Mexico Travel Quotes

Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.

María was out of the blocks the moment she heard the doorbell jangle. She came rushing from the kitchen to greet her childhood friend with cilantro hugs and chipotle kisses.

I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.' I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world." [Shakespeare & Company, archived statement]

You just wait patiently like you always do in America among those apparently endless policemen and their endless laws against (no laws for) -- but the moment you cross the little wire gate and you're in Mexico, you feel like you just sneaked out of school when you told the teacher you were sick and she told you you could go home, 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

We are, after all, citizens of the world - a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald's? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, Senor Tamale Stand Owner, Sushi-chef-san, Monsieur Bucket-head. What's that feathered game bird, hanging on the porch, getting riper by the day, the body nearly ready to drop off? I want some.

Giving up on the drive to succeed is a good part of what being an expat is all about. If you travel all the way to the Caribbean Sea, you probably have already decided to trade the dog-eat-dog competition of modern living for a hammock on the sand.

The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: "Hello - Goodbye!" and no address.

It wasn’t hard to understand. Mexican women are something special. They learn early on that men are subservient to them. They are trained by their mothers in the use of this power over these lowly creatures.

Under NAFTA, businesses, their property and their money can travel back and forth across national borders with relative ease, while workers who try to do the same are dubbed illegal, and are snatched off the streets and off factory floors, and are carted back over the borders they crossed. In the "free market" of NAFTA, the freedom is for the wealth and personnel of the capitalists- the thieves- there is no corresponding freedom for the refugees of land theft and conquest whose only capital is their daily toil. Capitalism is the immense and widely celebrated ideological package used to rewrap theft as freedom, to recast imperialism as democracy. (273) Mexico Unconquered

For victims of some crimes, real and horrible crimes, permission to stay in American territory is probably insufficient recompense. But it's better than nothing. It's certainly better than the right to a mass grave in Tamaulipas or Veracruz, for instance - the most common "permanent residence" granted to Central American migrants who travel across Mexico.

My friend Jack Wagner has often, in Mexico, assumed this state of being. Let us say we wanted to walk in the streets of Mexico ity but not at random. We would choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it.

I call it the Margarita Road. It's the course your heart sets when you want to leave the past behind and start over someplace new and warm. Usually the path heads south to blue water and white sand, with any bumps along the way smoothed over by rum and tequila. It's not for everyone. This is a highway traveled mostly by runaways and drifters. I know, becuase I'm one of them.

Now then, Mr. Crab," said the zebra, "here are the people I told you about; and they know more than you do, who live in a pool, and more than I do, who live in a forest. For they have been travelers all over the world, and know every part of it." "There's more of the world than Oz," declared the crab, in a stubborn voice. "That is true," said Dorothy; "but I used to live in Kansas, in the United States, and I've been to California and to Australia--and so has Uncle Henry." "For my part," added the Shaggy Man, "I've been to Mexico and Boston and many other foreign countries." "And I," said the Wizard, "have been to Europe and Ireland." "So you see," continued the zebra, addressing the crab, "here are people of real consequence, who know what they are talking about.

Mexico, as it was in the 1970s—and isn’t now—was my Paris. With Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans I celebrated life and the journey, which took on qualities of a pilgrimage in which every moment was a movable feast and every place was a shrine. Among the intricately carved ruins in the jungle at Palenque, I partook of the Mayan sacrament, the sacred psilocybin mushroom, and there I learned to see.

When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City”. Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is “city”. Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. p197

But I'm not running away. I'm running toward... toward adventure, toward discovery, toward diversity. And while I was in Mexico I discovered something intruiging: Once I leave the U.S., I am not bound by the rules of my culture. And when I am a foreigner in another country, I am exempt from the local rules. This extraordinary situation means that there are no rules in my life. I am free to live by the standards and ideals and rules I create for myself.

There is a kind of alchemy in the transformation of base chocolate into this wise fool's-gold, a layman's magic that even my mother might have relished. As I work, I clear my mind, breathing deeply. The windows are open, and the through-draft would be cold if it were not for the heat of the stoves, the copper pans, the rising vapor from the melting couverture. The mingled scents of chocolate, vanilla, heated copper, and cinnamon are intoxicating, powerfully suggestive; the raw and earthy tang of the Americas, the hot and resinous perfume of the rain forest. This is how I travel now, as the Aztecs did in their sacred rituals: Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia. The court of Montezuma. Cortez and Columbus. The Food of the Gods, bubbling and frothing in ceremonial goblets. The bitter elixir of life.

Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Florida Keys. New York City. The North Shore of Lake Superior. A small island close to Seattle. Those

What if we are all simply lost souls blown off course, just trying to get home?

I’d heard street food was a big thing here in Mexico but I didn’t think it meant the creatures that lived on the street.

You probably know that a raindrop falling into Lake Itasca in Minnesota will travel the length of the Mississippi and arrive at the Gulf of Mexico about ninety days later,” he said.

He might have left Amherst and traveled far away, to Italy or Mexico in search of beautiful food and adventure...Made small things exciting and beautiful, the way he knew how. pg. 246

Mexico is a lawless place. I don’t care what the UN says, or what the State Department travel advisories tell you. The fact is that Mexico, as a whole, is a narco-state run by powerful regional cartels, with a hollow and largely irrelevant central government that is nothing more than window-dressing to appease the international community. Freedom is for those who can afford it, law is for sale, and what is fair is determined by who is most powerful. That’s the reality of Mexico. Cancun, Playa, Cabo, Puerto Vallarta- they are all much better than the interior of Mexico, but that is only because their survival depends on a steady flow of tourists with money to burn. To protect that, the government does a good job maintaining the appearance of western-style law and order through the direct threat of massive military intervention. Underneath it all, those places are not much different from the rest of Mexico.

[Author's note:] When I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I would get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then I thought, 'If you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?' So I began. In the early days of my research, before I'd fully convinced myself that I should undertake the telling of this story, I was interviewing a very generous scholar, a remarkable woman who was chair of the Chicana and Chicano studies Department at San Diego State University. Her name is Norma Iglesias Prieto, and I mentioned my doubts to her. I told her I felt compelled, but unqualified, to write this book. She said, "Jeanine. We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story." Her encouragement sustained me for the next four years. I was careful and deliberate in my research. I traveled extensively on both sides of the border and learned as much as I could about Mexico and migrants, about people living throughout the borderlands. The statistics in this book are all true, and though I changed some names, most of the places are real, too. But the characters, while representative of the folks I met during my travels, are fictional.

[Americans] know instinctively that when they see lines of Americans whose travel plans have been screwed up because they can't get a U.S. passport to travel to Mexico or Canada, when they realize 3 of the Fort Dix plotters were not only illegal aliens but were stopped 75 times (!!!) by various police authorities and never once had their status questioned, the very notion that a Washingtonized-immigration bill is going to "solve the problem" of immigration is hilarious nonsense.

Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, [...] came to teach [the ancient inhabitants of Mexico] the benefits of settled agriculture and the skills necessary to build temples. Although this deity is frequently depicted as a serpent, he is more often shown in human form--the serpent being his symbol and his alter ego--and is usually described as "a tall bearded white man" ... "a mysterious person ... a white man with a strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes and a flowing beard." Indeed, [...] the attributes and life history of Quetzalcoatl are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an actual historical character ... the memory of whose benefactions lingered after his death, and whose personality was eventually deified. The same could very well be said of Oannes--and just like Oannes at the head of the Apkallu (likewise depicted as prominently bearded) it seems that Quetzalcoatl traveled with his own brotherhood of sages and magicians. We learn that they arrived in Mexico "from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles," and that Quetzalcoatl was regarded as having been "the founder of cities, the framer of laws and the teacher of the calendar.

I'm glad that the rock is heavy and that it feels all right in my heart like an eye in a pot of humus. Let's write long letters on grand themes, fish sandwiches, egg sandwiches and cheese; or travelling in Mexico, Italy and Australia. I eat a lot so I won't get drunk and then I drink a lot so I'll feel excited and then I've gone away I don't know where or with whom and can't remember whom from except that I'm back with my paper bag and next time my face won't come with me.

Big and little they went on together to Molalla, to Tuska, to Roswell, Guthrie, Kaycee, to Baker and Bend. After a few weeks Pake said that if Diamond wanted a permanent traveling partner he was up for it. Diamond said yeah, although only a few states still allowed steer roping and Pake had to cover long, empty ground, his main territory in the livestock country of Oklahoma, Wyoming, Oregon and New Mexico. Their schedules did not fit into the same box without patient adjustment. But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange-dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards and Mexican cafes behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.

As I got to know my new neighbors, I found saints and sinners of every degree of good, bad, and strange. These aging adolescents thought of themselves as Peter Pan’s lost children, and the beach was their Neverland. Having run away from home, they now were refusing to grow up.

The Texans, they say, didn’t want to pay taxes and, second, Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829, and Texas, being part of Mexico, was required to free its slaves. Of course there were other causes of revolt, but these two are spectacular to a European, and rarely mentioned here.

Everywhere I traveled I saw this death space in action, and I felt what it means to be held. At Ruriden columbarium in Japan, I was held by a sphere of Buddhas glowing soft blue and purple. At the cemetery in Mexico, I was held by a single wrought-iron fence in the light of tens of thousands of flickering amber candles. At the open-air pyre in Colorado, I was held within the elegant bamboo walls, which kept mourners safe as the flames shot high. There was magic to each of these places. There was grief, unimaginable grief. But in that grief there was no shame. These were places to meet despair face to face and say, 'I see you waiting there. And I feel you, strongly. But you do not demean me.

Meanwhile, Sunny was also traveling to Thailand to set up another swine flu testing outpost. The epidemic had spread to Asia, and the country was one of the region’s hardest hit with tens of thousands of cases and more than two hundred deaths. But unlike in Mexico, it wasn’t clear that Theranos’s activities in Thailand were sanctioned by local authorities.

Prospecting & Marketing Institute, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I were conducting a multiday seminar for her clients — corporate executives and general agents from life insurance companies — about new methods of recruiting agents. Even though the attendees had paid a very high per-person fee to be there, most had traveled great distances, and the subject was of critical importance to them, we both noticed that on breaks, what most of them were talking about was where

Traveling with more than a hundred men, from engineers, cartographers, and geologists to astronomers, meteorologists, and botanists, as well as soldiers and guides, Whipple trudged through present-day Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, into what would become Arizona, on a path that vaguely foreshadowed today’s Route 66. The group was guided along the way by Indians — Creeks, Shawnees, and Zunis. But it was the Mohaves who would lead Whipple on the final leg of the journey.2 On

I’ve heard that when you’re in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you’re hyper-aware of what’s happening around you. As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me. Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren’t bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder’s cursing, my pounding heartbeat. I feel nothing—not the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb. Scent and taste disappear. The only thing about my body that works is my eyes,and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land—a continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet—and my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I’ve never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent—it dips and curves in ways I don’t recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect. And it’s not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home,but it will never be the home I left behind.

In Spanish there is a word for which I can’t find a counterword in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn’t greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction. My friend Jack Wagner has often, in Mexico, assumed this state of being. Let us say we wanted to walk in the streets of Mexico City but not at random. We would choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it.

Life down here is kind of a permanent Halloween where you choose a costume more fitting for your self-image than reality could ever offer. Do you want to be a captain or a cowboy? No problem. People will call you by whatever title or name you choose. You say you’re a reincarnated pirate queen or the abandoned love child of a famous entertainer? That’s fine with me. We believe each other’s stories about who we were and who we are. Being an expat means you can have a whole new life. It’s a little like being in the Witness Relocation Program only with flip flops and margaritas.

Wild Times Since Mexico accepted communism as a legitimate political party during the 1920’s and allowed refugees greater flexibility of thought, it became a haven from persecution. Moreover, living in Mexico was less costly than most countries, the weather was usually sunny and no one objected to the swinging lifestyle that many of the expats engaged in. It was for these reasons that Julio Mella from Cuba, Leon Trotsky from Russia and others sought refuge there. It also attracted many actors, authors and artists from the United States, many of whom were Communist or, at the very least were “Fellow Travelers” and had leftist leanings. Although the stated basic reason for the Communist Party’s existence was to improve conditions for the working class, it became a hub for the avant-garde, who felt liberated socially as well as politically. The bohemian enclave of Coyoacán now a part of Mexico City, where Frida Kahlo was born, was located just east of San Angel which at the time was a district of the ever expanding City. It also became the gathering place for personalities such as the American actor Orson Welles, the beautiful actress Dolores del Río, the famous artist Diego Rivera and his soon-to-be-wife, “Frida,” who became and is still revered as the illustrious matriarch of Mexico.

On the other hand, irrational fears are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Here’s an example: when 152 people were infected with swine flu in Mexico in 2009, people around the world, prodded by the media’s manufactured hysteria, erupted in fear of an epidemic. We were warned that the threat was everywhere—that everyone was potentially at risk; however, the data showed these fears to be completely unwarranted. Weeks into the “outbreak,” there were around 1,000 reported cases of the virus in 20 countries. The number of fatalities stood at 26—25 in Mexico, and one in the United States (a boy who had just traveled to Texas from Mexico). Yet schools were closed, travel was restricted, emergency rooms were flooded, hundreds of thousands of pigs were killed, hand sanitizer and face masks disappeared from store shelves, and network news stories about swine flu consumed 43% of airtime.9 “There is too much hysteria in the country and so far, there hasn’t been that great a danger,” commented Congressman Ron Paul in response. “It’s overblown, grossly so.”10 He should know. During Paul’s first session in Congress in 1976, a swine flu outbreak led Congress to vote to vaccinate the entire country. (He voted against it.) Twenty-five people died from the vaccination itself, while only one person was killed from the actual virus; hundreds, if not more, contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, a paralyzing neurological illness, as a result of the vaccine. Nearly 25 percent of the population was vaccinated before the effort was cancelled due to safety concerns.

Communism in America In the early 1920’s, fascism was undermining all vestiges of democracy in Europe and dictatorships were prevalent in most Latin American countries. Therefore, communism was considered by many as the best alternative for the working masses, and was embraced by many scholars, artists and authors, as a viable alternative form of political thinking. Many people in the Hollywood film industry became members of the “Communist Party of America,” or at least they agreed with the communistic views and became what was called “fellow travelers.” The Communist Party meetings were where people of like mind could gather and share ideas, as well as help each other with their budding careers. The United States Government had other ideas and some of the most serious attacks on personal rights took place during these early years. Constitutional rights were thrown out of the window as some government officials took unlawful actions against foreign immigrants and labor leaders. Being more tolerant politically, Mexico attracted many Americans who felt persecuted in the United States. Heading south of the border was a geographic cure that many of them embraced.

POEM – MY AMAZING TRAVELS [My composition in my book Travel Memoirs with Pictures] My very first trip I still cannot believe Was planned and executed with such great ease. My father, an Inspector of Schools, was such a strict man, He gave in to my wishes when I told him of the plan. I got my first long vacation while working as a banker One of my co-workers wanted a travelling partner. She visited my father and discussed the matter Arrangements were made without any flutter. We travelled to New York, Toronto, London, and Germany, In each of those places, there was somebody, To guide and protect us and to take us wonderful places, It was a dream come true at our young ages. We even visited Holland, which was across the Border. To drive across from Germany was quite in order. Memories of great times continue to linger, I thank God for an understanding father. That trip in 1968 was the beginning of much more, I visited many countries afterward I am still in awe. Barbados, Tobago, St. Maarten, and Buffalo, Cirencester in the United Kingdom, Miami, and Orlando. I was accompanied by my husband on many trips. Sisters, nieces, children, grandchildren, and friends, travelled with me a bit. Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York, and Hialeah, Curacao, Caracas, Margarita, Virginia, and Anguilla. We sailed aboard the Creole Queen On the Mississippi in New Orleans We traversed the Rockies in Colorado And walked the streets in Cozumel, Mexico. We were thrilled to visit the Vatican in Rome, The Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. To explore the countryside in Florence, And to sail on a Gondola in Venice. My fridge is decorated with magnets Souvenirs of all my visits London, Madrid, Bahamas, Coco Cay, Barcelona. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa How can I forget the Spanish Steps in Rome? Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was born. CN Tower in Toronto so very high I thought the elevator would take me to the sky. Then there was El Poble and Toledo Noted for Spanish Gold We travelled on the Euro star. The scenery was beautiful to behold! I must not omit Cartagena in Columbia, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Catalina, Key West, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Pembroke Pines, Places I love to lime. Of course, I would like to make special mention, Of two exciting cruises with Royal Caribbean. Majesty of the Seas and Liberty of the Seas Two ships which grace the Seas. Last but not least and best of all We visited Paris in the fall. Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Berlin Amazing places, which made my head, spin. Copyright@BrendaMohammed

Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. "Wow!" he said, and then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride--the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes--from two-fifty to four-fifteen--and told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosi, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he'd sold his own 1940 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa. He described persons he and his partner had met: a Mexican widow, rich and sexy; Otto, a German “millionaire”; a “swish” pair of Negro prizefighters driving a “swish” lavender Cadillac; the blind proprietor of a Florida rattlesnake farm; a dying old man and his grandson; and others. And when he had finished he sat with folded arms and a pleased smile, as though waiting to be commended for the humor, the clarity, and the candor of his traveler’s tale.

On the train I had a lot of time to think. I thought how in the thirty years of my life I had seldom gotten on a train in America without being conscious of my color. In the South, there are Jim Crow cars and Negroes must ride separate from the whites, usually in a filthy antiquated coach next to the engine, getting all the smoke and bumps and dirt. In the South, we cannot buy sleeping car tickets. Such comforts are only for white folks. And in the North where segregated travel is not the law, colored people have, nevertheless, many difficulties. In auto buses they must take the seats in the rear, over the wheels. On the boats they must occupy the worst cabins. The ticket agents always say that all other accommodations are sold. On trains, if one sits down by a white person, the white person will sometimes get up, flinging back an insult at the Negro who has dared to take a seat beside him. Thus it is that in America, if you are yellow, brown, or black, you can never travel anywhere without being reminded of your color, and oft-times suffering great inconveniences. I sat in the comfortable sleeping car on my first day out of Moscow and remembered many things about trips I had taken in America. I remembered how, once as a youngster going alone to see my father who was working in Mexico, I went into the dining car of the train to eat. I sat down at a table with a white man. The man looked at me and said, "You're a nigger, ain't you?" and left the table. It was beneath his dignity to eat with a Negro child. At St. Louis I went onto the station platform to buy a glass of milk. The clerk behind the counter said, “We don't serve niggers," and refused to sell me anything. As I grew older I learned to expect this often when traveling. So when I went South to lecture on my poetry at Negro universities, I carried my own food because I knew I could not go into the dining cars. Once from Washington to New Orleans, I lived all the way on the train on cold food. I remembered this miserable trip as I sat eating a hot dinner on the diner of the Moscow-Tashkent express. Traveling South from New York, at Washington, the capital of our country, the official Jim Crow begins. There the conductor comes through the train and, if you are a Negro, touches you on the shoulder and says, "The last coach forward is the car for colored people." Then you must move your baggage and yourself up near the engine, because when the train crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, and the dome of the Capitol disappears, it is illegal any longer for white people and colored people to ride together. (Or to eat together, or sleep together, or in some places even to work together.) Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a happy mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: "There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union.

The essay had developed from there to meditate more generally on language barriers, class difference, Tony’s philosophy of teaching, and his first impressions of living in a foreign place; but to his detractors, the damage had already been done. A doctoral student in cultural studies (San Diego) was the first to tweet a link to the essay, writing ‘I can’t even deal with how much is wrong here’ and adding a trigger warning and the hashtags #whiteprivilege, #povertytourism, and #yuck. The fury spread from there. Tony’s name was trending in a matter of hours, and the more attention his essay attracted, the angrier his critics seemed to get. He was accused of colonialist condescension, of reinforcing harmful stereotypes, of sentimentalising violence, and of being yet another entitled white man presuming, in a way that somehow managed to be both predatory and insipid, that the most valuable aspect of a thing was always, and only ever, his experience of it. Disgusted tweeters demanded to know why, if Tony had travelled to Mexico in order to teach English, he had not learned Spanish before he arrived; they pointed out all the invidious ways in which his essay implied the inarticulacy of his native guide, as though it were Eduardo’s failure that Tony could not understand him; they asked what right he had to appropriate the fight that he had witnessed, to instrumentalise it, and to seek to profit from it in the form of cultural cachet; they analysed the inherent problematics of his rather florid prose style; and they invited him, in less than cordial terms, to apologise to Mexicans, renounce all forms of white supremacy, and go home.

EUROS SIDE WITH MEXICAN GANG RAPIST Mexico, President Bush’s dearest international ally, brought a lawsuit against the United States in the International Court of Justice on behalf of its native son, Jose Ernesto Medellin, arguing that Texas failed to inform him of his right to confer with the Mexican consulate. It probably didn’t occur to the police to ask Medellin if he was Mexican, with the media referring to the suspects exclusively as: “five Houston teens,” “five youths,” “the youths,” “young men,” “members of ‘a social club,’” “a bunch of guys,” “six young men,” “six teen-agers,” and “these guys”23 (and, oddly, “America’s hottest boy band”). The World Court agreed with Mexico, confirming my suspicion that any organization with “world” in its title—International World Court, the World Bank, World Cup Soccer, the World Trade Organization—is inherently evil. The court ordered that Mexican illegal aliens in American prisons must be retried unless they had been promptly advised of their consular rights—a ruling that would have emptied Texas’s prisons. It wasn’t as if America had shanghaied Medellin and dragged him into our country. He sneaked in illegally, demanded the full panoply of rights accorded American citizens, and when things didn’t go his way, suddenly announced he was an illegal alien entitled to rights as a Mexican citizen. Or as the New York Times hyperventilated: A failure to enforce the World Court’s ruling “could imperil American tourists or business travelers if they are ever arrested and need the help of a consular official.”24 If an American tourist or business traveler ever gang-rapes and murders two teenaged girls in a foreign country, I don’t care what they do to him.

With the motto “do what you will,” Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau’s Alector, Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda’s Justina, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville’s Fantastic Tales, Sorel’s Francion, Burton’s Anatomy, Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Amory’s John Buncle, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett’s Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr, Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey’s Doctor, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe’s ornate novels, Bely’s Petersburg, Joyce’s Ulysses, Witkiewicz’s Polish jokes, Flann O’Brien’s Irish farces, Philip Wylie’s Finnley Wren, Patchen’s tender novels, Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s mad ones, Nabokov’s later works, Schmidt’s fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard’s later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palinuro of Mexico), the fabulous creations of those gay Cubans Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas, Markson’s Springer’s Progress, Mano’s Take Five, Ríos’s Larva and otros libros, the novels of Paul West, Tom Robbins, Stanley Elkin, Alexander Theroux, W. M. Spackman, Alasdair Gray, Gaétan Soucy, and Rikki Ducornet (“Lady Rabelais,” as one critic called her), Mark Leyner’s hyperbolic novels, the writings of Magiser Gass, Greer Gilman’s folkloric fictions and Roger Boylan’s Celtic comedies, Vollmann’s voluminous volumes, Wallace’s brainy fictions, Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language, Danielewski’s novels, Jackson’s Half Life, Field’s Ululu, De La Pava’s Naked Singularity, and James McCourt’s ongoing Mawrdew Czgowchwz saga. (p. 331)

New Mexico was supposedly a place with magical healing properties, a place where a hundred years ago tuberculosis patients traveled in droves, like gold prospectors in covered wagons, thinking the dry mountain air would cure them.

MEXICAN PURPLE Although the source of this exclusive dye was long a Phoenician trade secret, by the time of the classical Greeks it was known to be manufactured from a gland of the murex sea snail. Surprisingly, while traveling in Mexico in the 1830s, Thomas Gage observed that traditional purple dye manufacture there used the same techniques to create dye from the same sea snails.95

Without travel, writing dies...

In this collection of essays, you will meet more people like Zakia - golden-hearted souls who come from places like Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Canada, Cuba, The Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain, and Tanzania. People who become the heroes of our stories because they show the way or deliver joy, care for us when we're vulnerable, help us navigate meaning, or propel us when we're stuck. They are custodians of travel; they keep us believing in its magic.

travel via Mexico City. There appeared to be no

Rewind five hundred years, before the Spanish arrived: Zócalo was the center of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec island metropolis that was one of the world’s largest cities. Workers building a subway line in the 1970s found leftover pyramids. Tepito has been an active market since Aztec days too. “In Mexico,” wrote novelist Carlos Fuentes, “all times are living, all pasts are present.

UPON LEAVING MEXICO, THE OLMSTEDS RODE STRAIGHT TO SAN Antonio and "prepared for more rapid travel," shedding "useless weight" for their journey out of Texas. Having spent more than four months traversing the state, they exited it in three weeks, via Houston and Beaumont. By the time they neared Louisiana, "the hot, soggy breath of the approaching summer was extremely depressing." This was particularly so for John, who'd set off for Texas with "the hope of invigorating weakened lungs." Instead, the "abominable diet, and the fatigue" had "served to null the fresh benefits of pure air and stimulating travel." While slogging through a swampy plan near Beaumont, John fell from the saddle "in faint exhaustion," lying facedown on the ground for half an hour, "hardly breathing, and unable to speak.

Riotte fought to keep the Zeitung and free-state effort alive, but like Douai he was worn down by foes who "vomit fire and poison against me." Rather than "act the part of Sisiphus," he planned to found a new German colony in northern Mexico to "build up a more solid wall against slavery" than was possible in the US, In his letters to Olmsted, Riotte also delineated, with keen transatlantic insight, a divide that he felt had doomed their efforts from the start. "We are judged from the standpoint of an American-indeed a very strange people!" he wrote. Riotte and his ilk viewed society "as a congregation of men, whose aim it is to elevate the wellbeing of the aggregate by the combined exertion." Americans, by contrast, "look first upon themselves as private individuals, entitled to ask for all the rights and benefits of an organized community even to the detriment of the whole.... We idealize the community-you the individual! How is it possible, that we ever should amalgamate?" Riotte closed by praising Olmsted's writing on the South but expressed doubt that it would diminish the Slave Power. "I don't know of any historical record of an Aristocracy giving up their privileges, except in the case of revolutionary pressure.

the inscription at its base put San Jacinto on a par with Waterloo and other exalted fights. The defeat of Santa Anna, the "self-styled 'Napoleon of the West,"" led to the annexation of Texas, war with Mexico, and the "acquisition" of "one third of the present area of the American nation." As such, "San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world.

The geese are all asleep. A few tip their heads out from under their wings as we approach. I open the cookie tin and a few more sway slowly over to us. It’s cold, and Silas has wrapped the green blanket around me so I feel like I have wings, too. I shake the tin and walk backward in a circle around them. The ground is warmer than the air and warmer still where the geese have been sleeping. The ashes fall out evenly onto the grass. They peck at the silver flakes, their beaks moving like machines, faster than the eyes can register. More join them, they don't fight, there is enough to go around. I hold the blanket open for Silas and he slips beside me and pulls it closed. "Is this weird?" "Yeah," he says. He puts his lips in my hair. "I love weird." They peck and naw for a long time. There's not much left when they are done. They putter around for a while on their wide rubber feet, their necks look made of fur not feathers. A few are trying to sleep, curtsying to the ground and burying their heads between the folded wings on their backs. I’ll miss them when they take flight. I won’t be there. Their fast excited chatter, their wings finally spread wide, their feet tucking in behind them. Wheels up. I’ll miss it. I’ll be in class or at my desk or in bed when they cut across the sky. "I want them to go right now." "I know," Silas says. "They'll go when they're ready." A book in the library said that some Canadian Geese may travel as far as Jalisco, Mexico. My mother will like that. The long, exhilirating trip, the foreign landing. But others, the book said, will stay where they are for the winter. Those geese are already home.

I wandered over to the adobe birthplace of Ignacio Seguin Zaragoza, whose father was posted at the garrison in the early 1800s. Zaragoza went on to become a national hero in Mexico, leading a reformist revolt against Santa Anna and defeat- ing an invading French force on May 5, 1862, the date celebrated as Cinco de Mayo. While exploring the birthplace, I met Alberto Perez, a history and so- cial studies teacher in the Dallas area who was visiting with his family. When I confessed my ignorance of Zaragoza, he smiled and said, "You're not alone. A lot of Texans don't know him, either, or even that Mexico had its own fight for independence." The son of Mexican immigrants, Perez had taught at a predominantly Hispanic school in Dallas named for Zaragoza. Even there, he'd found it hard to bring nuance to students' understanding of Mexico and Texas in the nineteenth century. "The word 'revolution' slants it from the start," he said. "It makes kids think of the American Revolution and throwing off oppression." Perez tried to balance this with a broader, Mexican perspective. Anglos had been invited to settle Texas and were granted rights, citizenship, and considerable latitude in their adherence to distant authority. Mexico's aboli- tion of slavery, for instance, had little force on its northeastern frontier, where Southerners needed only to produce a "contract" that technically la- beled their human chattel as indentured servants. "Then the Anglos basically decided, 'We don't like your rules,"" Perez said. "This is our country now.

In Mexico City, as in any enlightened culture, street food is king.

On Sunday evenings, the plaza is transformed into a scene of intense social activity as the townspeople gather to participate in the weekly paseo, in which young ladies, elegantly attired, walk clockwise around the central bandstand, whilst young men walk in the opposite direction. When a young man sees a young lady who interests him, he will give her a flower as she passes. Next time around, she may choose to sit out with her admirer on one of the many wrought-iron seats in the plaza

What happened in 1970 in Los Angeles was the worst economic episode I’ve ever had to fight through. Unlike the post–Cold War Recession, we did not have the waves of in-migration from Mexico, nor were drug sales as great. I believe the underground economy was a silent savior of Los Angeles during 1990–94. The Kent State Massacre and the Pentagon Papers scandal didn’t help the 1970 scene. Furthermore, things didn’t get better in the early 1970s. The sharp recession of 1970 was followed by a sudden inflation caused by Vietnam spending. Nixon “slammed the gold window shut.” From 1945 to 1971, the U.S., under the Bretton Woods Agreement, had agreed to back its currency to a limited extent with gold at $35 per ounce. Other nations’ central banks were withdrawing our gold so fast that Nixon had to renege on the promise. This was followed in 1973 by the end of fixed currency exchange rates. The dollar plummeted. Traveling to the wine country of France in the summer of 1973, I was unable to cash American Express dollar-denominated traveler’s checks. Inflation jumped with the 1973 Energy Crisis. Nixon imposed wage and price controls. Then Watergate, accompanied by the Dow Jones hitting bottom in 1974. Three Initiatives to Turn the Tide Against all this, Trader Joe’s mounted three initiatives. In chronological order: We launched the Fearless Flyer early in 1970. We broke the price of imported wines in late 1970 thanks to a loophole in the Fair Trade law. Most importantly, in 1971, we married the health food store to the Good Time Charley party store, which had been the 1967–70 version of Trader Joe’s. Together these three elements comprised the second version of Trader Joe’s, Whole Earth Harry.

Nemenyi was a friend whom Regina had first met when she was a student at the University of Colorado in Denver and then later reconnected with in Chicago. He may have been Bobby’s biological father. The patrimony has never been proven one way or the other. Regina not only denied that Nemenyi was Bobby’s father, but once stated for the record to a social worker that she’d traveled to Mexico

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

Best Budget Travel Destinations Ever Are you looking for a cheap flight this year? Travel + Leisure received a list of the most affordable locations this year from one of the top travel search engines in the world, Kayak. Kayak then considered the top 100 locations with the most affordable average flight prices, excluding outliers due to things like travel restrictions and security issues. To save a lot of money, go against the grain. Mexico Unsurprisingly, Mexico is at the top of the list of the cheapest places to travel in 2022. The United States has long been seen as an accessible and affordable vacation destination; low-cost direct flights are common. San José del Cabo (in Baja California Sur), Puerto Vallarta, and Cancun are the three destinations within Mexico with the least expensive flights, with January being the most economical month to visit each. Fortunately, January is a glorious month in each of these beachside locales, with warm, balmy weather and an abundance of vibrant hues, textures, and flavors to chase away the winter blues. Looking for a city vacation rather than a beach vacation? Mexico City, which boasts a diverse collection of museums and a rich Aztec heritage, is another accessible option in the country. May is the cheapest month to travel there. Chicago, Illinois Who wants to go to Chicago in the winter? Once you learn about all the things to do in this Midwest winter wonderland and the savings you can get in January, you'll be convinced. At Maggie Daley Park, spend the afternoon ice skating before warming up with some deep-dish pizza. Colombia Colombia's fascinating history, vibrant culture, and mouthwatering cuisine make it a popular travel destination. It is also inexpensive compared to what many Americans are used to paying for items like a fresh arepa and a cup of Colombian coffee. The cheapest month of the year to fly to Bogotá, the capital city, is February. The Bogota Botanical Garden, founded in 1955 and home to almost 20,000 plants, is meticulously maintained, and despite the region's chilly climate, strolling through it is not difficult. The entrance fee is just over $1 USD. In January, travel to the port city of Cartagena on the country's Caribbean coast. The majority of visitors discover that exploring the charming streets on foot is sufficient to make their stay enjoyable. Tennessee's Music City There's a reason why bachelorette parties and reunions of all kinds are so popular in Music City: it's easy to have fun without spending a fortune. There is no fee to visit a mural, hot chicken costs only a few dollars, and Honky Tonk Highway is lined with free live music venues. The cheapest month to book is January. New York City, New York Even though New York City isn't known for being a cheap vacation destination, you'll find the best deals if you go in January. Even though the city never sleeps, the cold winter months are the best time for you to visit and take advantage of the lower demand for flights and hotel rooms. In addition, New York City offers a wide variety of free activities. Canada Not only does our neighbor Mexico provide excellent deals, but the majority of Americans can easily fly to Canada for an affordable getaway. In Montréal, Quebec, you must try the steamé, which is the city's interpretation of a hot dog and is served steamed in a side-loading bun (which is also steamed). It's the perfect meal to eat in the middle of February when travel costs are at their lowest. Best of all, hot dogs are inexpensive and delicious as well as filling. The most affordable month to visit Toronto, Ontario is February. Even though the weather may make you wary, the annual Toronto Light Festival, which is completely free, is held in February in the charming and historic Distillery District. Another excellent choice at this time is the $5 Bentway Skate Trail under the Gardiner Expressway overpass.

And there was even Oswald’s purported trip in September 1963 to Mexico City, where he supposedly visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in attempts to acquire travel visas. Most researchers now believe that this was an impostor pretending to be Oswald—which itself seems to establish a larger plot.

Most of the pilgrims I met in Mexico were running from something: financial woes, a pissed-off spouse, or a life that hit a dead end. Regardless of the reasons for the journey, the Margarita Road will take you far from all those problems. Still, there are no guarantees. A funny thing about the past--it can catch up to you even on a remote tropical seashore. Sometimes you bring it with you.

It didn’t take me long to settle into my new life as a beach bar owner in paradise. Truthfully, it wasn’t a demanding career. Trust me when I say that serving rum drinks to girls in tiny bikinis isn’t that big of a chore.

For some time now, people like me had been drifting south, ending up in Mexico with Jimmy Buffett songs playing in their heads. They left behind mortgages, failed marriages, and a lifetime of disappointments. Some of them came looking for a fresh start, and some were searching for a place to hide. A few were pulled by a dream they could never quite understand, until they walked down the beach to that crystal-clear water for the first time.

The Margarita Road isn’t just about flip flops and late-night beach parties. Running away can be hard work.

Oh sure, there was a gringo gulch where the sunbirds lived in the winter months. But if you avoided them, you might hook up with the small community of Margarita Road refugees: a group of wanderers from up north; a crazy Irish sailor; a few Italians; some young, fast-living kids from Mexico City; and one beautiful girl from Brazil. All in all, it was a nice place to stay—or hide, if that’s what you needed.

He kept ordering beers and making what he thought were humorous jokes about how Mexicans sleep all day, all the while telling me how great my life was without a ‘real job.’ After an hour or so of this, I was ready to pour the next drink over his head.

There is a stillness in the air, in the light of the dusk, in the eyes fixed forward, in the still end of life, an intolerable sweetness...

I traveled through New Mexico, USA, and observed problems with one of their police officers.

I'll give you an actual example. Pamela Yellen, the CEO of the Prospecting & Marketing Institute, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I were conducting a multiday seminar for her clients — corporate executives and general agents from life insurance companies — about new methods of recruiting agents. Even though the attendees had paid a very high per-person fee to be there, most had traveled great distances, and the subject was of critical importance to them, we both noticed that on breaks, what most of them were talking about was where they were going to go play golf that evening when the seminar let out, the next morning before it started, or the day afterward. Both Pamela and I made note of how important it was to these clients of hers to get out on the golf course. This led to one of the most unusual ads Pamela has ever written and run in her own industry's trade journals, with the headline: “Puts Recruiting on Autopilot So You Can Go Play Golf!” The entire ad is reproduced on the following page, Exhibit #3. As you'll see, it sold the system we devised for insurance agent recruiting, but it did so circuitously, by emphasizing the hidden benefit: you'll get the job done with less time invested, so you can spend more time on the golf course.

to go on adventures with you. -          Music and dancing: these provide an easy excuse to invite her home later (e.g., “Let’s go back to my place, and you can show me some of those salsa dance moves”). -          Where she wants to travel: this provides her with good emotions and gives you an easy chance to bring up possibilities for the future (e.g., “Mexico? That settles it—we’re hopping on a flight tomorrow

Today the entirety of the travel and expense policy still consists of these five simple words: ACT IN NETFLIX’S BEST INTEREST That works better. It is not in Netflix’s best interest that the entire content team fly business from L.A. to Mexico. But if you have to take the red-eye from L.A. to New York and give a presentation the next morning it would likely be in Netflix’s best interest that you fly business, so you don’t have bags under your eyes and slurred speech when the big moment arises.

Hawaiʻi’s historical trajectory changed dramatically upon its contact with European explorers, which began with the arrival of British explorer Captain James Cook in 1778. Despite this being the most well-known and well-documented instance of Hawaiian contact with European travelers, Spanish archives have documentation of a fleet of conquistador ships sailing from the southern end of Mexico toward the Philippines that arrived at islands that resemble Hawaiʻi. Nonetheless, these findings and discoveries were not publicized or made widely known by Spain. In all likelihood, Spain kept the discovery of the Hawaiian Islands a secret to maintain supremacy over trading lines and to retain a naval advantage.

Once settled, I loved New York, Boston, San Francisco, every place I lived, but what widened the aperture was where I traveled. London, Paris, Rome, Venice. I fell hard for Central America and Mexico. Unhooked from the South, in each country I now had fantasies that I could upend my life and live there forever. I wrote six books of poetry and a field guide, The Discovery of Poetry.

Mexico City is a timeless place, a beautiful entanglement of contrast and contradictions. It is a megalopolis where the traditional and the contemporary, the indigenous and the modern, merge into unexpected and fascinating configurations.

His face started morphing into different people, shapeshifting into wise, old, Indigenous men, as though he’d lived hundreds of lives and I was seeing him as he was in each one of them. I met many different people coming through to help with healing – shamans from centuries before – and I studied creases across their faces, wrinkle lines worn like badges of wisdom, markings of lives lived.

No matter the season, the sight of the dunes rolling into the ocean always awakened Abby's senses and filled her with awe for the cycle of life. She thought of how the horseshoe crabs emerged from Cape Cod Bay each spring to mate and deposit their eggs; how juvenile sea turtles knew to travel to these waters where crabs and jellyfish were plentiful; how monarch butterflies - each of which lived up to only six weeks - managed to transfer knowledge intergenerationally to complete their year-long migration to and from Mexico.

With a remarkable journey from a 79-year-old Italian immigrant to a successful real estate investor and hotel operator, Paul Boschetti's life is an inspiration. He enjoys collecting vintage cars and jukeboxes, cheering for the San Francisco Warriors, and traveling to beautiful destinations like Mexico, Hawaii, Germany, France, and England.

slavery while on a sales trip to the New World in 1829. Traveling through Mexico, Florida, Louisiana, and Cuba, he was especially horrified by the racial character of slavery. On his return to France, he condemned the exploitation of slaves in an article titled “Des Noirs,” but he stopped short of calling for immediate emancipation, suggesting instead a gradual process of manumission over some forty to sixty years. It was only when he learned that plantation owners refused to educate their slaves that he turned against gradualism and came out in favor of “the immediate abolition of slavery”—the subtitle of his 1842 account of his trip to the West Indies. Tireless in his advocacy of abolition, he served as undersecretary for the colonies and president of the Commission on Slavery, and became, in effect, the architect of the post-slavery order in the Antilles. The novelist Victor Hugo offered a telling description of the ceremony at which Schœlcher announced the final abolition of slavery, held in Guadeloupe on May 19, 1848:

Urban and untamed, Mexico City possesses a raw vitality; it is a city where the poetic is found in the most unexpected places.

Mexico City entices you to explore its hidden corners, to unravel its stories and to follow the vibrant pulse of life that courses through its veins. It is a place of myth, a place of magic and surrealism, where the extraordinary takes you by surprise.

To experience Mexico City is to be absorbed into its history. Every street and plaza pulsates with vestiges of the past – palaces, cathedrals, and the ruins of unearthed temples stand alongside bustling markets, informal vendors and food stands.

In walking the streets of Mexico City you are immersed in a symphony of sounds. From the recordings of the tamale vendors to the whistles of knife sharpeners, the camote vendor with his oven that sounds like a train, the melodies of organilleros, the sounds of birds and church bells that fill the morning air – each note adds to the beautiful chaos of the city.

The complex processes and secrets that are inherent in Mexican cuisine, one of the most exquisite and sophisticated in the world, are part ritual and part transfer of cultural knowledge through generations.

Arriving in Mexico City is like stepping into a storybook, hinting at things hidden and surreal. The wondrous seeps into everyday forms, manifesting in the physicality of the city itself.

For all its beautiful chaotic energy, Mexico City allows you to enter a flow that has its own rhythm....There is a feeling of fluid unpredictability.

The defining ethos of the city is one of laid-back organicism. Nothing is forced and things unfold at their own pace.

Elsewhere throughout this sprawling metropolis, a multifaceted beauty reveals itself. Here, the past accrues in layers and is felt on every corner and on every street.

Mexico City’s enduring cultural dynamism is owed in large part to the reclamation of its ancient past. It is a world full of allegory where a multiplicity of experiences coales into a single lyrical whole.

My grandmother traveled in a Hispano-Suiza automobile, wore Balenciaga, stayed at the Hotel Carlton in Bilbao, and took part in the Wagner cycles at Bayreuth.

It's not always ho ho ho on the high, high highway. Extended time in the car reveals human frailties. Dad's refuse to stop. They hearken back to the examples of their forefathers. Did the pioneers spend the night at a Holiday Inn? Did Lewis and Clark ask for directions? Did Joseph allow Mary to stroll through a souvenir shop on the road to Bethlehem? By no means. Men drive as if they have a biblical mandate to travel far and fast, stopping only for gasoline. And children? Road trips do to kids what a full moon does to the wolf man. If one child says, "I like that song," you might expect the other to say, "That's nice." Won't happen. Instead the other child will reply, "It stinks and so do your feet." There is also the issue of JBA---juvenile bladder activity. A child can go weeks without going to the bathroom at home. But once on the road, the kid starts leaking like secrets in Washington. On one drive to Colorado, my daughters visited every toilet in New Mexico. The best advice for traveling with young children is to be thankful they aren't teenagers. Teens are embarrassed by what their parents say, think, wear, eat, and sing. So for their sakes (and if you ever want to see your future grandchildren), don't smile at the waitstaff, don't breathe, and don't sing with the window down or up. It's wiser to postpone traveling with children until they are a more reasonable age---like forty-two.

A riot in Mexico on 10 December 1826 is reported in a Philadelphia newspaper on 10 February 1827 and announced in a London paper, The Courier, on 10 March. In other words, the story takes two months to travel 2,500 miles across America and then one month to cross the 3,500 miles by sea to London.

went to powwows with her. There’s a compliment among truck drivers, “He’s driven more miles backward than some drivers have driven forward.

Amalfitano had some rather idiosyncratic ideas about jet lag. They weren’t consistent, so it might be an exaggeration to call them ideas. They were feelings. Make-believe ideas. As if he were looking out the window and forcing himself to see an extraterrestrial landscape. He believed (or liked to think he believed) that when a person was in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn’t exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence. And so if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn’t exist or hadn’t yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn’t traveled. This was something he’d probably read in some science fiction novel or story and that he’d forgotten having read. • Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in Ciechanów, Poland, Ania Ahlborn is also the author of the supernatural thrillers Seed and The Neighbors. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of New Mexico, enjoys gourmet cooking, baking, drawing, traveling, movies, and exploring the darkest depths of the human (and sometimes inhuman) condition. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico,

I've met travelers who are so physically sturdy they could drink a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new languages where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand down a threatening border guard or cajole an uncooperative bureaucrat at the visa office. People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal wherever they go - in Turkey they just might be Turks, in Mexico they are suddenly Mexican, in Spain they could be mistaken for a Basque, in Northern Africa they can sometimes pass for Arab...

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts.