I like to spend some time in Mozambique The sunny sky is aqua blue And all the couples dancing cheek to cheek It's very nice to stay a week or two And maybe fall in love just me and you “Datz mah co-co-nuht!” The woman yells at Tony from two huts down. Tony looks down at the coconut on the table outside our hut and points. “Datz MINE!” she yells again. “Well, then take it,” Tony yells back. The woman briskly walks past us, muttering and hunched over, a string of surely bad wishes in Portugese, leaving her alleged coconut in [View Full Entry]

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“One thousand meticas, your fine.” The Mozambican policeman sentences Tony for driving over a street divider in swerving from hitting two people sitting in the middle of a pothole-stricken road in pitch dark. There were no signs, no visible clue as to the street splitting into two ways. The policeman sits waiting with his tattered notebook, looking to his fellow officer on the right. Tony protests that he isn’t paying a fine for something that ridiculous. “How much you have? OK, two thousand meticas, your fine!” Tony shakes his head, We’re on holiday, we hav [View Full Entry]

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The guy jumps out behind a wall as I walk through the parking lot on a stop made through Neilspruit on our way from Joburg to Mozambique. "Gimme your bag." My eyebrows come together on my forehead in that way to say "Areyoufuckingkiddingme?" "Gimme your bag," and he pulls out a gun. "Ohshithappyto." It was over before it even began. "MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" screams over and over in my head. Everything. My shiny white mac, my fat Nikon SLR with lens, my Canon digital compact, my only cash in EUR, copies of my passport, credit cards, ATM cards, everything. My phone, all my [View Full Entry]

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Exiting Tel Aviv was barely marginally less of a hassle than entering. When you go through Ben Gurion security they have different lines which they designate you to, and I am thrown in the third one while all the Jewish looking people go straight ahead through the first one. I am the only person in my line, and I am also the only person who actually has their bag completely taken apart at the inspection table, while all the Jewish looking people go straight ahead through to check-in. It's a good thing I arrived like 3 hours early. The entire process [View Full Entry]

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I have a confession to make, and this confession is that four months ago when I was working in my tall building with my important computers in my expensive clothes in my fancy city, I knew barely the bare minimum about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nothing, and really, I didn't even care too much. I wouldn't doubt that many of you reading this probably don't know much or care to know much either. For me, it was just another piece of bloody news, somebody attacking somebody else, somebody else blowing up another building, all happening on a little strip of land far, [View Full Entry]

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Shalom, mes amis. I come to Israel with Fred and another Frenchman, Martin. Martin I am pretty sure is all over pictures from my 24th birthday. "Martin" in French sounds something like "Mahrh-tahn." He works for the European Commission and likes to debate, only wears collared shirts and cares strongly about the environment. He argues with me that I do not need two showers a day, which is I would say the norm for an American, while he only washes his hair twice a week. He has skipped many showers on the trip which I would have deemed highly necessary, ameliorating [View Full Entry]

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Israeli security measures are no joke. For example I fly frequently with Cathay, and standard rule of thumb is that you need to check in an hour before the flight if you have luggage, half an hour if sans luggage. Stupid, stupid me as I roll up to the very end of some far-flung, isolated wing at Charles de Gaulle for my flight an hour before for a flight to Israel. The El-Al Airlines (the Israeli national airline, I think) area sits all the way at the end of one of the terminals. Its check-in counters are blocked off by both [View Full Entry]

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Nous sommes le premier septembre. It is a sad day for me, for it is the day that I must finally say goodbye to this amazing city after two beautiful months. This last week has seen Parisians slowly trickling back into the city from August vacances. Each day I see gradually more and more locals returning on the RER/metro from Roissy, Nord, Lyon, Montparnasse, with their luggage in tow and a grimace on their face. The trees in the street, which were a rich green when I first arrived at the end of June, have now shades of red and yellow [View Full Entry]

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This Sunday, I spent the night in a train station with two gypsy women and their crying babies. Hardly what I imagined for my first night in St Tropez. After six hours, the TGV from Angers arrived in Marseilles on time at 7:15pm Sunday evening. I rushed to catch the connecting train set to depart at 7:59pm for St Raphael. From St Raphael I would take a bus to La Foux where Fred would pick me up and whisk me away to his beautiful house in St Tropez. I would be tucked away, drunk and full of Rose, in a warm [View Full Entry]

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So it's been about 3 weeks since I last wrote. Really? Sorry. - I turned 23 in Bali with my brother. I turned 22 in London with a collection of my favorite Eurotrash. I turned 21 in Hong Kong with corporate expats who basically hazed me. I turned 20 in NYC with Americans. I realize that in my past 5 birthdays in 5 countries, Fred is the only person to have been present at more than one. I can't decide if this is really cool or really sad. Maybe a little bit of both. Unfortunately I am now 24. I don't [View Full Entry]

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