As many of you probably know already, James Brown -- the Godfather of Soul -- died on Christmas morning. He was 73 years old. Like most Americans, I'd been familiar with Brown's music since childhood, but I didn't really learn to appreciate it until one evening in Syria nearly seven years ago. I wrote about...

In The Meaning of Tingo , author Adam Jacot de Boinod admits that -- in researching his book -- he found many unusual foreign words that he could not, in the end, verify. Two of my favorite of these unverified words were attributed to Japanese: Age-otori , which means ‘to look worse after a haircut’...

Unlike my Yahoo News! stories about road romance and souvenirs , my recent column about travelers' love-hate relationship with McDonald's didn't generate many comments or emails from readers. I'm not sure why this was the case, but a notable exception came from Pico Iyer, with whom I shared the article by email. He wrote back:...

It's been awhile since I've shared any of the weird words from Adam Jacot de Boinod's The Meaning of Tingo , so -- for travelers looking to wow (or just confuse) their international hosts -- here are a few choice global vocabularly nuggets: The Dutch word for skimming stones is plimpplamppletteren . Nakhur is Persian...

Recently, a journalism student in the U.K. emailed me for insights on a paper she was writing about why backpackers choose to travel to politically and economically unstable countries. Do independent travelers seek these places because they think they can help, she asked, or is there some different reason? Since I find this topic interesting,...

The following essay, written by the late critic John Malcolm Brinnin, was first presented as the keynote address to the 1991 Key West Literary Seminar . At this year's seminar in Key West , "Travel and the Sense of Wonder" was mentioned in several contexts, and Thomas Swick, who wrote about Brinnin in his blog...

Award winning author Tom Miller will give a three-day travel-writing workshop in the high mountain air near Taos, New Mexico in early June. Miller will offer practical advice, one-on-one sessions, and lively talks about favorite travel writers and books. Details and registration here .

Above : Bourdain strikes a new pose. I opened The New Yorker this week to discover that the advertisement for travel-chef Anthony Bourdain's television show, No Reservations , has been altered. Last September, you will recall that I disparaged the original ad for Bourdain's show, which inanely implored readers to "be a traveler, not a...

One of the most vivid shocks for first-time travelers in the developing world is witnessing the human capacity to load vehicles with far more people or supplies than one would think is logistically possible. I still recall the amazement I felt when I first witnessed a family of five perched atop a single 100cc motorcycle...

Update #2 (8 Feb. 06): Except for a couple of very minor details, RolfPotts.com and Vagabonding.net are fully back online and operational, as is my email. I'll re-debut the Karl Taro Greenfeld interview soon, and regular blog posts will resume immediately. Update : RolfPotts.com and Vagabonding.net suffered a server crash over the weekend, but both...

The following essay, written by novelist Michael Mewshaw, was first presented as the plenary address at the 2004 South Central MLA Conference in New Orleans on October 28, 2004. It was included this year with the orientation materials for the Key West Literary Seminar , and I share it here with the intention of giving...

Above : Korean condom packaging . The above snapshot of a box of Korean condoms is a relic of Newley Purnell's recent trip to Seoul. Newley's brief commentary says it all: There is so much to analyze on this box of Korean condoms that I don’t even know where to start. The copy on the...

Travelers often obsess about change and modernization in the communities they visit (the phrase "it was so much better here 20 years ago" is a common refrain, even among travelers who weren't around 20 years ago), but what they often overlook is the fact that their hosts have a stake in that change. Indeed, modernization...

Above : The real Rod, or an impersonator? My sister Kristin recently traveled to New Orleans with students from a January-term travel-writing class she's teaching at Bethany College (where she's an associate English professor). While in a Pirate's Alley bar in the heart of the French Quarter, Kristin and her students met a well-dressed man...

I just got back from a magazine assignment on the Caribbean island of Grenada -- and I've spent the past couple days catching up on various tasks, including my notes and comments on the Key West Literary Seminar , which I attended earlier this month. I'll be sharing a number of items from Key West...

Here are a couple of bizarre signs I've discovered from online travelers in recent weeks. First, from Newley and Mechum Purnell , here's a Korean sign that makes me homesick for "Konglish": And, from BoingBoing , here's a Chinese sign that makes me wonder just how "nutrious" it is to order that beef penis soup:...

The editors at Islands Magazine have just informed me that they are holding a travel-writing contest this winter, with the winner scoring publication in the magazine and a free trip to Tahiti. Only non-professional writers (that is, those who derive less than 20 percent of income from writing) are eligible to enter. The entry information...

In the United States and England, the four suits in playing cards are 'diamonds', 'hearts', 'clubs' and 'spades'. According to an entry on Adam Jacot de Boinod's blog , however, other languages interpret these symbols differently. The French for clubs, for example, is "trèfles", meaning ‘clover’ (which makes more sense to me than 'clubs'). In...

East Coast elites need to travel more (inland) [ Above : Hit the road, pal.] Last month, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham announced his retirement after nearly thirty years on the job. I've been an enthusiastic Harper's subscriber for over a decade, but I've always found Lapham's monthly "Notebook" column to be the most irritating part...

My longtime friend and former Thailand elephant polo diva Diana Moxon recently made her debut as a radio reporter for BBC 4 . Her story, which ran on the language-oriented program " Word of Mouth " last Friday, is an examination of a Shakespearian-style English dialect that is still spoken on Ocracoke Island in North...