Safety Happiness Cloth Shop

So I've been doing some spring cleaning. This has entailed cleaning out the closet--mine and hubby's.

I ran across this suit coat bag from a tailor shop in Hoi An, Vietnam.

Funny. I don't ever remember paying any attention to the name of the shop. But how could I have missed this?

So Says Hemingway

A while back, a friend of mine traveled to the Florida Keys. She visited Hemingway's home and sent me this postcard.

It has graced the cork board above my desk for the past few months. Every once in a while, I take it down and look at it.

It makes me laugh. The Hemingway quote on the front is quite strange:

Writing and travel broaden your ass, if not your mind.

However, it is the description on the back of the card that I find equally - if not more - bizarre. It reads:

Ernest Hemingway's weight varied through the years, but his love for cats never wavered.

Even though I wonder about the tourism board employee who came up with this quip, I'm also able to admit that Papa Hemingway made a good point with this quote.

It's been a long, cold winter followed by a drab and chilly spring in Minnesota, and I've filled these days with writing, travel and travel writing.

Now that the sun is starting to peek out here at home, I've started breaking away from my computer and taking my dogs (for whom my love has never wavered) for long walks.

And while I'm not yet willing to publicly proclaim on my blog that all this travel writing has broadened my backside, I am willing to admit that my body is feeling the aftereffects of my newly extended neighborhood roamings.

It's Greek To Me

I've been blessed with lots of "niece time" this spring. I've gotten to spend lots of time with all the little girls in my life.

On one of these visits, which included a trip to a playground, I found this plastic coin half buried in the sand under the swings.

I just had to keep it and post in on my blog. It's stamped to look like an ancient Greek coin, but then it also has the word "China" stamped on it as well; presumably it was made there. And yet I found it here in the U.S.A.

I Made the Huffington Post!

An essay I wrote made it to The Huffington Post!

I wrote the essay and submitted it for publication through a women's networking group that I am a part of called Ladies Who Launch.

Even though I submitted the work about a month ago, I had no idea whether it would be chosen or not. I was told to "wait and see."

But now, I'm so excited to see my work on such a well-read and well-regarded site!

The essay is called My Travel, My God.

Here is an except. But of course, I think you should all go and read the whole thing!

There is a common misperception about travel junkies. It is often said that we travel to "find" ourselves. We do not. Or at least, I do not. I do, however, go looking for something when I travel. I go looking for God.

This revelation will shock some people in my life. I'm not a particularly religious girl. I tend to purse my lips tight when the subject comes up. I don't quote the Bible, and I don't attend regular church. Instead, for me, travel is church. Let me explain.

The Secret Travel Lives of Others

Cyclone. Earthquake. Cancer. Alzheimer's.

All of these words have entered my ears and left my lips in the past two weeks, and each has left a mark. I haven't felt much like blogging.

While the natural disasters in Asia seem to run on a constantly spinning newsreel online, on TV and on NPR, it is my own personal local concerns that have consumed my recent thoughts.

For example, there is a man I know. His name is Art.

He is an older man with a crop of white hair, a man from around the neighborhood,and although he doesn't know it, he has helped me a great deal.

Four years ago I moved from the city to the suburbs and it was a hard transition for me; I loved my old neighborhood so. I had called that house in the city my home for over eight years and I was fairly convinced that my new home, my suburban home, would offer me little character, connection or charm.

But Art became my character, my connection and my charm. He hangs out at a nearby coffee shop. He arrives every afternoon at 4:30, reads a book, stays for an hour then goes.

But he'll gladly give up his book to talk to me. Regulars tend to recognize each other, whether they are of the coffee tab, pull tab or bar tab sort. After we made our initial acquaintance, Art always remembered to ask me about my writing.

He spots my byline about town and wants to know when I'm going to publish a book. He's so diligent in his questions about my writing career that sometimes I think he's my biggest fan.

After meeting him at the coffee shop, I started seeing him everywhere -- the grocery store, the Chinese place -- and he helped me feel that maybe the suburbs weren't all formulamatic, that maybe this new neck of the woods could be my home.

I knew that Art had struggled with cancer. Yet I also knew he'd beaten it. But now it's back and Art told me the other day, "I've run out of miracles."

"You don't know that," I countered.

"Yes, I do. I've had more than my fair share," he replied.

"So impress me," I prodded. "Tell me about your miracles."

"Well, back when I lived in Lybia," he started and proceeded to spin a tale from decades past. Then he moved on to stories of the Dominican Republic, stories that weren't all palm trees and umbrella cocktails.

I'd had no idea that Art had such a wildly traveled past and it made me start to wonder about the others around me. Who else in that coffee shop had had a miraculous travel experience and was just sitting on it, keeping it quiet?

And then, a dear family friend passed away. She was a woman who'd always been in my life, a woman who'd driven me to junior high choir practice and pulled me water skiing behind her speed boat.

She was a woman who barely sat still, but who in the past handful of years had been bogged down by a myriad of health problems, including Alzheimer's. This was particular tragic as she was just in her sixties. She died the other night at age 66.

But back before Jan learned about her Alzheimer's, she was an avid traveler, a loyal and ardent lover of the human race. She was a woman who took so many trips that her children followed her footsteps and became travelers, too. In fact, her son helped coach my hubby and me through the planning stages of our own global roam.

And yet, throughout these past few years, she was forced to give up that passion in exchange for care centers and care takers, who -- I'm quite certain -- were clueless to her travel past.

All this has convinced me, a traveler who has the wanderlust bad, that us travelers need to be more vocal and diligent about sharing our travel tales before we forget them and before we take them to the grave.

The person on the receiving end might be more receptive than you expected and you just might spark a whole new breed of wanderlust.

If you've made it this far in this travel musing and want an outlet for releasing your hibernating travel tale, check out this page on my newly launched travel site, a site which I have designed with the goal of sparking wanderlust in a new generation.

Photos:
Cemetery angle in Havana, Cuba
Dragonflies in Burma
Candles burning in Montreal's Notre Dame

Saving Myanmar

In an earlier post this week, I mused about a possible global push back against the military junta of Myanmar once everyone began to see how messed in the heads these guys truly are.

A week now has passed since the cyclone hit and still the generals are toying around with visas, relief and voting polls.

I've been watching the news reports out of one eye all week long, dutifully clicking on a Burma headline each time I see it's been updated. I've turned into somewhat of a media junkie when it comes to Myanmar, but I just can't help myself. I am astonished.

This morning I spent some time with my coffee and my Internet, reading deeper into the crisis.

I came across a BBC article in which British politicians were wondering about the moral obligation that we as human beings have to the people of Burma.

At this point, have the generals proved themselves to be so crazy and inept that we have a moral obligation to invade the country on humanitarian grounds in order to deliver aide?

A journalist for the Asia Times thinks so. This morning, Asia Times published an article written by Shawn W Crispin titled The Case for Invading Myanmar.

In the article, Crispin claims that a US invasion of Myanmar makes sense. An invasion, lead by the US and backed by the rest of the world, would go a long way toward restoring America's rattled reputation, he says.

Toppling the junta would clear the way for Burma's already democratically-elected president, Aung San Suu Kyi, to finally leave house-arrest and take her rightful spot as the country's leader -- a move sure to be supported by the majority of Myanmar's people as they are the ones who voted for her.

Is the idea of invading Myanmar far-fetched and silly?

I'm not so sure. What I am sure about, however, is that if the United States actually did step into this crisis and invade Burma, I'd be much more likely to support it than I would some of its other foreign policies.

Going Greyhound to Mexico

Today, GoNomad posted a story I wrote about taking the Greyhound to Mexico.

Yes, that's right. I crossed the border on a bus.

Our end point was a pretty little town called Ensenada that is the heart of Mexico's wine country. It's just two hours south of San Diego on the Baja's Pacific coast.

While there, we toured a bodega, sipped some vino, downed a margarita, nibbled hot churros, and stumbled into a room where Al Capone was rumored to have played a hand of poker or two.

If you'd like to read all about it, go here:

Visiting Ensenada: A Bus Trip to Mexico's Wine Country

Also posted this week is an essay I wrote and published a few years back in the local paper. The link has been archived and hidden behind passwords, which means nobody is ever able to find it. So instead, I found it a new and approachable home.


Wanderlust and Lipstick is a web site that encourages women to get out there and travel. The site's author, Beth Whitman, actually posted two of my older travel tales.

First, What we Leave Behind, is about an encounter I had with a man on the streets of Havana.

The other, On Guard Against Giardia, is about getting sick in Guatemala.

Cyclone Sadness & Madness

Just like everyone else, I have been stunned, angered and saddened by the cyclone fall out that is happening in Myanmar.

Myanmar has maintained a front spot in my mind since I traveled there two years ago.

Hubby and I only spent five days in the country - a time frame that was both too short and too long.

Too short because there is so much to see in the country. Because transportation is difficult, we didn't get to half the places we had hoped to see. We never made it to Mandalay, for example. We didn't reach the ruins of Bagan. Nor did we visit the now devastated region.

At the same time, the days we did spend in Burma filled us with questions and unease. We witnessed disturbing ecological destruction as well as poverty, inequity and forced labor, like these local people pictured above who had been forced to build a highway by hand.

Of all the places I have ever traveled in my life, Myanmar is honestly the one place I have no desire to ever step foot in ever again. I am so glad I experienced it, but I am so glad I'm no longer there.

Watching the cyclone fall out, I am of course horrified that the military junta is dragging its heels on letting foreign aide in. It's a clear indicator of just how messed in the heads these guys really are.

I can't help but wonder whether or not this massive blunder on their part isn't going to spell the end of their reign. Maybe they are delaying aide because they are trying to punish their own. Maybe they are doing it because they are power paranoid. Their motivation doesn't really matter. The end conclusion is the same: The leaders are insane.

Last fall, the world watched as the military rulers smashed a local revolution. In the end, the world stood by and let it happen.

But maybe, maybe this will be a tipping point that will convince all governments and average Joes everywhere that Burma's leaders need to be toppled. Maybe this will spark a global effort to oust the junta.

Bizarre Foods with Kelly

TiVo is a wonderful thing. Now that I have it, I can't imagine my life without it.

Sitting down to watch TV at a scheduled time?

Waiting through commercials?

Both are a thing of the past now that TiVo has entered my life. It lets me record shows that run at strange hours and check them out at my leisure.

One of the shows I've come to love as a result of my TiVo is a Travel Channel offering: Bizarre Foods.

The show blipped across my radar for a couple of reasons:

1) Just like me, Andrew Zimmern - the host of Bizarre Foods - calls Minneapolis-St. Paul home. He's got radio bits and TV bits and magazine bits all over the Twin Cities. I knew about him long before he started showing up in strange places and eating strange things on the Travel Channel.

2) By chance, I discovered that his show is actually produced by a company that is headquartered just down the street from my house. It's a Minnesota crew that cuts and edits his stuff into the show it eventually becomes.

3) Last fall, an email showed up in my inbox from a woman I never met. She was a staffer with Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods show and she was researching weird things he could eat in Chile.

After a bit of goolging, she came across my past blog entries about Chile. She sent me a message to see if I had any bizarre food suggestions for the country.

I told her that when in Chile, Andrew Zimmern had to eat a hot dog loaded with mayonnaise and avocado. I remembered that these hot dogs were everywhere and that both Quang and I were repulsed by them.

Actually, I'm repulsed by hot dogs any old way they are served, but Quang isn't. He loves them. Yet just one look at a Chilean hot dog, hidden under one whole inch of mayonnaise and another whole inch of guacamole, stopped him cold. No hot dogs for him.

But guess who did eat one?! That's right! Andrew Zimmern!

Finally, finally, the Chile show aired. It ran in the beginning of April and I just got around to watching it the other day. And he ate it! He ate it! He ate a mayonnaise-guacamole hot dog in Santiago, Chile!

Punky Junky Style

You don't get hair like this without some uber strong gel.

Ever since Quang discovered Punky Junky hair gel in Mexico a few years back, he has been a fan.

He only bought one bottle while there though, and when it ran out, we couldn't figure out how to get any more.

We googled and googled. We discovered there were lots of Punky Junky fans out there, but short of making a run across the border, nobody knew how to get their hands on any.

Some smart guy finally decided to start importing the stuff and selling it online. I made my first online Punky Junky purchase last fall. Quang finally ran through the bottles I bought back then and last week, I had to go online and buy more.

I graduated from the little bottles to the big bottles. Although Punky Junky comes in a rainbow of colors, I decided to stick with the purple hue for no other reason than nostalgia. That was the same color Quang bought back in Mexico.

Today, the new big purple bottles arrived in the mail!

Oh joy!

Now Quang can keep his hair spiked and sharp.