by Phil Goldman
“HELP WANTED: FOREIGN MEN NEEDED FOR STRIP CLUB.” I am just desperate enough to reply to this ad. I’m living in Tokyo and I’m broke; I can’t get a steady English teaching gig, or any other form of employment, to save my life. Unfortunately, the days when a native English speaker without any [...]

by Christina Ammon
Sometimes a simple walk down the block feels like the journey of a lifetime

Nine months have now passed since my grandmother moved into Milder Manor Nursing Home. One morning last September she was getting dressed, took a fall, and in that instant was transformed from a commanding, bridge-playing, globe-trotting golden girl into [...]

by Bonnie Morris
Western visitors to Hong Kong, Korea and Japan expect to find teahouses, tea ceremonies, rituals steeped in steeping leaves of tea. But coffee is now a staple of East Asia; in fact, as described in Taylor Clark’s book Starbucked, the world’s largest Starbucks coffeehouse is located in South Korea. And a controversial Starbucks [...]

by Nancy Middleton
We arrived at the St. Petersburg airport a couple of hours before takeoff.  In plenty of timeor at least we thought.  My mother and I dragged our suitcases to the end of an ominously long line just inside the terminal and waited with the rest of our tour group. The bus that had [...]

by Shelley Seale
Lurching along the dirt road, I gazed out the window at rural Orissa in northeastern India as the car bounced over potholes, sending plumes of red dust billowing behind it. The small villages we passed were as familiar to me as if I had been there only last week. The shacks that lined [...]

by Jan Burak Schwert
“Sarajevo is ready for tourists,” read the article in the London Times.  Pictures of red roofs and snow-capped mountains leapt off the page.  Bosnia had emerged from the 1990’s war and rebuilt its infrastructure, but tourists had yet to discover the country.  It was time to visit.
Flying from Italy to Sarajevo, I [...]

by Mohezin Tejani
I am on an eighteen-month overland trip from California to Argentina. The year is 1977. The thoughts that run through my head are considerably different from those that I’ve had before the short jaunts I have taken during summer breaks and holidays. When the open road turns into a long-term lifestyle, the obstacles [...]

by April Orcutt
“Please!  Please!” the Tibetan woman pleaded, her young son trailing behind her.  She approached me in the ancient market of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, holding an orange beaded necklace that hung around her neck, smiling sweetly as she implored me to buy it.

But I didn’t want orange beads.  I was on an [...]

by Tim Leffel
Out of the corner of my right eye I saw movement, something rushing toward me. A few milliseconds later there was a brutal thud as something ran headfirst into my car.
Instinctively I hit the brakes and turned my head toward the point of impact. There was a smear on the window, but nothing [...]

by Tom Miller
I am a border rat. I’ve been one since the day I hopped back and forth between countries over a fallen, rusty barbed-wire fence in the woodland along the Arizona-Mexico line some 40 years ago. Since that act of joyful anarchy, I’ve traveled the entire length of the frontier numerous times, dined and [...]