Stopped to get gas before returning my car at the airport. A guy walked up and tried to sell me two fat, shiny rings that I assume he purchased legitimately and then decided he didn’t really want them and then … Continue reading
Everyone else in this audience seems to be blogging right now, so I feel like I should too. God bless the internet.
Can you even call a 17 hour layover a layover? That’s long enough that you really have to consider putting down roots. At Turkish passport control, I was in line with 50 middle-aged Russian women. They are much better at … Continue reading
I didn’t make any of the obvious mistakes. A couple little things, yeah. I could have thought things through more. But mostly it came down to circumstances beyond my control. Of course, you never want to land in an unfamiliar … Continue reading
There’s a Turkish man behind me who resembles a hairy lump of coal. He’s watching videos on his laptop of men with high-caliber machine guns shredding target dummies. He is chuckling with glee about this. He is as happy as … Continue reading
I pulled my laptop out on the flight to Kuwait. The act jolted the Sri Lankan man next to me from his slumber and sent him into an angry rant about computers and their destructive effect on modern life. "They … Continue reading
The next time you’ve got a layover in Cairo airport, remember to go up. The gates are all on the first floor, which is smelly and ugly. The few available seats are occupied and everyone is yelling at each other. … Continue reading
Over the last couple hundred flights, I’ve decided the notion of sitting next to someone cool and interesting is, essentially, mythical. Pleasant surprise, then, to meet a programmer from San Diego on her way to Rome to teach a course … Continue reading
Tonight, we celebrated Earth Hour with a candlelit dinner in front of a blank TV. The inclination to flick a switch was almost overwhelming at first, but in time it dimmed, and once we got comfortable with our books, we … Continue reading
Dancing without gravity. Check. It took a second try and a new videocamera with solid state memory storage, but I got it. Thanks to Phil and everyone at ZeroG for helping me get the shot right. By the way, floating … Continue reading