Catching Up: August, September and October 2009 Stories

Oh how woefully neglectful I’ve been in keeping up with this, my portfolio blog! It’s definitely been a busy few months, I’ve traveled to Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, Oregon, Sweden and Mexico, and have been very busy working on stories throughout.  I also started to write a weekly essay for the most-excellent Perceptive Travel, while [...]

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Shanghai, Stuttgart & Outer Space: Selected Luxist Stories from July

Here are a few of my favorite Luxist stories this month.

Vacation with the Obamas on Martha’s Vineyard 7/20/09
Hot Cars and Red Wine: 4 Ways to Do Stuttgart 7/15/09
Langham Yangtze Boutique Opens in Shanghai 7/18/09
Four Reasons to Toast July 4th with Rum 7/1/09
That Other Moonwalk 7/3/09

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The Heat Seeker, Part Three: Spicier Please! — World Hum, 5/13/09

And here’s part three, which takes me into the backwaters of Kerala.

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The Heat Seeker, Part Two: This Raita Will Be Your Savior — World Hum, 5/12/09

Here’s part two of my World Hum series, in which my quest for heat takes me to Mumbai.

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The Heat Seeker: Eat, Sweat, Love — The Travel Channel’s World Hum

Today starts my five-part series for World Hum on my quest for the spiciest food I could take. (And there’s video of me talking about it too!) It’s a story that took several years to research and then a long while to write, but I’m pretty proud of it, so have a look!
Part One: Currywurst [...]

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Burqas, Made into Evening Bags? –The Huffington Post, 2/4/09

I attended the New York International Gift Fair last week, where I was completely taken by a line of evening bags, made from re-purposed Afghani burqas. I’ve written about it over at the Huffington Post.
Here are burqas in their original form:

And here are the bags:

It’s hard to imagine someone making an evening bag out of [...]

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My Chinese Love Affair

There’s one of those memes going around on Facebook right now called “25 Things You Don’t Know About Me”, in which you’re supposed to list, well, 25 little known facts about yourself. I’ve been tagged but haven’t participated because I over think things: I don’t know who knows what about me, and the mental macrame [...]

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Ice and Snow International Sculpture Festival in Harbin, China

One of the places that’s very high on my list to visit is Harbin, China. It’s in the very north of the country, has a heavy Russian influence, and in recent years has  apparently become a hot (so to speak) winter resort destination for said Russians.
Its best known for its Ice & Snow International Sculpture [...]

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Tourists of Evil Omen?

A couple of days ago, I discussed my odd travel karma of having been in a few places this past year that became victims of terror attacks.
Well,  this couple has me beat.  Jason and Jenny Cairns-Lawrence were in New York City for 9/11, London for the attacks of July 7th, 2005, and then in Mumbai [...]

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Flee for Your Life Decidedly

It seems I have had some odd travel karma in 2008: two places that I visited became terrorist targets.
One, the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower in Mumbai, and the other, more recently, Printemps, the Parisian department store , which was evacuated after five sticks of dynamite were discovered in the men’s department, just a week [...]

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