This week's weird word from The Meaning of Tingo is areodjarekput , which is an Inuit word that means "to exchange wives for a few days only". Naturally, as author Adam Jacot de Boinod points out at his blog , this word raises the question: How exactly does this arrangement work? And at what point...

Do you have a great travel tale from the Middle East or North Africa? If so, editors Nesreen Khashan and Jim Bowman, in partnership with Travelers' Tales , are looking for stories for two travel anthologies, 30 Days in the Middle East , and 30 Days in North Africa . Khashan and Bowman are seeking...

. Not long ago, I commented on an intriguing new book by Adam Jacot de Boinod, entitled The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World . Since that time, I've been in touch with Jacot de Boinod, and he's agreed to share words from his book as a little weekly feature...

There is no such thing as the Trans-Global Association for Travel and Tourism Commerce. But thanks for looking! You can go back to the article now. Or you can stay here for awhile and check out the links at left and right.

[ Above : The offending ad.] OK, I'm sure Anthony Bourdain isn't really a tourist dork, but I do take issue with the magazine advertisement for his new Travel Channel show, Without Reservations , which features the tagline "Be a Traveler, Not a Tourist". For starters, the traveler/tourist dichotomy has long been one of the...

For you travel-foodies who travel to France primarily to enjoy the cuisine, this outtake from the July 2005 issue of Harper's might make you take pause when shopping for cheese: [Degustation] QUEL FROMAGE! From "Adapting a Lexicon for the Flavor Descrip

A little over a year ago, I blogged a curious item from Esquire , wherein film director Barry Sonnenfeld sang the praises of using Tucks hemorrhoid pads as a more sanitary form of toilet paper . "Tucks," the film director exulted, "are like a romp through a field of daisies for your butt." At the...

A few months ago I blogged that my old college friend Gina Ochsner has just released her second collection of short stories, entitled People I Wanted to Be . This week I noticed that Gina has a new piece of short fiction in the current (August 22nd) issue of The New Yorker , entitled "...

The following recently appeared in the "Readings" section of Harper's : PLANET OF SLUMS Adapted from an essay by Mike Davis, in the March/April 2004 issue of New Left Review . Daws is currently writing a book about slums that will be published by Verso this year. "In 1950 there were 86 cities in the...

You don't often see mainstream magazines touting the virtues of vagabonding, so it's encouraging to see that this month's Men's Journal features a cover story entitled, "How to Take a Year Off", by Ethan Watters and Dean Latourrette. This article, which mainly looks at the lives of a handful of men who've put work on...

The following comes from the "Readings" section in the June 2005 issue of Harper's : [Renovation] SET A COURSE FOR INDENTURE From a proposal by the tourist association of Rab, an island off the coast of Croatia. After breaking with Stalin in 1948, the Yugoslav dicta

From Husain Haqqani's " Why Muslims always blame the West ", International Herald Tribune , October 16, 2004: "The Palestinian issue and the pre-emptive war in Iraq have undoubtedly accentuated anti-Western sentiment among Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. But the conduct and rhetoric of Muslim leaders and their failure to address the stagnation of their...

The Australian Financial Review recently dedicated an issue to musings about the future, calling on various pundits, futurists, and consultants to predict life in the year 2020. I served as a panelist for " The Road Less Traveled " (posted in the previous entry) -- a story that predicts the state of "elite" travel in...

The Road Less Traveled By Peter Huck "One only has to look at the past to judge the direction

The following comes from the "Readings" section in the May 2005 issue of Harper's : [Etiquette] GETTING TO DA From Russian Customs for Finns , a guidebook published in 2003 by the Finnish-Russian Chamber of Commerce, which withdrew it in January after com

Though it's been several months since the tsunami hit Asia, the recovery continues. Here is a recent travel report from vagabonder Wendy Wrangham, who is visiting Sri Lanka: I drove down to Galle from Colombo yesterday morning, and the wave seems so unbelievably arbitrary in who/what it hit. Next door to each other are the...

[Um, could you remind us again what we've been warned about?] Rolf Gibbs' Travels in India blog recently had an amusing entry called " Great Signs of India ", which included the image above. Another great shot (of a "joy-riding" camel) can be found by clicking here . Rolf's full entry can be found here...

"The Islamic doctrine of apostasy is hardly favorable to free inquiry or frank discussion, to say the least, and surely it explains why no Muslim, or former Muslim, in an Islamic society would dare to suggest that the Qu

Just a quick note to say that the current issue of the literary journal https://www.fencemag.com/"> Fence contains a short story by my cousin Daniel Rolf (who once took the Trans-Siberian railroad from Beijing to Moscow with me). Dan's story is entitled " Back When I Prayed I Always Thanked a Cowboy Jesus That My Mom...

The following list of names, which recently appeared in Harper's , caught my eye because I've come across similar names in my own travels in Mongolia. "Khunbish", for example, which means "not human", was once a popular given name, since it was thought the evil spirits would ignore a baby if they didn't know it...