Travel Tips: rules of the road

Posted on August 5, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

Over the course of this summer, I have driven a lot.  I’m not referring only to the usual driving around we all have to do to get to work or meetings or to run our errands.  I’m talking about additional highway driving, getting from the airport to the heart of San Francisco, getting from San Francisco to Napa, from Napa back to the airport, driving from Dallas to Memphis and back, and visiting friends in Austin for a delayed screening of “Sharknado” (which is my new favorite movie).  I have a few friendly pieces of advice for my fellow drivers.

1.   If the cars in any of the lanes to your right are passing you, you are in the incorrect lane.  Please change lanes to the right and continue to do so until you have found your speed team.  For some of you, I understand that this might put you on the surface streets or the highway access road; based on your speed, this is where you belong.  I do understand that the number posted on the speed limit sign is supposed to represent an upper limit for speed.  You should understand that many of us believe that you can add some constant, x (where x varies
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An Online Dating Tale

Posted on August 1, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

I’ve been doing online dating on and off for several years now.  Here is an exchange that highlights one of the reasons that the off times are so much longer and more frequent than the on times.  It’s from OK Cupid, which I like because of the questions it allows people to answer.  Based on the way that you answer these questions, which are submitted by users and cover a wide variety of topics, the OKC algorithm comes up with a likelihood percentage for match, friend, and enemy.

OKC evaluated this Potential Suitor (PS) as 61% Match, 67% Friend, and 16% Enemy – not promising.  His answer to one of the questions indicates that he is not ok with homosexuals; this is a nonstarter for me.  My policy, though, is to respond to the e-mails that men send me, because they at least deserve a reply.  I probably strung this exchange out too long, but I had a feeling it had some potential.  (I’ve copied and pasted directly from OKC, so any grammar, spelling, syntax, and usage mistakes are intentional, in that I didn’t correct them for purposes of this post.)

May 28, 2013 – 2:52pm
PS:  Hi Continue reading →

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Bad Taxi Karma

Posted on July 29, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

I don’t like taking taxis by myself.  If I can avoid taking a taxi solo, I will.  As a traveler, though, taking taxis, alone or accompanied, is unavoidable.  I dislike taking taxis because, even though I hate people, there’s something about me that seems to encourage unpleasant (for me) conversations, more so than about others, because my friends and colleagues don’t have the same experiences in taxis that I have.

Several times when I lived in DC, before I started driving myself to the airport for business trips to avoid these conversations, I would get asked about my boyfriend.  I get that I’m more sensitive than most when it comes to safety (too many episodes of “Criminal Minds”), but I’m so uncomfortable with the idea that a perfect stranger who knows where I live and in whose moving car I’m trapped also wants to know my romantic status.  I made up a boyfriend, and he happened not to be in town to pick me up from the airport because he was in the Navy.  Eventually, that got changed to the Marines.  And then he became a sniper in the Marines.

Another time in DC, the cabbie was listening to NPR,
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Travelogue: Abu Dhabi and the UAE

Posted on July 25, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

My father got lured out of retirement in 2010 to work for a company owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, one of the United Arab Emirates (the one that most people have heard of is Dubai).  As a result, my sister and I spent our Christmas holidays there in 2010, 2011, and 2012.

Being there for two to three weeks at a time for three years running let me observe more of what was going on around me .  We’ve done most of the tourist activities:  dune bashing, ALLOF THEMALLS (including the gargantuan one in Dubai), the Grand Mosque, and the observation deck of the Burj Khalifa (which is not at the top of the building like we thought).  I recommend all of them. 

If you like roller coasters, the dune bashing will satisfy your soul, and if you don’t, try to book an outing that ends with a meal in the desert.  When my family went, we got to see some Arab dancing (a little half-assed and done by the non-Arab drivers of the reinforced Land Cruisers), we got henna tattoos, and we rode a camel.  My cousin smoked shisha like a pro and got in trouble with
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Travel Tips: how to pack

Posted on July 22, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

I love to travel.  I love being in a new city and learning how to navigate unfamiliar streets and neighborhoods and eating at restaurants that I can’t find at home.  I love getting caught up in conversations with locals, whether in my native tongue or theirs, and discovering what they love about their homes and the things that they’re interested in finding out about visitors.

What I think makes me different from the other billions of people in the world who also like to travel is that I also love the travel part itself.  I love figuring out how to pack everything I’ll need for my trip into a carry-on suitcase.  I love the drive to the airport, I love getting through security efficiently, and I love having just enough time to have a glass of wine before getting on my flight.  One of my non-super superpowers is that once my seat belt clicks shut, I can fall asleep in under three minutes (although this might be a sign that I operate in a state of constant sleep deprivation).  Striding through the airport weaving through sleepy travelers makes me feel productive and invincible. 

And so I humbly offer a few packing tips; I can’t promise that these are new or revolutionary or that you haven’t read them in other places.  I can promise you that I put these into practice every time I take a trip, and they never let me down.

1) Avoid checking bags.  When you check your bag, you invite the airline to misdirect it or lose it altogether.  I’m not at the point yet where I believe the airlines do this on purpose to spite us, but I’ve had too many bags not arrive in cities at the same time that I do to feel comfortable checking.  Sometimes it’s unavoidable (like when you buy a bottle of wine or three or end up purchasing too many purses in Buenos Aires (they were gifts) (mostly)), but I try to risk it only on the return flight home, where I know I have plenty of clean underwear.

2) Get a high quality, carry-on bag.  During the summer, I can pack two weeks’ worth of clothes and shoes and provisions into my rollerbag.  I confess that while my carry-on is only 20-inches high, it is also a couple of inches wider than your average bag (I don’t want to Continue reading →

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Code Switching: do you do it?

Posted on July 18, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

[My friend Diane, who lives in Singapore and is married to an Australian man, and I have been discussing code switching over e-mail for the past few weeks.  She suggested it as a post topic for me, but I haven’t had an encounter recently that offers the richness of perspective that I got out of my discussion with her.  With her permission, I’ve edited and reproduced it here.]

Diane:

I have been thinking about code switching lately because of NPR’s great blog launched in April. Their definition of code switch is expansive and interesting, but here’s a snippet:  “In linguistics, “code-switching” means mixing languages or patterns of speech in conversation. But as our blog host Gene Demby explains: ‘We’re looking at code-switching a little more broadly. Many of us subtly, reflexively change the way we express ourselves all the time. We’re hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts of our own identities — sometimes within a single interaction.’”

I think most of us think of code switching as a dance that some people have to do (want to do?) to ‘fit in’ .. mostly when they encounter differences of race … Obama adding a bit of lilt Continue reading →

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Girls from the Past

Posted on July 15, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

There was a three-week period of time during which I cast aspersions on a young relative, accusing him of being spoiled and lacking basic life skills.  I found out that I live in a glass house and that I’ve been throwing stones.

When I was in high school, I ran around with a pack of smart girls, most of whom are still close 25 years later.  I’m not one of them.  I have a tendency to flee from chaos and instability and drama, and the 20s were turbulent for a few of these girls.  I’m not proud of this tendency, and it leaves me in a poorer condition, because I’m not one of those people who has a ton of friends from childhood whom I see all the time.

When I moved back to Dallas in 2010, I reconnected with one of these girls, primarily through Facebook.  I’m pretty good at Facebook.  Maybe because it’s a form of writing, maybe because I’m the right amount of narcissistic, but my Facebook page expresses who I am in a way that’s enabled me to get closer to people who were less friends than interesting acquaintances I wanted to get to know Continue reading →

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Travels with the Viking: Iron Horse

Posted on July 11, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

The Viking and I have gone on enough wine-tasting trips together that we have a couple of unspoken, de facto rules.  The first is that if it’s just the two of us, I drive.  There are a few reasons for this:  1) I travel less for work than I used to, so it helps me maintain status to be the one who rents the car; 2) because I have status and a points surplus with the rental car company, we tend to get some decent perks; and 3) left to my own devices, I will drink too much wine at tastings and end up not drunk but feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck.  If I have the responsibility of driving, I will only take a sip of each wine we taste, and if I fall in love with a wine, I’ll drink the entire ounce.  The rest of the wine gets poured into Loraine’s glass.  (Incidentally, she recently wrote one of the best explanations of terroir that I’ve read.)

Our second rule is that we don’t do more than three tastings in a day, and usually only two.  On my first trip to Napa with another friend, Continue reading →

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Drinking with the Viking

Posted on July 8, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

My friend Loraine is my favorite travel buddy, but the downfall of spending free or vacation time with her is that I get lulled into false sense of alcohol-related security.  I get caught up in the fun, and I forget that I can’t and shouldn’t match her drink for drink.  You see, she is six feet tall and of Scandinavian descent.  I am not.

She and I met in Houston over Memorial Day weekend in 2011.  She drove in from Austin, and I flew down from Dallas.  She picked me up from the airport, and then we had lunch.  I introduced her to my favorite jewelry store in Houston, Fly High Little Bunny.  Commerce happened.  It’s not important how much.

Then we went to Sonoma, a wine bar, where we each drank a flight of champagne.  As we chatted with the staff, it came out that we had met the owners of the bar in Napa a few months earlier.  The bartender offered us another glass of wine if we let her take our picture and use it on the Sonoma Facebook page. Loraine and I are not churls, so we agreed.

We ate dinner at the Astros game, where Loraine paid a million Continue reading →

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“Passion” Bugs

Posted on July 4, 2013 by travelfoodandlife

I think that one of the most overused words is “passion” and its variations.  As in, “What’s your passion?” or “My passion is X,” or “I’m really passionate about A, B, and C.”  “Passion” (the word, not the thing) makes me cringe because I think that a person who is truly passionate about something pursues that something.  The fact of the pursuit is enough; the statement is superfluous.  And so if someone talks about a passion, it makes me think that person is a dilettante.  Maybe this is unfair, but I’ve had a couple of experiences in the past couple of weeks that reinforce this.

Loraine and I went to Napa and Sonoma for a long weekend (I’ll have more details in a future post).  Loraine loves wine.  She has passed the Level 1 sommelier exam offered by the Court of Master Sommeliers.  She is a certified wine educator.  To use the irritating vernacular, wine is Loraine’s passion, but you’ll never hear her talk about it that way.  That’s because she’s too busy learning about wine and teaching others about wine and drinking wine and having knowledgeable conversations with wine experts to say that wine is her passion. 

When we visit

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