Summer Postcards 2013
Test Tube Half Empty
New York City’s largest borough is also the most ethnically diverse place on earth. This makes for an excellent variety of cuisines, from “Mama’s Empanadas” to “Knish Nosh” to the less clever but no less descriptive “Himalayan Yak Restaurant.” It also makes it fun to ride the subway and smile/frown/raise your eyebrows as you pretend to understand whatever language the old men across from you are speaking.
The Indian in Old Town Square
There are so many amazing things about this city and about the few Czech people that I’ve met here that I’ve been inclined to write him off as just a poor idiot, maybe a drunkard, not representative culturally of anything. Who knows where he picked up this particular brand of stupidity.
Tear Gas and Coffee
“Run!” I looked up and saw it, a foreboding cloud rolling down the street, grey tentacles stretching towards me. Soon, I felt it—my eyes stung as tears suddenly flowed down my checks. I froze for a moment and saw shrouded hooded figures emerging from within the cloud, trying to outrun its advance, before my smarting eyes forced me to join the fleeing crowd.
Zagreb’s Museum of Broken Relationships
Rather, what’s important about this place is that it exists at all—that there is a place for people to send these discarded bits of self.
Tiny Place
My friend who showed me around the town on my first day described it as “homogeneous.” He’s right, but it’s homogeneous in a fairy-tale way that makes it all strangely enchanting.
Walk Like an African
I’ve come to realize that I thrive on order; any number of piercings and tie-dyed shirts cannot mask my neurotic inflexibility. I’ve taken to stocking up on toilet paper here, always certain that we’re about to run out. I hang newly clean clothes on the line far before I’ve run out – what if it rains and they take two days to dry rather than one?
