(In the spirit of Nora Ephron's What I'll Miss, What I Won't Miss) What I Won’t Miss Traffic Slow buses that take an hour to go five...

I found my red shoes in Paris. In Paris women walked everywhere. They did it in heels and flats and colorful espadrilles. They did it...

"How many nights had the ocean rocked me to sleep? How many times had I lain on the ground and felt its sustenance? How many times had I...

Lime Vodka Soda: I don’t drink a lot of vodka so I didn’t really know what to expect. But I did expect to go somewhere exotic, the “Isle...

“Instead of killing himself, he travelled and wrote.” -Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene It began with Bourdain’s Kitchen...

"The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country." --Yasunari Kawabata This is how Snow Country begins. The first line and...

What was it really like to spend a week in Fiji with Elizabeth Gilbert? Was it really that easy to hang out with her? Well, we didn’t...

I went to a women’s retreat in Fiji because I wanted to spend a week on a tiny island with Elizabeth Gilbert. I knew that even if we...

“I could dive straight down now, even if I still couldn’t go that far. If I took several shallow dives, then I could risk a deeper one.”...

This week’s talk at Kadampa Meditation Center was on understanding our mind of love. The monk said the definition of the mind of love is...

I’d heard the expression “boat people” before. Not referring to refugees, but people who work and live on boats. For the nine days I...

In my early 20s when I was teaching ESL, a student told me his dream had been to come to America. He’d wanted it his whole life—or at...

One of the reasons I didn’t go to France a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago… was because I wanted to go with the right person. I...

Remember the children’s book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” where Alexander says he’s going to move to...

I’ve stayed in plenty of nice places—some of which I’ve paid for financially, all of which I’ve paid for emotionally. I’ve stayed in big...

I started to plan Paris. The funny thing was, as I reached out to European friends telling them that I was making my dream come true,...

I’ve wanted to go to Paris for as long as I can remember. In my childhood bedroom I had an Eiffel Tower statuette I'd gotten at the...

Looking for wildlife is a funny thing. We go to certain corners of the world in hopes of seeing something we’ve only seen in pictures or...

The last time I went to Tokyo—en route to India—I had 30 hours. My aim was to visit old haunts from when I studied abroad 16 years ago...

I’d been warned about Hanoi. Warned by folks I met in Bangkok and my tour guide in Laos that it was incredibly crowded, filled with...