Very cool set of videos from the Space Station, which you may have seen but are worth seeing again. List of locations can be found here.
Archive for November, 2011
The Food Less Traveled
Posted in Africa, Clips, Travel on November 4, 2011 by frankbures
The best meal I ever ate was at a roadside restaurant in the middle of Nigeria. I was in a microbus heading north through an otherworldly landscape strewn with giant boulders. It was mid-morning when we pulled over at an open-air restaurant. The counter where people were ordering was jammed. An old man, seeing my confusion, explained the menu and ordered for me.
We sat down, and the waiter brought our food: a ball of pounded yam and a bowl of egusi soup, made with crushed melon seeds and containing a hunk of beef. The waiter asked if I wanted utensils. I looked around. No one else had them.
The old man leaned over. “You know,” he remarked, “they say your food tastes better when you eat it with your hands.” Sometimes I still wonder why that meal was so transcendent.
Bangkok Books
Posted in Asia, Books, Clips, Travel on November 3, 2011 by frankbures
Bangkok has found its way into the works of authors including Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, and James Michener, all of whom spent time in Thailand’s capital city. Recommended reading about the city, from Four Reigns to Bombay Anna to The Beach here.
Paul Theroux’s Tao of Travel
Posted in Books, Clips, Travel, Travel Writers on November 2, 2011 by frankbures
For 50 years, Paul Theroux has been traveling the world, and writing about it. The author has penned some of the best-loved travel books of all time, including The Great Railway Bazaar and Sunrise with Seamonsters, as well as many other titles (more than 40 in total) informed by his journeys.
In The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (Houghton Mifflin, 2011), Theroux steps back to ruminate on the act of travel itself. He has collected a half-century’s worth of insights in one volume, and added much more.
