By GARY SHTEYNGART
NY Times Published: September 29, 2012

You, American Airlines, should no longer be flying across the Atlantic. You do not have the know-how. You do not have the equipment. And your employees have clearly lost interest in the endeavor. Like the country whose name graces the hulls of your flying ships, you are exhausted and shorn of purpose. You need to stop.

Flight 121 from Paris to New York began on a clear autumn afternoon. It ended over 30 hours later. For those of us without miles, it is probably still going.

The initial delay was a mere hour or two. Some were told that our aircraft possessed faulty tires and brakes. Others were told that the crew could not find their way in from Paris. Neither scenario was particularly encouraging.

The aircraft was indeed an interesting one. One of the overhead baggage compartments was held together with masking tape. Halfway across the Atlantic you decided to turn Flight 121 back because your altimeter wasn’t working. Some of us were worried for our safety, but your employees mostly shrugged as if to say, Ah, there goes that altimeter again.

And so you took us to Merrie England for a spell.

At Heathrow, fire trucks met us because we landed “heavy,” i.e., still full of fuel we never got to spend over the Atlantic. At the terminal, a woman in a spiffy red American Airlines blazer was sent to greet us. But the language she spoke — Martian — was not easily understood, versed as we were in Spanish, English, Russian and Urdu.

Using her Martian language skills, the American Airlines woman proposed to take us “through the border” at Heathrow, for a night of rest before we resumed our journey the next morning. An apocalyptic scenario: an employee of the world’s worst airline assigned to the world’s worst border crossing at the world’s worst airport.

The Martian took us to one immigration lane, which promptly closed. Then another, with the same result. A third, ditto. Despite her blazer, the Martian was obviously not the ally we had made her out to be. So, ducking under security ropes, knocking some down entirely, we rushed the border with our passports held aloft, proclaiming ourselves the citizens of a fading superpower.

Come morning, you, American Airlines, provided us with a free, daylong tour of Heathrow Airport. By bus. The bus brought us to our new plane, but the doors of the bus would not open. We stood, pressed to one another, in sweltering heat, as the plane was sprayed down for no reason we could discern. It would have been nice, in retrospect, had you sprayed us down, or at least given us something to drink. After an hour, we were told this flight would be canceled because this plane, too, had caught ill. Back to the terminal once more.

It became clear that the older and more feeble of us would be at a disadvantage. A 70-year-old cannot rush past 140 gates to check in for yet another canceled flight with the same brio as a 20-year-old. Some of us started to cry. Not because the journey was never ending, but because you can be told that you are not a human being only so many times.

And then you stopped telling us. The American Airlines representatives we were promised failed to materialize. One passenger told us this was all part of the union’s strategy to destroy the airline. All I know is that with each encounter, I steadily began to feel that your employees were prisoners just like us, armed only with their little walkie-talkies from which issued tinny instructions, lost communiqués from some distant Oz.

“This used to be a great airline,” one old-timer said as we were sweltering to death on the bus. I know you were. And I know you are not alone in failure. An American diplomat based in Moscow tells me he prefers flying Aeroflot to Delta. But Delta is a futuristic paradise of working altimeters and braking brakes when compared with you, dear American Airlines. So what can you do? Empires rise and empires fall. A metaphor you may need to consider closely.

By EVE FAIRBANKS
NY Times: September 6, 2012

THIS summer, during a conference in Berlin, a fellow attendee told me about the kind of summer love that arises in his profession.

He was a military officer who had been posted in Europe, and not infrequently a soldier would come back from a furlough in Croatia confessing he had fallen in love with a stripper. Not in lust, in love, the soldier would insist, and he wanted to marry her.

A fellow officer had developed a question to test the depth of a young man’s passion, though the officers still rolled their eyes at the idea that enduring love could be born in a pole-dancing joint in Dubrovnik.

“Do you know her parents’ names?” he would ask his love-struck charge. “If not, you can’t marry her.”

I laughed. Not because the soldier’s feelings were ridiculous, but because they were so recognizable.

I’ve always fallen in love on vacation. Who hasn’t? There’s a distinctive intensity to vacation romances. The object of our affection rises from the crowd like fireworks, simultaneously illuminating the unfamiliar landscape of our travels and obliterating its interest.

Why do we fall so hard on vacation? I have my theories.

The first is that the vacation, as a setting, imbues a crush with a heightened sense of meaning. Although conventional wisdom says we have flings on vacation because they won’t have to mean anything, this couldn’t be more wrong. We have flings on vacation because they seem to mean everything.

You know the feeling, when away, that the new and magical environment you are in is trying to send you a message about how to live? A week in Paris reiterates the power of great food; a month in Joshua Tree National Park admonishes you to wedge time out of your work flow for the contemplative and the holy.

We’re primed, on vacation, to recognize such messages in what we see, hear and eat, and in the people we meet. These strangers often seem to carry important information about what is valuable in life, and this makes them incredibly alluring.

I remember my first summer love as such a prophet. He was a dancer at an arts camp I was sent to. I was 12, the shortest girl in my class, with pimply skin and Coke-bottle glasses, profoundly uncomfortable in my body.

The camp was in northern Michigan, and many days it rained. That made me desperately anxious because it imperiled the fragile hairdo I’d devised to tame my natural curls: bangs blow-dried around a huge roller and sprayed so they sat in a stiff, perfect, artificial hoop on my forehead as long as I didn’t move fast or encounter moisture.

I first saw him from the bleachers of a performance hall, practicing his part of a duet alone on an empty stage. He was tall and lithe, with a shock of Baryshnikov hair and dark circles under his eyes that made him look deep. Moving fluidly with and around the partner who wasn’t there, his body looked so at ease, so natural, so like a single unit, not like the pastiche of “good” and “bad” features that I inhabited.

He was living on a higher plane, one in which the body wasn’t the obstacle to pleasure but the vehicle to obtaining it, a plane to which I newly aspired. In the context of the middle-school boys I knew back home, in their flannel shirts and cargo shorts, the image of his body in a leotard was a revelation.

When we’re away, we allow ourselves to be drawn to people who are thrillingly different from us, even inappropriate. A half-dozen summers after the dancer, I fell for a German Lutheran pastor in Brussels. I’m Jewish, but even more significantly, I was 13 years younger than him, not even 20. We were both in Brussels temporarily; I had an undemanding internship at the United States Embassy, and he had an equally forgiving stint at a theological institute.

We took afternoons off to roam the city’s jewel-colored Art Nouveau bars, he puffing on Gauloises, me sipping the beer I still wasn’t allowed to drink at home. I thought he had a poetic soul. Indeed, he loved poetry, sending me reams of Hölderlin over e-mail during the days we were apart. At night, we lay in bed and prepped him for his sermons by reading the Psalms aloud.

The idea prospers that vacation flings are an escape from our real selves. But maybe what’s really happening is that they draw out selves that are real but suppressed. When we’re young, we stifle many possible selves to channel our energy into one, but the others can probably never be fully smothered. They merely wait for a trigger to revive. That can be a new place, a new person or, most powerfully, both.

I had decided before I left for Brussels to be a diplomat instead of a writer, but the freedom and the bars and the romantic northern European weather — cool, with a mottled layer of clouds rolling fast and low over the ground so that one second it was overcast and the next bright — were bringing out the poet in me. As was my pastor, who encouraged me to respond to his Hölderlin with my own words.

At summer’s end, he asked if he could come back with me to the United States. I didn’t want the affair to be over, but the thought also horrified me: this man out of Molière roaming my college campus, his Bible in one hand and his Gauloises in the other! I worried most about what my friends would make of his profuse smoking, although this was also one of my favorite things about him. It was a vice that went charmingly with all that conspicuous virtue.

The ultimate truism in our understanding of vacation romance is that it’s exciting because we don’t see our new lover’s flaws. Again, I think the opposite is the truth: on vacation we stop judging and allow ourselves to relish another person’s quirky imperfections.

When I consider what most attracted me to the pastor and the dancer, I think of what slightly marred their beauty: the pastor’s cigarettes and indecision, the dark circles under the dancer’s eyes that suggested he, too, was vulnerable to exhaustion.

Once, vacationing in Stinson Beach, Calif., north of San Francisco, I developed a crush on a waiter at the oyster restaurant where I ate most meals. The weather was bad and there were few people in town, so it was often just the two of us in the dining room.

He was incredibly elegant, with crisp black shirts and fashionable horn-rimmed glasses; his manner was perfect, warm and dignified; and he was an intellectual, confessing a love of Shakespeare.

He also had crooked teeth. I wondered why such a refined man was waiting tables and hadn’t fixed his teeth. The picture didn’t quite square, and its crookedness only intrigued and delighted me more.

THE makers of Persian rugs know that an imperfection makes a beautiful carpet more winsome. We are drawn to the cracks in a wall, the cake with a slight droop, because these are what make something — or someone — individual. We indulge our natural attraction to imperfection more freely on vacation.

Remember how your favorite part of touring Kenya was the bus that was so packed you had to share your seat with chickens, or, in Sicily, the angry baker who denied he had cannoli even though you could see them in the display case?

My favorite part of a Moscow trip was using an old Soviet-designed oven in my apartment; the temperature could not be adjusted because the plastic dials had long ago melted off. We tried to bake a pie anyway with apples we had collected from a village, and it was impossible, but I knew then it would make a great memory, and it did.

At home, though, in our ordinary lives, imperfections are liabilities. We repaint, we replace. We tolerate flaws in our partners but rarely cherish them. Partly this is the inevitable shift to a longer-term calculus. Those crooked teeth: will my children have them?

But I also think our aversion to imperfection is amplified by today’s Match.com dating philosophy, in which compatibility is king, smokers are excludable by checking a box, no weird tics and take care of your body, please.

On vacation, we fall in love less by logic than by instinct. The question then becomes: Should we be trying to love in regular life more like we love when we travel? Should we be dating strippers and oyster-bar waiters? Probably more often than we do, but not all the time.

The final thing that distinguishes vacation love, what makes it so great, is what transfigured my experience with the Moscow oven: the knowledge that it’s already halfway to becoming a memory.

By: Sarah Hepola
Salon, July 23, 2012 

It was three months into my solo road trip when I grew genuinely scared. I’d been pitching my tent across the country, but I had rolled into Bar Harbor, Maine, on July 4 only to discover all the campgrounds and hotels were full. Wouldn’t you know: The grand celebration of our freedom left me with nowhere to stay. So I parked my car in Acadia National Park, because I figured serial killers wouldn’t bother with the entrance fee, and I curled up in the backseat with the only protection I had: A ball peen hammer, and a teddy bear.

Yes, I carried a teddy bear with me on my swashbuckling Jack Kerouac adventure. It was a gift from my high school boyfriend, and it reminded me of being loved, and I had dragged it along the ground of the previous decade, across college and my first career and various romantic disappointments. That bear was a kind of battle armor, even as it squished up against my face.

And I needed it that night, because my mind was a haunted house of broken glass and men in ski masks lurching from the shadows. There were so many reasons to be frightened while traveling alone – 18-wheelers, lightning storms, roadside motels that reeked of death – but the most formidable was my own imagination. I told myself I’d be fine, that no one would find me here, but I was wrong, because I was startled awake by a flashlight flooding the window at 3 a.m.

“Ma’am, you can’t sleep here,” said the park ranger. I tumbled out of the car, barefoot, and how strange I must have looked to him: the ball peen hammer swinging from one hand, the teddy bear from the other. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see his face, a mixture of amusement and disbelief. What the hell are you doing here?

The truth was, I didn’t know.

At the age of 27, I got in my aquamarine Honda and drove 26,000 miles around the country for five months by myself. It was foolish and lonely and 10 years later, I still think it might be the best thing I’ve ever done. I wore clothes till they were filthy and lived on baked beans and peanut butter, but the luxury of that time is unimaginable to me now, because I woke up every morning with no one’s agenda but my own. What did I want to see today? Where did I want to go?

I’ve been thinking about that trip recently, because I’ve been reading Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild,” an account of her foolish and lonely solo walk along the Pacific Crest Trail at the age of 26. As far as feats of fortitude go, Strayed blows me out of the water. She loses her toenails. She swallows her own mother’s ashes. Meanwhile, I visited the Cereal Museum at the Mall of America (and I highly recommend it).