Category Archives: Travel

New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS | It was my first time in New Orleans. Maybe I should start with that. I had arrived on a Wednesday, a full five days of work awaiting.

I had the most superficial understanding of New Orleans. Café Du Monde. Drew Brees. The Superdome. Katrina… and the scenes from the aftermath. Bourbon Street. That Simpson episode where Marge plays Blanche DuBois in a musical adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” And so on.

This was my New Orleans.

And then came Tuesday afternoon. My last day. For five days, I had covered basketball, tracking a Kansas team that wouldn’t wilt, and a Kentucky team that couldn’t. For five days, I had walked the streets of the French Quarter, all of its tackiness and beauty and charm blending together in some strange concoction of Bourbon-infused wonder.

They call this place Le Vieux Carré … the Old Square. Or at least they did.

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Portlaustina

I travel to Austin for work.* I travel there quite a bit and sometimes for rather long periods of time. Last May, for instance, I drove to Austin on a Sunday night, my car’s engine heaving like an 18th century settler with the whooping cough, and didn’t return until the next Sunday, my car’s engine purring like an 18th century house cat. In this period of time, I took my car, obviously, to a mechanic, who was actually a junkyard operator on the side of the road who was VERY helpful; visited the gorgeous Mount Bonnell; drank heavily on Sixth Street twice (Dirty Sixth, of course); ran on the path bordering the Colorado River; knocked down a few construction signs on a Friday night walk back to the hotel; witnessed a friend order two large pizzas at 2:15 a.m. only to leave the restaurant and eat none of the paid-for pizzas; and visited the state capitol. I also worked for six consecutive days.

*I’m actually here right now!

So as you might guess, I have become closely acquainted with the city. Continue reading

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Living Kansas City

I’ll be moving soon. Only have a few months left. New role at work. New responsibility. I’ll actually be living on my own for the first time*.

*As I type this, I realize this is not actually true. When I was a freshman in college, I lived with my brother to save money. And then he moved out the last couple months. Geez. That was a while ago.

Sure, moving to Lawrence, Kan., a place I have already lived for four years of my life is not exactly moving to Chicago or Dallas or Denver. But nonetheless, I’m moving, leaving Kansas City*, heading one county over.

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Mediocre Ivy League basketball and the beginnings of an East Coast roundball odyssey

The moment you step into the subterranean, no-frills gymnasium on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it’s clear that this isn’t the land of blue-chip recruits, multi-million dollar budgets or unscrupulous “advisors.”

Truthfully, that much is readily apparent the moment you exit the 1 train at 116th Street and meander up the decrepit staircase into the brisk January air among a crowd of chattering students, an elderly couple or two and a few scattered fans in team colors.

Through towering wrought iron gates, a small avenue leads into a grassy square flanked by enormous, stately buildings* that evoke eras past when New York City was in the early throes of reconciling its European origins with its American upbringing. To the left, up a few minor inclines and past a couple of stone lions, is the entrance to Columbia’s Levien Gym.

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Nutella

It starts with breakfast. Breakfast in a hostel. A hostel in Paris. Paris in the summer.

We had been traveling for five or six days, give or take a town. We would travel for five or six more, my brother and I following the EuroRail map from Annecy to Nice to the Cinque Terre and back.

But that’s a story for a different time. This is a story about breakfast. And you probably know that breakfast in a Paris hostel consists of about three things. Bread and cheese and… and maybe water. That’s it. This particular hostel had a tiny room for the travelers to eat. It had faded wallpaper, and frilly curtains on the windows, and white table cloths from 1981. My brother and I sat down at the table and surveyed the spread.

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Two Hours In Olathe

Being home for the Holidays, at least during the daytime at my house, generally presents two options for entertainment: watching Lifetime Original movies with my sister (A Nanny For Christmas) or counting how many individual dog hairs canvass the leather furniture of our family room. I got lucky on Friday, though. My sister, Rachel, who has recently moved back to the United States from Denmark, is in need of a car so that she may start working again in hopes of inflating her bank account, which has a cash flow problem that rivals the country of Greece. Continue reading

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Invasive Species (They and Me and You)

I see the way they look at me and mumble a meek “Hi” as I duck into my renovated apartment in the building we share.

After all, they were here first. They lived through the days of glass-enclosed cashiers, barren after-dark avenues and the crime that made New York notorious. My Brooklyn — its craft beer bars, wine shops and organic groceries — isn’t their Brooklyn.

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Times Square

My company relocated recently from the stately silver canyons of Sixth Avenue to the pulsating, luminous walls of Times Square. This two-block shift might not seem like a big deal, but as any resident of the five boroughs knows, it is, indeed a very big deal.

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The Sound of Nothing

Nothing has a sound, and it’s predictably difficult to describe.

It comes in the moment when your own breath sounds like whipping wind. It comes when your shoe’s rubber-on-grass pad is audible from six feet up. It comes when the sky is clear and dark and the air is cold and crisp.

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Vacation

In my six years of living in transplant-centric locations (Lawrence, Kan., and Brooklyn, N.Y.), I’ve come to cherish one of life’s more underappreciated delights: Staying put for the holidays.

Back in Lawrence, some of my favorite times included window-down drives on relatively empty summer-evening streets, enjoying the solitude of the Student Rec Center during its reduced summer hours and running the hills of the car-free streets just north of campus before the summer heat hit near mid-day. Staying in a snowpacked and silent Lawrence over winter break felt like being in on a beautiful secret that the rest of the world only stumbled upon twice a week at Allen Fieldhouse.
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