Traffic, Delhi

Manu and Dayel are the family drivers and they think we are hilarious. They speak just enough English to tell us so, or maybe it's just something in their eyes.

On the night of the party, we're in Dayel's car, which is scary because Dayel drives like he's rounding the curve in a NASCAR race but really, he's driving a van in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a Saturday night in the second largest city in the world. There are no discernible traffic laws in Delhi, no stop lights, no lines in the road. Most cars carry no insurance. The city's pedicabs have no working headlights or tail lights, and they account for every third vehicle on the street.

By the time the party is over, when we are happily warm and a little tipsy and piled into Dayel's car, when he is blasting Hindi dance music at top volume, as he accelerates, foot to the floor, even though there's a truck twenty feet in front of us, Jen realizes that she knows exactly how to drive a car in Dehli. She's sitting in the front, on the passenger side but on the left. Her stomach has been iffy all night.

She holds up the palm of her hand, presses it forward toward the windshield, and goes, “Beeeeep.”

It seems, in this moment, that she is exactly right. That here, a horn is a turn signal and speed is the only chance at survival.

Dayel swerves to the left and we see what he's trying to do. He's trying to create a fifth lane of traffic to the left of a long line of trucks, but the space between the trucks and the guardrail is so tight. It barely looks wide enough for our car.

“NO,” we shout. “NO!”

And he laughs, because he's going to do it anyway, and because we have no idea how this works and we think we do, because we've driven Toyota Camrys and Chevy Cavaliers on the streets of suburban Massachusetts and Texas and New Hampshire.

He does it and we shout some more, and when a car suddenly appears in his makeshift lane, he swerves back, falling into line behind a cement truck with the words, HORN PLEASE painted on the bumper. Dayel obliges.

“What are all these people doing out?” asks Jen.

“It's Saturday night in New Delhi,” says Katie.


We pass through the same neighborhood we did on the way, a tangle of low, neon-lit hotels that had been choked with hollering street food vendors, and stores crammed in with endless piles of things – plastic, glass, electronics, live chickens – only it's silent and dark now. The shops have lowered their metal grates. The sidewalks have cleared. Still, Dayel does the same thing he did on the way: He locks us in. We joke that he's trying to keep us from trying the street food – something we're all fairly desperate to do – but we know that's not the reason.

It takes us twenty minutes to get home from the party. Abiding by the American-style speed limits in our minds, we estimate that it should have taken an hour. We will learn later that Dayel and Manu had a bet about who could get us home first, that there was beer riding on it. We are not sure how the results were tabulated, or who judged, but we're guessing that Dayel won. For Manu to have beaten him would have taken miracles – and a sixth lane.

Babu Market, Two Days Before the Wedding

When I hold out my hand to the bracelet seller at Babu Market, I expect him to touch my wrist, but he doesn't. Instead, his hand cradles the widest part of my fist, the breadth between my pinky and thumb knuckles.

An instant before, Mrs. Sahrawat dropped the sari across his table of bangles, a bright folded square of gauzy pink netting with an elaborate appliqué of silver beads and sequins. He ponders this for a moment, nodding. That's when she gestures for me to show him my hand.

I have this panic about doing things wrong, mostly because I am always doing things wrong, and my heart sinks when I realize that I have given him my left hand – the only one not laden with shopping bags. Alas, a taboo instantly trod upon, and I've been in India less than 24 hours. He doesn't seem to mind, though, because he reaches for me without a blink, takes a moment to make his determination, drops my first, and gently pushes the sari aside.

He works quickly, selecting from one section of his table. The bangles are arranged in long rows by color, threaded onto dowels. He finds a pink that is nearly identical to the color of the sari, pulls up the dowel, and chooses a thick handful. From another section, he chooses some with white crystals, and from another, a stack that's inset with pearly little beads. Then he arranges them, flipping them over using both hands and they move as fluidly as a slinky, first a pink one, then a white one, then a silver one, so they form a regular pattern. He puts them in a box that looks like it's been fashioned, by hand, from some other box, from a whole other generation of boxes. Like it's descended from a long line of boxes. It's covered in paper that says “S. R. Bangle Store” and has an illustration of a bird holding a bracelet in its beak.

He moves on to Tanya, and when he touches her hand, he ponders for a little longer and says something, barely audible and in just a few words, to Mrs. Sahrawat.

“This is harder,” she says to us.

We assume, for a moment, that we're going to move on to another bangle stall. There must be others in Babu Market, just like there were more shoes, more dress shops with spangled frocks folded into bags upon bags, more stalls for menswear and rhinestone-studded purses and bindis. Mrs. Sahrawat drives a hard bargain and her strongest chip is the most elegant one – refusal. If she can't get the price she wants, she shrugs, turns down the corners of her mouth, and goes to another stall, leaving the merchants shouting at her back.

But then, the man hollers up to someone standing above him, on the roof, it seems, of the stall across the aisle. There is a room up there with a jagged tin roof and a riot of boxes and packages inside. An instant later, there is a shopping bag on a pulley sliding across the aisle, down to the bangle seller. He pulls out a new set of bangles in Tanya's size and does his sorting trick, one bracelet at a time, settles them into a different kind of box – also recycled from another box.



We try to pay, but Mrs. Sahrawat refuses our money in the same way she rejects the sellers who won't budge on their prices – coolly, and without question that negotiations are over. We add the boxes to our bags, to our growing stash of wedding stuff, and continue on to a wall of glittering sandals. We have been in India less than 24 hours. The course of action for the rest of the day is set: Hold out your hand and give it a moment to size you up.

Barcelona in Six Square Meals

There was the tortilla in La Boqueria, jetlagged and with an empty belly. And how I pointed because I was afraid to say things in Spanish or in Catalan or in anything that wasn't English. And I ate it standing up amidst the stalls of hanging pork legs and lanyards of chiles and wide-eyed staring fish. I thought it was the best market I'd ever seen -- no small feat after Provence, after the strawberry sellers in Paris and the guys with tables of mangoes and coconuts halfway across the Pacific. But I liked this better, the colored glass and the narrow lanes and the candy sellers and the intricate sea creatures with spiny, spindly shells.



There was a baked piece of brie encrusted with pistachio nuts and a raspberry dipping sauce, and a sliver of pork loin on a little piece of toast with a chile pepper and a toothpick, and a salty piece of seared cod with chutney and there was beer. And endless little pieces of bread rubbed with tomatoes and olive oil and garlic. And outside the restaurant beforehand, C______ passed out cold on the sidewalk and I ran next door and got her the Spanish equivalent of Gatorade, which was predictably bright yellow in a bright orange bottle. When she felt better, she said, "How did you know that would help?" I said things about electrolytes and then our table was ready.



On the flight over, my foodstuffs are divided by a solid wall of mashed potatoes made from potato flakes. It stops the river of gravy from spreading across the little aluminum plate. The potatoes feel solid and inevitable. The vegetables can be counted on a single hand, and they're incomplete, the shaved-down insinuations of carrots. Something shaved off a bigger carrot. A dismembered carrot.



I go to McDonalds. Fuck everything, I go to McDonalds. Because it's predictable and because the results are consistent, the whole world over. Because I am too tired from stomping around the city in flat shoes, from staring agog at Gaudi's creations, to fish through a guidebook for something recommended. I don't want a meal. I want fuel to keep seeing things. I order in English and sit on the bottom floor amidst noisy families and write in my notebook. The McDonalds is on the Passeig de Garcia, one of the most fashionable streets in Barcelona, near the Casa Batllo with its arched dragon back, its bones and scales. I sit in brown and orange familiarity in the basement with the kids, and I write in my notebook. A full third of the bun on each of my cheeseburgers is fully, undeniably stale.



At the restaurant that everyone recommends, we get a heap of slivered, fried baby artichokes, which are like French fries only made of artichokes. Their flavor is so delicate that it's like eating fried air. We share plates of sliced meat and more brie with nuts and patatas bravas and when the bill comes, our only thought is that we should have ordered more.



Me and C______ sit in a seafood restaurant by the port on a Sunday afternoon in winter and in the sun, it feels like summer. Or like some strange version of summer where people get sunburned in their heavy coats, where the breeze soothes and chills all at once. We get paella, which comes in huge metal pans with huge spoons. The yellow rice glistens. We chug sparkling water and talk about men, and after, we walk down to the beach. And over to the W hotel, which is shaped like a giant post-apocalyptic taco. In the lobby, we ask to see a room but the guy isn't there, so we wander past the LEDs, past the mod fountain and the dumpling-shaped chairs and we walk on the boardwalk around the outside of the taco, which overhangs the ocean. What must it be like in summer, with full-strengh sun and everyone tanned and dazed from a day on the sand. Instead, it's just us taking pictures, trying to imagine it, watching the sun set and pretending that it was June.

Paris: The Thing That Everyone's Seen

On the last night in Paris, I visit the Eiffel Tower, because no one can be cynical about the Eiffel Tower, even in February. I went up once, but not to the top. It was closed because of the wind. But I have never really needed to go up, to get the true bird's eye. Once you have done it from the Tour Montparnasse or the Sacre Coeur, you don't need to do it again, to see miniscule Paris. Or maybe I'm just leaving things, setting aside Paris experiences to have later. I never want to run out.

I always do the same thing, on that last night. I get off the Metro at Trocadero and I buy macarons at Carette, and I go see the Eiffel Tower, like paying a visit to an aging Aunt. There is no point in going during the daytime, when it is beautiful but not magical, when the tourists nearly injure themselves, tumbling over the steep wall, to get their thumbs-up photo. They do that at night too, but you can't see them as well, which helps.

This time, I do what I always do. I snap photos in the cold. I wait the requisite 15 minutes for it to begin its pre-programmed shimmer—the thing that never fails to conjure a surprised gasp from the assembled crowd, like they had no idea it was going to happen. But then, maybe they truly had no idea. The people who gather at Trocadero to stare at the tower are the typical hodgepodge—businessmen in town for a night, weekenders from Italy and Belgium, elderly Japanese women on a tour. Maybe they missed that line in the guidebook. Or maybe they read it and the reality of it is still stunning—that sudden shimmer of sparks on the tower's surface, the closest it will come to straightening up its bowlegs and doing a little dance, and all for no reason. For amusement. For the sake of being lovely. An iconic monument puts on a show. You can understand why people applaud.

The last time I was in Paris, I observed my little tradition. I got off at Metro Trocadero and crossed the nutty streets that loop around the square where people drive like they're trying to kill themselves, or you. And I walked between the long wings of the Palais de Chaillot, the collection of museums and government buildings that crown the hill above the Eiffel Tower in grand fashion, all of it done in sleek art deco gold. In the open space between the two sides of the building, this is where people come to view the Eiffel Tower, and where men come to sell their wares. They are the famous, ubiquitous trinkets of Paris—Eiffel Towers on keychains. Eiffel Towers in metal with felt under their feet so you can sit them on a desk or in a cabinet. Light-up plastic Eiffel Towers for children. Eiffel Towers that play “La Vie En Rose” when you touch a button.

The men are mostly from north and west Africa, and they keep the keychains—a hot seller, no doubt—threaded on a big silver ring, which they then loop over an arm. They advertise by shaking the ring so that the whole thing jingles like a Christmas bell. This noise fills the square, and the sellers call out to you as you pass in heavily-accented English. Every once in a while, an ambitious trinket seller with add a new item to his inventory. One I've seen a few times is a little light-up helicopter that flies when you wind it up. At Trocadero at night, you are likely to see them before you even arrive from the square, little blinking rainbows dipping down and up in the dark.

This time, I decide to buy something. I approach one of the men. He has not been hassling me or calling out at the top of his lungs like his colleagues, which is probably why I choose him. For an instant, as I approach, his eyes dart around him, terrified. Clearly I am not a cop, but it makes me wonder how many times each week, each month, these men get busted by the French police, how quickly they need to throw their wares into a bundle and run. This man looks like he's about to.

“How much for the little one?” I ask.

“One Euro,” he says, so quietly I can barely hear him.

I pull out my wallet and fish for a coin, and he unhooks the loop on his arm. He hands me five little Eiffel Towers—two gold and three silver, each molded in chintzy pot metal that will undoubtedly start to turn colors before I get them back on the plane.

“No no,” I say. “Just one.”

“Yes,” he says. “The price is five for one Euro.”

I am taken aback, but it makes sense. Every vendor has the same stuff. There can be no real undercutting or competition. Everything is priced to sell, and at rock bottom. I wonder at a life built on twenty-five cents a trinket, of how many tiny Eiffel Towers it takes to buy dinner, to pay for a room.

While I wait for the real Eiffel Tower to switch on, to shimmer and do her dance, I touch the replicas in my pocket, feel the hard-but-delicate edges of them. Inside and under the fabric, they make a noise like bells, but muffled, as though I have caught the air of the square, and the vendors, and the sparkling tower itself, and put it away, made it ready to transport home.

Meanwhile, In a Fishing Village Outside of Copenhagen Called Dragor

In Copenhagen in winter, I try to escape. The amusement park is closed. The weather barely crests the freezing mark. The guidebooks tell of other islands, of tiny coastal villages. I want to get to them but don't have the time to make the journey, and even then, the cold will follow along with me.

Dragor gets one line in my guidebook. The internet tells me a little bit more, but only a little. I take a risk and get on a bus in one of Copenhagen's central squares. Trains in a foreign country are one thing. Busses are quite another. I mess up once, getting on the bus in the wrong direction. Once I get off and re-board, half an hour later, I'm not entirely sure that I've paid the correct fare. The gods smile. No one checks.

The bus pulls up in front of a red brick bus depot in Dragor, the end of the line, although it's not very far from Copenhagen. The sun blazes as hard as it can, which is to say, not very hard. The bare, knobby trees with their stocky limbs don't budge in the wind. I've written everything out – bus numbers, times, the current exchange rate for Krone. I have no idea what I've come to see until I see it.

I walk toward what I think is the sea and am swallowed by the town – by a village of little houses that only the very rich can afford to live in – that time left alone because it was too pretty. The buildings are low and thatch-roofed and sit on the neat cobblestone streets like a cluster of cakes set out for a party – all of them the color of butter cream, the orange and green accents like vines of icing.

I try not to stare into the windows of the houses, but so many things on the ledges and windowsills catch my eyes – ceramic cups, vases of flowers, glass bottles and spheres, statues of animals. Some houses even sport an ancient contraption on the outside – two mirrors angled in a V and attached to the house with a metal bracket, so the people inside could see what was happening up the street. Bicycles with woven baskets site idle in gardens. Watering cans wait on doorsteps. The slate tiles that lead to rounded front doors have not felt the pressure of footfall in hours.

The town is silent. It's early and a Sunday, but still. My feet on the cobbles make the only noise. The fishing boats sit idle. I walk the entire village -- see every winding street, every lonely, standing water pump -- in 25 minutes. I cannot bear to leave the color or the quiet, so I sit down in a restaurant by the harbor.

The wood-paneled room is covered in nautical-theme movie posters – The Hunt for Red October, U-571, The Perfect Storm, Jaws. I order coffee, a Coke, a cheeseburger. I let the waiter refill my water. The whole time, I write. I stare out the windows. I give myself permission to be entirely outside of my daily life in New York. This is what it means to travel alone, to let yourself be something entirely other than your typical daily self.

The cheeseburger is perfectly cooked and enormous. I eat it, clumsy, with the fork and knife offered. In my notebook, amazing things happen. I glean new insights, learn stuff about myself, solve the entire universe of my problems, all on ten lined pages, with a blue Bic pen. Wrapped in my shawl, I escape Denmark's cold for the first time in four days.

As I pay, I tell the waiter that the cheeseburger was really good. He smiles and nods and I leave and head back to the bus. I snap a few photos, but they don't do the place justice, don't capture the slant of the winter sun, or the perfect piles of thatch on the roofs. The only thing that can hold the memory of Dragor is the place itself. I make a note to come back, with company, so I have proof, an affirmation that it existed at all.

Rungsted Kyst, Denmark: Solace in Unpronounceable Places

In the cafe at the Karen Blixen Museum in Rungsted Kyst, Denmark, I hit the sweet spot. I have spent my last $4 on a bottle of elderflower soda in a bright green bottle, the brand name of which I cannot pronounce, and can hardly write thanks to the unfamiliar amalgam of consonants.

I cannot pronounce the name of the museum either, as it turns out. Or the name of the blue-and-white seaside town – Rungsted Kyst – where it an be found. I learn this – of my lack of lingual accuracy – on the way, in the blank, blinking silence of bus drivers and conductors who ask me to repeat the name, again and again. In Italian, I'm fine. In French, I can make myself understood. In Danish, I'm dumbstruck.

Before venturing out to Rungsted Kyst, I spend the morning freezing at Hamlet's hulking castle. Or rather, it is the castle that people think is Hamlet's castle -- Kronborg. Perched on a cliff above half-frozen seas, you can see Sweden across the bay, and not much inside the castle itself save a few poorly-translated exhibits, a tapestry or two, and lots of peeling paint.

I leave craving something warm, or at least bright.

In the Blixen Museum, I am asked to kindly cover my feet, and spend the rest of my visit padding around in the provided linen boot covers. I am tempted to slide across the wood floors, to choreograph impromptu figure skating routines. Because I get my brightness. It floods the whole house through tall windows and pours through sheer curtains. I vow to paint my whole life the green color in the living room – neither turquoise nor grass, but something clear and in-between.

The woman herself, the English-speaking, Danish-born, fashionable and droll authoress, seems to be everywhere. In the masks she carried back from Africa, in the rows of books that occupied her personal library, many of which were written by her friends and acquaintances – Truman Capote, Pearl Buck, Ernest Hemmingway. It is a dream of a little house full of books and flowers and paintings and light.

I stay until the last instant, until they kick me out, sitting under a Warhol-like edit of the famous portrait of Karen, her strong, wrinkled profile half-hidden under a bell-shaped hat. I sit with my elderflower soda, scribbling in a notebook. Whatever is written in a great writer's house feels sacred. The words pick up something in the air that surrounds them. It is maybe a prayer or a to-do list. Or maybe just something about finding some blessed warmth in the brightness of a Danish winter afternoon.

Go there: Kronberg Castle is located at Helsingor, Denmark, which is about an hour by train north of Copenhagen. The Blixen Museum at Rungsted Kyst also reachable by train from Copenhagen, or from Helsingor, but it requires a transfer. From the Rungsted Kyst station, hop on a bus to the Blixen Museum, but make sure the driver lets you off in the right place. Once you see the ocean, know that you're close.

What Gets Caught Between Paris and New York

I visited the shops at the Parc de Bercy in the rain in the spring, which is how I saw so much of Paris. Because of that, I tend to remember the city as an upside-down place, reflected most clearly in the streaky puddles on the street, green from the fallen buds.

My feet got wet that day.

I tend not to love the places in Paris that feel as though they're somehow trying to be like New York. The Marais feels that way to me sometimes -- a neat row of clean-lined boutiques with black-painted walls and half-empty shelves, impossibly sparse and chic but too much like SoHo, or the galleries on the West Side. France without arcs and curlicues is hardly France to me. I want to see a breath of Versailles, of the lavish, even if it's done with no effort. I liked the old stuff in Paris better than the new. Or maybe the New York-ized Paris just made me homesick.

The shops at the Parc de Bercy are of this sort. Bright and glassed-in, and built into old stone storage warehouses, the shops capitalize on a modern idea -- put new stuff in an old space, and leave the old space as unmarred as possible, so it can exude all of its original charm and character. It's well done, but it's boring.

I skipped the travel store and the soap store and the gift shops. There was nothing I wanted to buy. My sandals were soaked through. Plus, I could do the same thing in Chelsea Market -- hell, in Faneuil Hall.

I ducked under a stone arch to get some shelter from the rain and lowered my umbrella. That's when I saw it.

There was a photo exhibit on one wall -- large-format, vertical black-and-whites, all of them rather moody and dark -- of street scenes from New York. I stopped in front of one, aghast. The photo was of a prewar building in the West Village, the typical fire escapes clinging to the brick like spiders. The ground floor was occupied by a shop, a dry goods store that sells coffee. The barrels were clearly visible through the front windows.

The shop in the photo -- and that prewar building -- stood exactly two blocks from my apartment in New York. I passed by it every day, smelled the coffee, watched the patrons shuffle in and out on weekends. And there it was, in an art exhibit in Paris.

I took a picture of the picture. I could not resist. A thing to take back with me, to restore to its rightful place on a quiet tree-lined block. A block where there once passed a French girl with a camera, who aimed her lens, and thought, "This looks like Paris. Only more so and less so, and maybe not at all."

Go there: Bercy Village, a patch of new shops in old buildings, is located at 28 Rue François Truffaut in Paris. To get there, take metro 14 to Cour Saint-Emillion.