by Tracy O’Neil “If I Hear One More ‘Ciao Bella’ I’m going to Scream” is a humorous story about my month abroad in Florence, Italy. I write about my encounters with the Italian men, and how they were nothing like I had thought they would be. Walking down the Ponte Vecchio at night in Florenceone […]

by Catherine Jaffee We open the hive and at least 100 bees hit my face like bullets. Around me, I hear sounds like hail pounding a rooftop. But it’s just the noise of bees attacking my suit. I look at Mehmet Bey, he is unfazed but knows that we need to end our work here […]

by Stephen Robert Morse In late January, I arrived in Batumi, the Republic of Georgia’s major city on the Black Sea. Georgia’s pro-Western President, Mikheil Saakashvili, who was thrust into power in 2004 following the nation’s “Rose Revolution,” has made Batumi his pet project. He’s vowed to transform this 125,000-person resort town from a tourism-based […]

by Brege Shinn I awake naked.  I’m on my bed but there are no sheets.  The pillow case is gone.  I scramble to my backpack for something to wear, but there’s not a stitch of clothing to be found. Confused, I look in my travel-mate’s pack, but she too has no clothes. Damn it, I […]

by Pearl Chen “Do you speak English?” the blonde woman asked casually as she plopped right down next to me on a block of concrete outside the bubbly Water Cube on Beijing’s Olympic Green.  For such a sprawling, futuristic, Disneyland-esque plaza, it wasn’t exactly overflowing with places to sit, and we were both relieved to […]

by Kevin Kaiser Scarlet and I are making out in a bathroom stall in the men’s restroom of a Hollywood eighteen-and-up club.  Her fist twists the cityscape image on my red Dismemberment Plan t-shirt, pulls my body close, as I grip the flesh of her hips exposed between the too-small black shirt, the tight black […]

by Haifa Mahabir Into the Heart of Darkness You awake. The moon’s hue cascades the walls of your room in a whitewash, that certain shade of blue. A draft leaves your blinds rustling; the sound rapid like the flutter of insect’s wings. You hear the rise and fall of your own breath. Shamans of the […]

by Cara Winters I came to Munich twicethe first time to party and the second to cry. Do not be deceived; the vast range of emotions that this city elicited in me are no fluke, for Munich, or at least the area around Munich, is home to both Oktoberfest, the annual festival of beer, and […]

by Kawaii Luna “Puerto Escondido está bien gringo, Lunita,” my friends from Oaxaca City warned me, so I expected a big tourist bus like others I’d been on–chilled cans of Fanta and Manzana Lift, chile-covered cacahuetes, movies popular decades ago on the static-laced TV screens. Instead, I am stuffed like ham in a torta, between […]

By Kristin Repsher All we wanted to do was to watch a good footy game. This seemed like a reasonable expectation, since we were sitting in the upper deck of Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium, waiting for players to line up against one another for the second half of the second of three State of Origin clashes. […]