this tiny border town on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, just three hours from Tucson, but I’ll tell you something: I absolutely adore this dusty, abrasive, desert town. It’s sandy, relatively poor, and looks like it’s been sitting still since the 1990s when problems with the border halted nearly all construction, and yet, I love it. It’s unbelievably quiet, its beaches are long, wide, and flat, its water is clean and clear, and its downtown bustles with locals buying fruits and fish and tourists buying trinkets and souvenirs. There are some delicious restaurants, too, serving up all kinds of tamales, quesadillas, and, of course, Sonoran burros (our word for the burrito out here).

Though we’ve been to this Arizona-dweller’s seaside paradise many times before, this summer’s trip was extra-special, because it would be the last time my friends and I would all drive down together before Ryan and I moved to California. The weekend held a kind of joyful magic in the air–we drank a ton of margaritas, we talked about our lives, our friendships, our writing, and our futures, we danced on the rooftop of our two-story Airbnb rental, overlooking the sea, and we cried. Against the sandy desert backdrop of modest Puerto Penasco, it was the most perfect weekend I could have imagined.

The tequila-induced late-night dancing on the beach to 1990s hip hop music didn’t hurt, either.

Long Beach, California

The one place I didn’t really travel to, so to speak. I’ve been living here since mid-August, after having taken a job just up the hill at a small college in Palos Verdes. Long Beach itself is equal parts the funkiness of Tucson with the elegance of L.A., so I’m still trying to figure out how I fit in here. I always dreamed of living the beach life, of waking up to sea smells and blustery breezes, of coming home with sandy feet and sun-kissed shoulders after a long day of paddleboarding, of hosting the many guests and friends who would come and stay with us.

Things are, of course, a little bit different than that. I’m still getting used to the fact that houses are crammed together and that rent for a two-bedroom apartment is prohibitively expensive, that people don’t really ever say hello to me on the street and look at me in terror when I wave at them, and that our two cats Giuseppe and Luigi no longer have a yard to go out in during the long, lazy mornings. Of course, it’s stunningly beautiful here–the weather is magnificent, the beach is beautiful, the sunsets are lovely, and the restaurants, bars, and shops all walking distance from me are fantastic and represent all walks of life and cuisine from all over the world. We’ve hosted some dear friends and look forward to hosting more, and we take daily jogs on the beach. So far, Long Beach has been both kind and overwhelming, a study in contrasts.

Jerusalem, Israel

2015 was the year I went to two of the most fascinating and complicated countries in the entire world. In October, I had the rare and incredible opportunity to visit Israel, the tiny sliver in the Middle East that seems to hold the history of the world in its small, oblong shape, along with tourism marketing organization Geoffrey Weill, the Israel Ministry of Tourism, and four other amazing bloggers and writers. We happened to go at a particularly difficult time: in the days leading up to our visit, headlines like “Is This the Third Intifada?” and “Tensions Mount in Jerusalem” captured the public’s attention and were the first hits on Google searches about Israel. The violence was real, and I went to this country in the thick of murders and heightened disagreements between the Israelis and Palestinians. And yet, in Jerusalem, I only felt a sense of serenity, a calmness that I can’t quite replicate, yet, in words, even knowing that just around the corner were violent acts, stabbings, and people afraid for what would come. Luckily, in December, we still aren’t facing another intifada yet, and one can only hope that the tensions don’t ever escalate that far again.

One thing that’s particularly worth noting about this trip, more than the memories I have that will last me my lifetime, is that it was the first trip I’ve been on in which I completely filled up my notebook–every. single. page. Exploring ancient cities, unearthed cobblestone streets dating thousands of years, boats brought up out of the Sea of Galilee from Jesus’ time….Israel will upend you, make you question everything, make you understand the depth of the world’s monotheistic religions, make you fall in love, over and over again, with hummus. It’s all there.

Dahlonega, Georgia

My hometown of Atlanta is definitely worth visiting, but what a lot of people don’t do when they come to my home state is drive up north to some of the adorable little towns near the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Dahlonega, a town of only 5,000 people with one of the cutest downtowns I’ve seen in small-town America and some of the best wineries in the Southeast, is one of these places. While my dear friend Magda, who I met in Malta nearly 11 years ago, was visiting me last week from Amsterdam, I decided to take her up there for the day to show her a bit of the south she hadn’t seen before. We ate a buffet of chicken-fried steak and collard greens at the Smith House, a historic house near downtown, shopped the cute little boutiques, stopped at The Crimson Moon and struck up a two-hour conversation with the two bartenders there, and tried a new recipe from Sweetwater, a local Atlanta brewery. We didn’t leave quietly, either: People were even waving to us as we pulled away in our quirky little rental car, an itty-bitty bright-red Chevrolet Spark.

I’d say, all in all, I had a pretty lucky year. As always, life is complicated, full of the good, the bad, and either the things we don’t want to face or the things we’ve long ignored. Travel doesn’t relieve us of our troubles, cure our demons, or make our lives easier, but it has always helped me find perspective, and for that I’m eternally grateful.

May 2016 be your year of light, with promises fulfilled, strength and patience to get through the difficult times, and lots of joy and beautiful travels!

Yours in travel,

Kristin

The post A Year in Review: The 9 Most Beautiful Places My Feet Went in 2015 appeared first on Bon Touriste.

I know what he means—I’m not immune to the media headlines, the sensationalized rhetoric, the news stories from CNN and the BBC capitalizing on the mounting events that some news personalities have started calling the stirrings of The Third Intifada. I’ve been hearing it because I can’t not hear it—it’s literally everywhere, every time I open my internet browser. Palestinian-Israeli Tensions Mount in Jerusalem. Jerusalem Abandoned After Two Israelis Shot in City Center. Rocks Thrown at Innocent Bystanders in the Streets.

My friend Yolanda, who lives outside of Tel Aviv, has sent me the news articles from The Jerusalem Post—articles whose headlines are no less sensational—and has told me that, although she’s never said this to anyone before, we should avoid the Old City completely, because the situation there is just too unstable. I ask my seatmate about “the state of things,” what he thinks about these undeniable and interminable tensions that have become a daily part of life in this tortured little country, this complex, sacred space, in the heart of the Mediterranean. He shrugs and tells me this: “It’s just a part of who we are. It’s like, at some time or another, everybody is either oppressing or the oppressed.” His comment, though meant to be exasperated, tells me more about the way 20-somethings feel about Israel than anything else I’ve read.

Edan and I spend the next hour talking about what Israel is really like. As an American whose grandparents still live in Haifa, he is intimately connected to both cultures, and he decided to attend university in Israel so he could finally have the chance to see what life was really like for him, an American Jew with tangible roots to his homeland. As a budding entrepreneur, he is going to business school in Israel because he wanted to meet other young Israelis and he wanted to get a multinational education. Eventually, he wants to start a line of fashion jeans for hipsters with stores in both L.A. and Tel Aviv, the two most magnetic, sensual, misunderstood cities in the world.

So, here we are. I’m on an airplane to Rome, sailing once again over the Atlantic Ocean, to a place I’ve only imagined in my dreams. To a place that, until recently, I only knew as a country where my dear friends Alison and Joel took their birthright trips, as a legendary place that was mentioned in my Sunday school stories, as a nativity scene on my parents’ bookshelf during the winter holidays. I also knew, somewhere in this mix, that it was also a place as inextricably tied to occupation and political tension as the word Bethlehem is to the Christmas play we used to enact at school each year with white kids wearing brown leather sandals with straps and tunics too big for their child-sized bodies.

I’m on an airplane to Rome, and then to Tel Aviv, to a place that, yes, reminds me that this chosen passion of mine, to journey, to experience, to write, to capture scenes as best I can with a lens, often comes with a price. It requires me to face trauma, to face insecurity and cultural uncertainties, to open myself up to the possibility that yes, life is not perfect, not elsewhere, and not at home; it is not without political strife; it is not without raced, gendered, and socio-economic realities. I think that this is one of the first lessons that Israel can teach me—that living with uncertainty is as undeniable a part of life as getting out of bed in the morning. It’s a way of life, it’s a reality of life, it’s a daily part of life.

But I also know that I am a better person for having had the chance to learn these things. And I’m not afraid—I’m electrified. I can’t wait. I want to understand more fully the lives the Israelis and the Palestinians live and experience every day. I hope, that even though I will be a temporary visitor in their home, that they will allow me to ask, and that they will tell me. What we see in the media is never, ever the full story, and I am so utterly grateful for this opportunity to learn what that actually means. I’ve been to places recovering from war before, places like Medellín, Ciudad Juarez, and Malta, but I’ve never been to a place that fears a new war is on the horizon.

Map of Where We’re Going

So, let’s see what our week in Israel looks like. Of course, our itinerary might—and almost certainly will—change depending on the current political situation, road traffic, and/or time and crowd constraints, but here’s what the Israeli Ministry of Tourism has planned for us.

Imagine a circle, starting at Ben Gurion International Airport (the blue airplane icon). Travel up and around in a clockwise circle from there and keep going until you get back to Ben Gurion. Because I could only figure out how to put pins on a Google map and not numbers, envisioning them as pins in a clockwise circle is about the best we’re going to get. That being said, I’ve read that flexibility and adaptability are as much a way of life as anything else around here, so in the spirit of our upcoming journey, let’s just use this as a starting point.

If anything, it’s nice to see an up-close map of Israel, a country no larger than the state of New Jersey.

Day 1 – Weds. – Haifa, Old Acre, Beit She’an

After the million hours it’s going to take us to actually get to Israel, we have to get in a bus and ride from the airport up to Haifa, where we’re spending our first night (and at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, a place I am hoping has beautiful pillows and comfortable mattresses….). When we wake up on Wednesday morning, we’re going to start our day touring Haifa, Israel’s third-largest port city (and the name of the dog who lives next door to the Winet cabin in Idaho). We’ll visit the Bahai Shrine and Gardens, which, though I know little about it, seems to be the world’s center for the Bahai faith.

From there, we’re going to drive across the Galilee to Old Acre, an Ottoman seaport designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where we’ll get to see the fishermen at work, shop at a street bazaar, and visit an Israeli bathhouse. After our afternoon in Old Acre, it looks like we’ll head back and check in at the En Gev Holiday Resort kibbutz, where we’ll have what is rumored to be St. Peter’s fish….or descendants of the fish St. Peter used to harvest on the Sea of Galillee two thousand years ago.

Day 2 – Thurs. – Kibbutz En Gev, Caesarea, Jerusalem

We’ll be waking up early Thursday morning for a tour of the kibbutz (commune) before we drive over to Caesarea, a coastal Mediterranean resort town and former Roman capital. We’ll spend some time wandering around the ruins and the ancient theater before heading to the Israel Museum where I will get to see, with these own two blue eyes of mine, the actual Dead Sea Scrolls. For those of you who don’t know what the Dead Sea Scrolls actually are, let me say this: they are the oldest remaining biblical texts in existence. No matter what your beliefs are (or if you even have any), there is something immaculately sacred about these books.

Thursday night, we’ll check in to the Dan Panorama Hotel in Jerusalem and get to meet Chef Moshe Bason, a local farm-to-table phenom in Jerusalem whose entire repertoire of recipes is based off of references to foods and cooking techniques mentioned in the Bible. This, too, sounds extraordinary….I’m hoping to steal him away for an interview!

Day 3 – Fri. – City of David, Western Wall, Mt. Zion (Jerusalem)

If everything goes as planned, Friday will be the kind of day that I know I will remember for the rest of my life. It will be that kind of day, the one and only chance I might ever have to walk through, on my own two feet, the world I only know from my Methodist Sunday school classes as a child, the world I know only through books, and stories, and the sermons of my childhood ministers. I will get to see the City of David. I will get to touch the Western Wall, Judaism’s most sacred place on Earth and I will get to walk through the Western Wall Tunnels. I will get to stroll down the cobblestoned alleys of the Cardo, the Roman-Byzantine streets that were once trod by people thousands of years older than me.

I will visit Mt. Zion, and I will see the room of Jesus’ Last Supper. I will dine in the old city center, and I will see the streets light up with life. Or so I’ve heard.

I hope, hope, hope with all of my heart that the Old City is reopened to the public and is safe by Friday. A precarious time, but in Israel, always a precarious time.

Day 4 – Sat. – Dead Sea, Judean Desert

And today, I will float on water. And we will visit the absolute lowest point on the planet. I think we’re also supposed to take a Jeep safari to Mout Sedom, a place comprised entirely of salt.

We will bathe in the sea and, according to my itinerary, put on the black mud. I have no idea what this black mud of which they speak actually is, but I guess we’ll find out together.

Tonight, we’ll spend our last night at the Leonardo Plaza Hotel in Jerusalem.

Day 5 – Sun. – Tel Aviv

In the morning, we’ll hit the road again and head to the National Musem of the Holocaust in Yad Vashem. From there, we’ll drive to the city of Tel Aviv, Israel’s cultural, financial, commercial, and entertainment center. We’ll walk through Neve Tzekek, Tel Aviv’s oldest neighborhood from the 1800s, and we’ll get to stop in some art galleries, cafes, and boutiques.

From the city center, we head to Old Jaffa, an ancient seaport on the coast that has (so I’ve heard) been transformed into a vibrant vacation spot for Israelis and international visitors. We’ll visit some museums, walk around, have dinner at Wilhemina, a restaurant in a former German colony, and hit the Tel Aviv nightlife, a nightlife I’ve heard is like nowhere else on earth.

Day 6 – Mon. – Tel Aviv

And then, just like that, our last day. Our plan, as of now, is to visit the Carmel open-air market, to travel to the White City, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its unique whitewashed, modern architecture, and to take a swim in the Mediterranean and reflect on our voyage.

We will have a special bon voyage dinner with the Ministry of Tourism at a local restaurant called, interestingly, Dr. Shakshuka. We will sleep a few hours, check out of our hotel at 1:30 in the morning, and leave for the airport.

I will be home, in the insanity of flights, time changes, and the weirdness of the Circadian rhythm, by 11:45 a.m.

So, without further ado, shalom Israel!

Yours in travel,

Kristin

—

All photographs from Flickr’s Creative Commons. I thank them for their generosity and I hope my photos turn out just as beautifully!

I’m excited to be traveling to Israel and exploring this magnificent holy land with the Israel Ministry of Tourism.

The post One Week in Israel appeared first on Bon Touriste.

MOSCOW

Kristin: Nearly two weeks after we started our journey in St. Petersburg, we woke up one morning in Moscow. We had been wondering what a Russian city of 15,000,000 people might look like—if it would resemble tiny St. Petersburg, if it would have the sprawling Communist blocs from one side of the horizon to the other, if (since we learned in one of our on-board lectures than there are more billionaires living in Moscow than anywhere else on earth) it would be peppered with first-class yachts and mansions. According to our lecture, though collective living is still common and most people now rent from private owners, real estate in Moscow is as expensive as (if not sometimes more so) than Hollywood in California, so I had a sneaking suspicion that we’d see quite an impressive mish-mash. We put on our walking shoes and boarded the bus for our “Moscow Up-Close and Personal” tour.

In fact, I was right: it was all of these things.

And that doesn’t even begin to describe Moscow’s architecture, which is characterized by a delicate artisanship I’ve never quite seen anywhere else in my travels. For one thing, Moscow is one of those places whose zoning makes absolutely no sense to me, a girl who grew up on grid systems in Western cities: it has buildings built as early as 900 A.D. (talk about longevity!) a few streets away from mansions built during Imperial Russia just a few streets away from modern apartment buildings that look like they were lifted from an American suburb and plopped down in Russia.

Kay: There are two impressions that struck me as being an important part of my realization and appreciation of this marvelous country. First, artisanship is beyond anything we can see in the US, and rivals anything in Europe or Asia, at least in my opinion.  In the cities, it becomes clear that Russia is forcefully and actively working to preserve her architecture, some dating from the 11^th century and before, her art, her history, her soul.  Almost everywhere, especially in Moscow, a huge city of 15,000,000, there is refurbishment and restoration and construction wherever you look. The second impression is that there is an important contrast between the old and the new.  Moscow boasts many new skyscrapers off in the distance, reminders of the 21st century and the future.  But Moscow is, more importantly, a beautiful city, begun in 1147, that still contains over 2,500 historical and architectural monuments, 70 museums, 50 theaters,4,500 libraries, and 540 colleges and research institutes.

THE RED SQUARE

Kristin: And, of course, there is something about seeing Moscow’s Red Square, that kind of iconic mecca that draws all travelers to Russia. There was something almost ephemeral about seeing it in person, as though I couldn’t make sense of the fact that I was actually standing in the middle of it, battling tourists, feeling the sun on my shoulders, seeing the peaks of St. Basil’s onion domes peeping over the horizon line while waiting in line at the Square’s grand entryway.

What happened next will stay with me for the rest of my life: as we crossed through the brick-red arches and touched ground on the cobblestones, it occurred to me that I had made it not only to a country that had been a mystery to me my entire life, and I was there with my mom, a woman who, too, had spent two weeks getting to know a place she’d been terrified of as a child and that continues to be constructed by the media as a place diametrically opposed to our own home. Everything—all those tangled emotions that happen in travel—culminated in that one moment, stepping through that archway.

I realized then, that I’d also been nearly brought to tears.

The Red Square is not just an architectural beauty—it is divine. The jagged walls of the Kremlin line one side (with Vladimir Lenin’s mausoleum in front of it, a sight I’ve heard is both reverent and disturbing—reverent because we’re talking about witnessing the remains of a world figure, disturbing because, well, Lenin is not the freshest-looking of corpses); Goom’s Department Store lines another, St. Basil’s Cathedral on yet another, and the magnificent archway on the other. We were literally surrounded by four kinds of Russia—she who governs, she who shops, she who worships, and she who now allows guests to enter.

“History doesn’t know the subjunctive mood. We can’t really ask ourselves ‘what if?’” – Andrey, our tour guide, on Russia’s difficult history

Just….go. I hope you’ll see what I mean.

THE METRO

Kay: You know what we haven’t mentioned? How we got there! To be honest, a trip to Moscow would not be complete without a ride on the Metro.  While most of us have ridden or commuted on subways in various cities, there is none like this. It is more than 180 miles long with daily ridership exceeding 7,000,000.  It is also the deepest of any, one station resting at 243 feet underground, with over 190 stations overall.

Kay: The stations are like nothing we have ever seen; they are works of art. Stalin caused this incredible monument to socialism to be begun in 1932 where it became a collective work of art, showcasing themes of communist ideology and history. It is also the fastest subway train I have ever experienced. If you want to see some of this incredible Metro, go here: http://twistedsifter.com/2014/11/beautiful-stations-of-the-moscow-metro/

Kay: As we exited the metro stop near Red Square, were initially astonished to see a man who at first glance appeared to be Putin, outside the Resurrection Gate, the entrance to Red Square.  Perhaps a welcoming committee of one?  At closer look, however, he was an entrepreneur of sorts, an almost duplicate of the President of Russia himself. Dressed in a suit, starched white shirt and tie, he had on offer pictures of himself with unwitting tourists, all for a sum of 1000 rubles (about $20).

Kristin: He was hilarious! And kind of a bad entrepreneur, truly, as he wouldn’t even consider bartering with us on the price. $20 for a photo with a Putin imposter? That’s a $5 purchase at most. Too bad we couldn’t fool dad with a picture of us and faux-Putin…..

Kay: A high point of this day was the classical folklore concert, played expertly on traditional Russian folk instruments such as balalaikas and bayans.

TREYTAKOV GALLERY & THEATER

Kristin: To be honest, the folklore concert at the Tretyakov Theater was actually one of my absolute favorite activities in Moscow. For one, if you’ve never been to a classical folklore concert, it’s one of the most unusual—and wonderfully bizarre—symphonic experiences you can imagine. The stage is set up in a half-moon shape, reminiscent of a classical symphonic orchestra; the musicians are dressed in long black dresses and classic black-tie attire; the maestro stands, feet together, on a pedestal in front of his orchestra, his baton delicately poised in one hand.

But….then the maestro waves his baton, the musicians pick up their instruments, and what comes out is a riotous, playful, strummed-and-plucked explosion, the likes of which you’ve probably never heard before (or at least not quite in this way!). Everyone is smiling—the young musicians clearly love what they do!—and the domras, gooselys, and balalaikas (similar to violins, harps, and guitars, respectively) take their audience into the sounds of Russia’s interiors, where her wooden folk instruments still fill the silences.

ST. BASIL’S CATHEDRAL

Kay: The next day, we had some free time and so we went back to Red Square to properly tour St Basil’s. We ate at a café in the Square, walked around, and just took in the sights. It was so nice to have a relaxing morning and then to just spend the rest of the day enjoying ourselves on the boat!

THE KREMLIN

Then, the next morning, we met back with our group to take our tour of the Kremlin. Kremlin means “fortress inside a city”; it is indeed, and is nothing like ever will see again. We also noted the site of Putin’s helicopter landing pad where he arrives and departs from work.  It still seems unreal that we were inside the Kremlin, a place so long surrounded with secrecy and mystery. It took me a couple of days to get my mind around this alone, especially given all the other experiences we had on this incredible trip.

“If we tried to only stick to the facts, the tour would be this: Hello, good morning, the church was built in 1714. Goodbye.” – Micha, our tour guide, on the mystery of Russia’s history

Kristin: The Kremlin tour, though crowded, was SO INTERESTING. The entire place is akin to a compound, with tall red walls surrounding it on all sides (much like what you’d expect), but the inside of it is another story. There are winding gardens, fresh flowers, exquisite medieval churches pristinely restored, Renaissance-style government office buildings, and men and women in suits, clutching their briefcases and wearing sunglasses as they walk to and from their meetings.

As we walked around, I tried to imagine the same kind of world on our side of the globe, wondering what radically different kinds of conversations were happening inside those walls.

Oh yes, and there are hundreds of tourists. Go early.

Kay: Our second to last evening, we enjoyed a small boat tour along the waterways to see “Moscow by Night”. The entire city, small and large buildings alike, is lit with street lights, floodlights, and fairy lights.  It is a magical sight with, for my daughter and I, a travel story attached, but that is for another time.

FAREWELL TO RUSSIA, AND A LITTLE ADDENDUM…..

Kristin: I’d like to mention, too, how throughout our trip, and throughout this three-part series in which we wove our stories together, it’s what happened in-between those sights, those magnificent, haunting places, that will remain with me for the rest of my life. There is nothing quite like seeing St. Basil’s Cathedral, the St. Petersburg Hermitage, the Kremlin, of course; nothing quite like it in the world. But even more than that, there is nothing quite like the experience of opening my eyes to another culture, one whose world had been closed to us for so long, with my mom by my side.

Because I live in California and Kay–along with the rest of my family–lives in Georgia, I don’t get to see her all that often, a reality of my wandering roots that is sometimes very difficult for me. We Skype, of course, and when we’re missing each other, we cook dinners together over the phone, we shop for shoes by sending picture texts back and forth of our feet, and we decorate my apartments together by shopping on websites at the same time. We share our stories with each other, and I still look to her for advice on nearly everything, from what to wear on my first day of teaching to what kinds of curtains I should put in my new living room. Having recently turned 30, her involvement in my life has become ever more important to me, especially as our family has faced difficult health issues, cancer, and remissions, and cancer, and remissions (so goes the cycle), and financial worries, and I’ve begun to recognize how precious our time is together. As I write this on the heels of the news that Kay will soon have to undergo chemotherapy again, our trip seems even more precious, and I hope she holds onto it during the more difficult days.

Being able to share this with her, seeing her light up, take copious notes in her journal, stay up late and laugh with me, drink vodka with me, examine world-renowned pieces of art with me, sit on the skydeck of our Viking ship and watch the forested landscape pass by….

What a treasure it’s been.

Mom, where shall we go next?

*

A very special thanks to Viking River Cruises and the team on the Viking Truvor for hosting my mom and me on our unforgettable first river cruise. If you’d like to see the full itinerary, you can see it on Viking’s site or in my previous blog post!

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