Anglo Adventure

Travel with a sense of humor


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What I Want to See When I Grow Up

travel kids sod house

Icelandic sod house. From Wikipedia.

I really wished they asked me this more when I was a kid. My What Do You Want To Be answer always ended with “a veterinarian” and then some stiff, condescending adult would tell me I would have to go through a lot of school and be really good in math and science, thereby stomping out this dream as if it were a fire.

What Do I Want To Be? A good person. An honest person. Witty.

Always tell kids their dreams are possible. No, I probably wouldn’t make a good vet, but I didn’t need to know that at eleven. I would have figured it out eventually, the way I have figured out that I am not a good whistler nor a good volleyball player. Trial and error.

I am about to create a lesson plan for a travel/food writing workshop I am doing with kids at 826 Seattle – a writing tutoring center. I don’t have kids and am never around them, so I am really nervous they’ll think I am boring. I fear the wrath of spitballs and bad evaluations.

She sucked!
What was with that long explanation about chicken fingers and spaghetti? Does she think we actually eat that stuff? 

I suppose I should start thinking of age-appropriate jokes and stop swearing to prepare.

What I want(ed) to see:

The Pyramids (obviously)

The sod houses in Kansas (someone read a lot of Little House on the Prairie)

Belize.

Wild horses. In particular on Sable Island.

Venice, Italy.

South Africa.

Kenya. Mainly for safari purposes. Continue reading →


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Final Word: Copenhagen Travel Guide Review

As a sometimes writer of travel guides, I am obsessed with them. If you read  and travel enough, you’ll notice subtle differences between the main brands. And there’s a new kid in town, coming all the way from Denmark. We’ll get to that in a sec.

Here’s a quick debriefing of the ones you already know.

Fodor’s appeals to upper-middle-class wanderers who have money to burn and high-end tastes. Although I am biased Fodor’s is my favorite as they only hire local writers. And the books completely revolutionized the travel industry.

To quote father Fodor:

“Rome contains not only magnificent monuments, but also Italians.”

Frommer’s is for middle of the road wanderers who want to be cutting-edge, but don’t have fancy-pants places in their budget.

Lonely Planet is for those kids who want to see Germany but “can’t afford” anything but a hostel. Broke travellers fascinate me. In my early twenties, I barely had the funds for my  $600 a month rent. Let alone plane fare to an exotic destination. It was all spaghetti O’s and frozen burritos. I couldn’t imagine spending a month in Spain on my catalog-writer’s salary.

That’s just me though. I think I should have been more daring with my $12 an hour. (Forget eating! I am going to France).

When asked to review this new guide to Copenhagen from noma (best restaurant in the world) and momondo, a travel search engine and guide book generator, I said yes. Absolutely. Bring it.

At First Look:

It’s a small, attractive guide that will easily fit into your purse or man bag (psst: everyone carries one there). With it’s chic black cover, it looks like it was designed by Michael Kors. It’s modern, beautiful, and has a classic ribbon bookmark built right in and a nice pull out map right in the back. If I judged books by their covers, I would highly recommend this guide. Continue reading →


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Best of the Worst Wednesday

I decided to create a “Best of the Worst” series. A reverse travel guide, of sorts. One that will teach you what not to do, where not to go.

I love animals in suitcases.

A place to highlight and write bad reviews, the ones about agressive hotel bed bugs, rude hoteliers, and chunks of half-raw chicken smothered in a diarrhea-colored gravy.

No “hidden gems” here, just hidden nightmares and ripoffs. Every Wednesday.

If you have any “Best of the Worst” stories or reviews, please, please comment below or submit to halmcreative[at]gmail.com. I could feature your reverse recommendation in an upcoming post. One star or less, please.

Best of the Worst Airlines: United Air

united airlines, worst customer service

Love this picture – by The Husband

If you like being lied to, long plane delays, and a terrible mileage plan, fly United. Your flight will be cancelled probably because the pilot spent the previous night doing tequila shots. Budget to spend extra on accommodations WHEN your flight gets cancelled. They won’t give you anything but 10% off a future flight  that will expire in three days.

United Air stands united on one thing: no comps. Never a comp. Never an apology. Not even if they lose your CHILD because of their dumbassery.

They’re the only airline I can think of whose goal is absolutely no return customers.

I am pretty sure customer service reps at United undergo Complete Asshole Orientation: How to act, think, and talk like a complete asshole. At this orientation, they learn the art of phone and email resistance – that is, not to pick up a ringing phone and how to avoid replying to customer emails. Then it’s over to customer ethics training, which includes a debriefing on how to lie with a straight face and how to de-fluff the pillows.

Lines from United Airlines orientation:

Our motto is: keep them waiting. Always, always keep the customer waiting.

No, no, Michael. You’re wrong. We don’t want to keep customers. We want to figuratively spank them with our bad customer service. That way, they’ll  remember us. 

Repeat: never give a comp. Never. But if we fuck up, tell them we’re going to comp whatever to get them off the line. Just give them a fake name so they will never be able to reach you. 


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Lavender Love: Adventures in Agritourism

agritourism, lavender farms, lavender care

I don’t think the red flower gets enough attention.

The Husband and I have adopted the habits of a couple in our early 50s. We don’t have kids and aren’t big partiers, although I have been known to dance until the wee hours. It’s just us and the dog in our apartment in a complex full of other drifters who decided to retire at the ripe old age of 30 (you know, the types who wear lots of flannel and refuse to work in an office and make art out of paperclips). Continue reading →


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International Left-Handers Day: Here’s to the Weird Ones

international left handers day, left handedness

Still can’t use these things

I write left-handed. I eat left-handed. I sit comfortably in the liberal left when it comes to politics, although I always carefully consider my options.

August 13 is international left-handed day. I am not sure what I am supposed to do, other than eat dark chocolate gelato*, which I have been enjoying daily anyway. Yes, I eat gelato left-handed and sometimes (gasp) with a fork.

Being born in the 80s, I have no recollection of the days when teachers forced children to write with their right hand.  If I am not writing on a spiral notebook or trying to open a can, I don’t think about it. And who really cares whether I crown my capital ‘C’ with a perfect little curl or not? My handwriting is a melange of cursive and print, big proud letters and small ones. It isn’t precise nor neat, but I like that. It’s borderline illegible and somehow expresses exactly who I am.

It is sad to think about teachers shoving pens into the right hands of kids. And the kids, writing and cutting with their opposite hands just because they were told to. It must have made them both incredibly frustrated.

Why do we waste so much energy trying to fit everyone into the same mold?

There’s No Right Way

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t write with my left hand. I couldn’t imagine it. Me: a righty. I’d dress differently for sure. No more smudged notebooks. No more asking The Husband to open the wine. No more drinking from the wrong water glass.

Part of my charm.

All that time, teaching lefties to write “right,” would have been better spent accepting what is and accommodating those who can’t cut Christmas trees out of construction paper. Or turning them into great pitchers.

Being exactly who you are never leads you wrong. I learned this from my parents, who never bought me dolls because they knew I hated them, and who gritted their teeth and said nothing (or mostly nothing) during my brief punk/grunge/goth/whatever-the-hell phase.

They also let me join the wrestling team, although they did try to ever-so gently dissuade me from it on the premise that I wouldn’t like the intensive workouts (I didn’t). I only wanted to make a statement with my fellow 14-year-old riot grrrls. At the first weigh-in/practice, boys crowded around and hurled level-C gender slurs at us. This all happened in front of the coach, who let it go on for awhile before finally stopping it. It was a scene straight out of a Lifetime flick, only scarier and it didn’t end in a trial.

I grew out of all this stuff and ended up pretty well-adjusted, though I’d like to think I was well-adjusted in high school and society was the problem.

I recently met a pre-teen girl at the writing studio I tutor at. She had a strip of blue hair, big boots, a striped skirt and topped it all off with a tiara. One of the other kids began to tease her about the tiara (I suspect he has a crush). She glared at him and said “It’s not a tiara. It’s just a bit of sparkle.”

She is a bit of sparkle. And I hope it’s never dulled by bullies or work or normalcy.

Embrace your weird quirks.

Celebratory Gelato

*I found this amazing gelato called Talenti. It’s not the kind of sugary ice cream that will remind you of childhood (if you lived near a Baskin Robbins, which I did). But it’s so freakin’ smooth. It will remind you of an oceanside hamlet in Italy, one you swear you’re going to visit one day. It the gelato of future travels. And I promise they’re not paying me to say this, although I wouldn’t turn away a freezer full. I am about to try their blood orange flavor. Blood orange is the new pomegranate and I suspect the black currant will soon replace it as the hippest food in the produce section. Mark my words.


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Quebec City in Cuisine & Clouds

I am finally finished with The Project from both heaven and hell. Funny, just as I finished, a month of 12-hour days, hunched at the computer, I read a forum where this lady said:

“How can I get a job like Rick Steves and and Samantha Brown, travel around the world, and be PAID for it?”

If the forum wasn’t four-years old, I would reply: There is no job like that. And also, although I like Rick Steves, I am pretty sure Samantha Brown has no idea w-t-f she’s doing. Now Anthony Bourdain…

(Side note: Rick Steves and Expedia rejected me, so really, there is no job like that, even for me who has been travel writing for 2 years now.)

I also don’t REALLY travel the world, I expatriated and became a specialist in one specific region.

Travel writing, especially guidebook writing is A LOT of hard work. So please, think of us writers next time you toss a guidebook in the garbage. I like to save them, take notes on them, sort of like a journal of the trip. I imagine if you’re creative enough, you can make a cool collage or poster out of their innards.

I understand eventually, they’ll get tossed or (hopefully) recycled, but I hope people really appreciate and use them. Unlike with certain review sites, the writers are (theoretically) trained to taste-out the best restaurants, sniff out the best hotels.

Also, please don’t say, I Could Do Your Job. It’s insulting, like I just waltzed into it with no prior experience. The devaluation of writers is something I plan to tackle in a future post.

Travel writing, by far, with the exception of literary writing, the most rewarding type of writing I’ve ever done. I enjoy getting rid of restaurants who are obviously serving terrible food. And replacing those with ones I know visitors will have a great experience.

Here is a photo narrative of Quebec City cuisine.

Quebec City in Cuisine and Clouds

Want to look like a brilliant photographer? Take more aerial shots and stop using Instagram!

 

If you don’t like croissants, I question your status as a human.

 

Food porn, Quebec City restaurants

The best fish ever. Salmon in a cranberry sauce.

 

All baguettes should be presented like this.


Continue reading →


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Confessions of a Former Hater

haterade, hateraide

I drank this during most of my early twenties. Must have been haterade.

Confession: I used to be a HATER. For those who don’t know what a hater is, the Urban Dictionary, (the place where I find all my mad slang) describes it as this:

A person that simply cannot be happy for another person’s success. So rather than be happy they make a point of exposing a flaw in that person. Hating, the result of being a hater, is not exactly jealousy. The hater doesnt really want to be the person he or she hates, rather the hater wants to knock someone else down a notch.

I feel like, in general women haters hate on other women more so than they hate on men. Why?

Do we view men as naturally smarter than us and assume they’re just going to beat us in everything anyway? Do we view women as competition? Is it a problem of directness because we don’t want to hurt feelings? It’s not just writing, it’s with many things. Motherhood, I’ve heard is rife with hate, judgement, and mid-wife vs. doctor wars. I am as feminist as they come, and I too have been lost in the ugly bog of criticism. (Do I really hate her, or do I hate her because I want to be her?)

I have also been the subject of this brutal adult bullying. Your friends don’t talk to you anymore, but don’t tell you why. Your coworker starts picking apart everything you do. Someone calls you Hitler in an anonymous comment.

It Started with a Lightbulb

I’ll bring you back to five or six years ago to my first full-time writing job, when I spent eight hours a day writing catalog descriptions of lamps. Our office was housed in a mustard-yellow-and-burnt-orange building flanked on both sides by railroad tracks. We sat in gray cubes and the office lighting was dim. Picture me, hunched over my desk under florescent fixtures that were clogged with the carcases of flies. You think, being the headquarters of a lighting store, they would have at least sprung for swivel-head desk lamps, but NO.

(This, in case you haven’t guessed, is my uphill-in-the-snow story). Continue reading →


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My War Against Weak Words

Bees pollination lavendar

Just a wee bee. Aren’t we all?

I decided to eliminate a number of words and phrases from my vernacular.

I think

I will never write “I think” in a work-related email again. I didn’t realize how weak it made me seem. Especially if I use it when I don’t think, I know. Would you rather take directions from someone who said, “I think the store is that way” or, “the store is that way?”

French eliminated superfluous words from my vocabulary, because well, my French vocabulary is so limited. In French, I will say, Oui! After everything. When I am explaining something, most of the “likes” are replaced with “uhhh” as I struggle to find the word in French. If I let an “uhhh” linger too long, the person will just start speaking English to me. That feels like getting kicked in the chins.

I did get in a bad habit of saying, “Je pense.” Beaucoup.

Ps. did you know, ponce (how I want to spell it) is British slang for a pimp?

Think about I Think in a professional context. Who wants I Think Sheryl managing a department or business?  “I think we’re about to go bankrupt.” “I think we should lay-off Jerry.” “I think this ad campaign will get us more revenue.” Way to fill us all with confidence there. Continue reading →


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Who am I?

travel writing, travel advice, travel blog, travel humor

Me at my desk. This is where I spend most of the day. The glare of the computer screen is strangely flattering.

I wanted to thank everyone for all the comments on my recently Freshly Pressed blog. It really means a lot that you took the time to read it and think about it, even if you disagree. I am quite torn on the whole situation myself. But most people seemed to be encouraging, so thank you.

Being compared to Hitler Youth was a new one. Hitler Youth? Just a little strong.

(Ok, so admittedly, I had a thing for Ed Norton in American History X, but that’s ONLY because of the shaved head and that post-jail bod, which made him look like the lead singer in a punk band. He also changed at the end from super bad boy to “looks cute in a suit.” I can’t be the only girl who felt like this.)

Hopefully, we’ve determined that I am in no way Hitler Youth or like Hitler Youth or even in the same Venn Diagram as Hitler Youth, even though I was strangely attracted to Ed Norton when he was dressed as a neo-Nazi.

I am just a nervous flyer.

Xanax is in my future. Continue reading →


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If You See Something, Say Something

tsa airport regulations rant detroit aiport

Bonus travel points if you tell me what airport this is

“If you see something, say something,” say the loudspeakers at Sea-Tac airport.

I saw something, I said something. And here’s what happened:

First off, I am not a hall-monitor type. I hated those smug kids with their little hall passes, threatening to rat you out for a harmless paper airplane.

Snitches get stitches.

If someone cuts in line, I roll my eyes and call it a day. I won’t tell on you for carrying an extra vile of liquid or playing hooky from work or cheating on a test.

But this was different. Way different. I saw a guy sneak a lighter through airport security. This was before I realized regular lighters without fluid are permitted in carry-ons. When did that happen? But who wants to carry a lighter without fluid – isn’t that just dumb? Doesn’t a lighter need fluid to work? Do they even sell fluidless lighters? Excuse me for my ignorance, I am not a smoker.

The Guy hid a blue BIC lighter under the vamp of a canvas slip-on, which was lurching towards the scanner in one of those bins. When I noticed it, he put one of those change tubs on top of his shoe. Clever.

My suspected terrorist tucks a tacky Hawaiian shirt  into his jeans.  And travels alongside a smallish, dark-haired woman who had a retired-teacher thing going on. I would guess mid-sixties, celebrating a 35th anniversary. Continue reading →