The Plane Truth
Chicago’s airports may be crowded and full of delayed passengers, but there’s one big advantage to flying out of here—it’s cheaper. Here’s why plane tickets cost what they do.
Ad Categories: Hotel and Travel
Foreign Grocery Stores and the Ugly American
During my travels abroad, I was obsessed with supermarkets. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t shake my deep-seated Ugly American tendencies, making the names of products on shelves endlessly amusing. I got so carried away that a suspicious security guard in Hanoi escorted me and my camera out the door. Eventually, Sarah forbade me to bring the camera in, and I was forced to do actual shopping rather than snicker at the tiny cultural differences that bring out the 19-year-old boy in me…
Tusks of Gold
An elephant walked past me on the sidewalk today. He was just strolling down the street, looking kind of bored, like he was on his way to the 7-Eleven on the corner for a Slurpee, when our cab passed him.
"Did you see that?" I asked Sarah, who was busy looking out the opposite window at lines of old women skewering chickens on the sidewalk, sending unruly streams of smoke into the air…
Swimming With Sharks
Ever hear of Eileen and Tom Lonergan? They were a couple from Baton Rouge who went scuba diving off the coast of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in 1998, and accidentally got left behind due to a faulty head count taken by the boat crew. No one noticed they were gone until their bags were found in the boat two days later. A vast search followed, but they were gone. Eventually their empty wet suits, tanks, and dive jackets washed ashore. Most likely they met a shark or…
Flex Time
Good parenting, as anyone will tell you, is all about flexibility. And bribery. And Cheerios. Yes, that’s it: flexibility, bribery, and Cheerios. Am I forgetting anything here? Oh, yeah, mindless repetition. If you haven’t the ability to listen to the same mind-numbing song, read the same stupid Elmo book, or feed the baby the same icky goop over and over again without…
Tropical Depression
While sitting at our private table on our private island, sipping cold drinks under our private umbrella, our toes in the warm private sand that no one else’s toes are allowed to touch, I had a terrible thought. This is not paradise I find myself in. It’s hell.
OK, stick with me here. I’m going to go off on a navel-gazing existential rant—which makes no sense given the fact that…
Green Heaven
The Great Barrier Reef. You hear a lot about it, but what do you really know? It’s in Australia and it’s visible from outer space: that’s about the extent of it for me. I always associated the reef with sharks and scuba divers, two species that don’t terribly interest me. As we were taking a ferry from Cairns, the city nearest the reef, to some island resort where Sarah had made reservations, a refrain from the Old 97’s entered my head: “What’s so great about the Barrier Reef?” I sang it repeatedly to Sarah, who finally told me to shut up…
The Meltdown
Beyond swearing allegiance to the Taliban, the quickest way to make yourself a social pariah in America is to take a baby to a restaurant. Only on airplanes, and, perhaps, movie theatres are infants more loathed. I’ve seen servers argue with hostesses after getting a baby-centric family seated in their section. Once, for no apparent reason, I witnessed a waiter passive-aggressively kick the stroller that we had placed behind our table. Not that I can blame him…
Animal Magnetism
Everyone knows that a child’s early years are the most crucial developmentally of her whole life. This fact seems to scare the hell out of most new parents. We’re constantly worrying that we’ve managed to screw up our child in some profound, irreversible way, the kind of issue that won’t be pinpointed until the kid is on a therapist’s couch in 25 years trying to make sense of what went wrong.
Therapist: What about your childhood?
Hannah: I don’t know . . . My parents took me to…
More Songs About Chocolate and Immigration
Cool town, Melbourne. It’s a clean, cosmopolitan city of nearly 4 million, and routinely lands on those lists of the most livable cities in the world, usually second to Vancouver. The skyline glitters at night, and everywhere we go are these sort of half-indoor, half-outdoor malls and cafés. Even the alleys are cool-looking.
One problem. Everyone pronounces Melbourne “MEL-bin,” which makes me think of Melba toast, which…