The Coastline Near Split, Pretty and Otherwise

On an afternoon in Split, Croatia in the spring, we decided to take a walk. We started at the ferry port—that teeming hallmark of so many Mediterranean cities—and moved southeast along the shore without a map or an agenda. It was warm for April, one of those days where you're not sure how to dress out of fear that the weather will make a soggy or a sweltering fool of you. On this day, it was more swelter than anything else, the sky incomprehensibly blue.

To walk that shore is to see Croatia at her prettiest and her ugliest, all at once. The ragged white cliffs along the coast plunge dramatically into the sea. The water is, as promised, that sublime Mediterranean blue. But really, it was the people that made this strip of coastline so lovely and alive. Families crammed into the seaside restaurants. Children giggled madly as they bounded into the water. Twentysomethings walked their dogs. We saw the Dalmatian coast on parade, the same way Central Park in summer is both a place to relax and a place to watch the city happen before your eyes. It was urban theater at its finest.

By the time we sat in one of those tangling little seaside cafes, about an hour's walk from the ferry port, we felt as though we'd passed through the belly of Croatian coastal life. And maybe we hadn't. It's so easy to make pronouncements about discovering an “authentic” place, when in reality, as travelers, we usually just don't know. But this felt good, whatever it was, this swarm of people in sunglasses enjoying the day.

Still, though, there was something that we couldn't ignore. Amidst so much natural beauty—at one point, the hills that drop into the sea are covered in swaths of pink wildflowers—were hints of things distinctly man-made. The walking path along the water has been paved over, giving it the air of a town swimming pool. At the edge, the concrete is shattered, crumbling inevitably into the sea. The hotels that dot this stretch are lumbering and plain and painted in industrial yellows and blues. A seaside playground is full of hard metal slides and seesaws. There is no picturesque boardwalk in Split, no made-for-tourists vista to take photos or a luxury hotel with an Italian name. Not in this part, anyway. Instead it was just us in a cafe, watching people gossip and pat their impeccable little dogs, and smoke, and drink their coffee, and do everything else that an easy afternoon on the coast affords.

Go there:

To reach the strip of coastline just southeast of Split, take a left at the ferry port and keep walking for about an hour. A drink in a cafe will set you back about 8 kuna. It's worth it.

Paris: Five Minutes in Montparnasse

In Paris, I went to class each day in Montparnasse at the building set aside by the Sorbonne for its extension school. I say set aside because that's truly how it felt as a student there—as though none of us should ever confuse what we were doing, our charming little French lesson, with attending the real Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter, the domain of true French academia. Every morning, I took the 13 to Montparnasse-Bienvenue and walked all the way through that tangling rail station up the steps to the tiniest, strangest exit that belches you up right at the foot of the Tour Montparnasse.

It was a strange neighborhood—untouristed as anything in Paris can be, glamorous on the surface for its grand cafes and hulking Haussmann buildings and strangely workaday, too. Those cafes—the enormous and storied La Rotonde on the Boulevard Montparnasse, for example—were often flanked by dives and chain stores like the Body Shop. And all of it pitted at the foot of the famously ugly Tour, which is stuck through the center of the neighborhood like an enormous tombstone. “Discovering” Montparnasse meant sitting in those cafes, yes, and paying a weekly visit to the rambling mixed-bag of a market on the Rue Edgar Quinet. (You were as likely to find pairs of knockoff Converse sneakers as fresh produce.) I did all that—and went to the top of the Tour, too, sat in its sunny observation-deck cafe—and then, one day, decided to venture East, toward Denfert-Rochereau. I would call it a neighborhood, but it's really just a cluster of buildings (and one very pretty street market; it's worth mentioning) built around the famous traffic roundabout, Bertholdi's regal and rather cuddly looking lion standing guard.

I took this walk on one of those churning winter days where the gray-black clouds floated, I swear, almost vertical to the ground. If it was America, I would call it Wizard of Oz weather—volatile and weird, as though something more than raindrops were about to descend. And then something did. I was just past the lion and walking Northeastish (Paris is a circle, remember.), in that place where the Haussmann buildings dissolve into sand-colored tenement blocks, measly little half-skyscrapers. And in an instant, the sky opened, and it wasn't rain. Ice pellets—too big for sleet, too small for hail—dumped down in walloping white sheets. I feared for the fortitude of my umbrella. At one point, the noise of this stuff—slail?—pelting against the top of it gave me real pause. Half-terrified, I put my hand out. A million tiny spheres settled on my palm, glittering, and then melted to nothing. It ended as quickly as it started, the pellets disappearing as soon as they landed, after a hearty bounce, on the pavement.

For everyone who searches so hard for Real Paris, I wonder how much of it they would actually want to see—a clump of buildings, seventies architecture, a place where people go to school, a place where people go to work. But that is the magic of Paris. The sparkle, sometimes, falls straight from the sky.

Go there:

Montparnasse is located on the Left Bank in south-central Paris. It's easy to find.

The Beaches North of Boston

If you're from any town in Northeastern Massachusetts or Southern New Hampshire, chances are you spent at least one childhood summer at Hampton or Salisbury Beach, and chances are your parents and grandparents did too. The hallmark of this area—a scrubby strip of beaches just north of the Massachusetts border—isn't some charming boardwalk or picturesque ferris wheel, but the bubble-domed nuclear power plant that sits perched on the edge of a bay in nearby Seabrook. Its looming presence always lent a whiff of terror to any beach trip, as did the neon billboards along the highway that promised NO EVACUATION POSSIBLE BEYOND THIS POINT. Is there any better place to discuss the potential obliteration of the world with your inquisitive (and unfortunately literate) children than in the car on a Saturday morning on the way to the beach? I personally don't think so. I vividly remember this particular conversation. I was probably 9.

“Beyond what point? Like, right there where the sign us? How do they figure that out?”

“Laura, I don't know.”

“What happens if there's a nuclear accident? Like, what actually happens?”

“Laura...”

“What if there's an accident today? Is there going to be an accident today?!”

“Laura...”

And so we went to the beach. Beyond just being pretty in that steel gray, windswept-and-seaweed-strewn New England way, the way of whitewashed little cottages with lobster traps on the porch, Hampton and Salisbury (and Seabrook too, although the very name conjures a creeping fear, as though the “Jaws” theme should start playing at the mention of it) are the best places I know to blow all your pocket change on rounds of ski ball, old arcade games and pizza.

The arcades at Hampton and Salisbury aren't arranged along a classic boardwalk like the much bigger, rowdier Midatlantic beaches in New Jersey and Maryland. Hampton Beach tries for a boardwalk, but falls short at a narrow seaside roadway known to every graduating Haverhill High School senior as “the strip”, which is, of course, where they all go on Saturday nights to sit in traffic for hours and play Rhianna at top volume with the windows down while the boys in the next car shout things. This actually is fun. I've done it. (Class of '98.)

And there are dingy little shops full of sunblock and slogan t-shirts and saltwater taffy, big sixties-era hotels with roof decks, and ice cream and corn dog stands. Salisbury beach, instead of an oceanside strip of shops, has a kind of plaza near the shore filled with two-story arcades, the occasional downtrodden nightclub (no, not a bar), and endless pizza and fried dough. This is, in other words, seashore at its tacky-but-somehow-low-key best.

The last time I visited, we made a trip to Markey's Lobster Pound in Seabrook (Yes, you can see the nuclear plant out the window while you're eating your steamers.), which is more or less my favorite seafood restaurant on earth. The point of going to Markey's is to eat an enormous boiled lobster on a plastic picnic table, to cut yourself open on its shells, and to dribble butter across your favorite shirt while you watch the seagulls swoop across the marsh. It's really fun. But this time, we decided on lobster rolls instead.



This is lobster eating for the lazy, for people (like me, apparently) who prefer to spend more time eating than cracking and cleaning. But there is a key compromise here. Often, lobster rolls come slathered in mayo. Sogginess abounds. Amazingly, the Markey's lobster roll avoids the sog factor in two key ways: It keeps the mayo to a minimum, and the bun is toasted. In fact, much to its benefit, the lobster is barely dressed at all. We also got a quart of steamed clams—my mother, still recovering from a traumatic Hampton Beach fish-baiting incident as a child, refuses to eat them—which Markey's steams behind a separate counter while you wait. The beer is cheap. The views are nice. This, I am pretty sure, is what they call summer.

Go there:

Seabrook, Hampton, and Salisbury beach are located just north of the Massachusetts border off of routes 110 or 495, but you can probably figure out better ways to get there if you're coming from somewhere other than Haverhill, MA.

Markey's Lobster Pound is located at 420 State Route 286 in Seabrook, NH‎. They sell t-shirts as well as lobsters.

The Sweet Stuff: Granita from Sicily to NYC

When I visited my family in Sicily last spring, I ate almost continuously for a week. In those six days, I forgot what it felt like to be hungry. This, I suppose, is the point of going to Sicily. I remember every meal I had there in almost freakish detail—a chive tied around a hard-boiled egg, the tiny, edible spines of fried sardines. At one point, my Uncle Turi said to me between bites of a pizza topped with artichoke hearts and prosciutto, “You realize, of course, that the best food in the world is in Italy and the best food in Italy is in Sicily.”

You know what? He was completely right. Of all the amazing meals I ate in every corner of Italy—and there were dozens of them, trust me—none were quite like the food in Sicily. None were so packed with flavor or so effortlessly and elegantly prepared, and this was both in restaurants and at home. They sent me back to Paris a solid five pounds heavier and I hardly cared. I refused nothing.

But my single favorite food in Sicily wasn't something that was prepared at home. I had it at my cousin Graziella's house, sitting at the kitchen table with her children, my cousins Gieuseppina, Rosetta, and Gieuseppe. In the morning, her husband got us a hugely special treat for breakfast—granita. I'd had granita lots of times growing up, starting with the homemade version my great-grandmother mixed in a baking pan in her freezer. There was also, at one point, an old Italian guy in a dingy convenience store in Lawrence, Massachusetts who sold it, too. I remember that granita, and it was good, but it was not quite the real thing. It was more like what Americans would call slush—more icy than not, and very sweet. My grandmother always said—still says—"It's better in Sicily." But then, she says this about everything. The granita that my cousin brought us that morning in Sicily was maybe the best sweet treat I've ever had. And for a girl who loves her macarons and her ricotta cannoli and fat slabs of New York City cheesecake, this is saying something.

It came in a styrofoam cup with a lid and with a brioche, a sweet bun that's glazed and a bit sticky on the outside, and very soft on the inside. You're technically supposed to put the granita on the brioche to eat it, but I think I had some coordination problems at that early hour and just sort of ate the two of them as time and space would allow. The granita itself was a beautiful balance of icy and creamy—and not too sweet. My favorite granita flavor—on both sides of the Atlantic, regardless of quality or authenticity—is almond. It's the kind I always got as a kid. It's the kind my great-grandmother made. It's the flavor I requested in Sicily. For me, it's almond or bust.

You can imagine how happy I was to find out that I can actually get granita—and a pretty good one at that—in New York City. It's not perfect like the granita in Sicily, but it eases my cravings for not just the food itself, but for the comfort of having my family close, the lazy, sun-dappled beauty of that island. It's at Grom, the amazing-and-jaw-droppingly-but-justifiably-expensive Florentine gelato parlor that set up in New York a few years ago. And again, it's not perfect. The almonds are not as finely ground, so it's a bit gritty, and it doesn't have that blissful smoothness. But it's flavor, its perfect sweetness—is so close. It's close enough that I can drop in on a Saturday, drop my $6 on the counter, and be transported back, just for a minute, to that table with my family, the place where my heart lives.

Go there:

You can find Grom in major cities all over the world, including two locations in New York City and the original in Florence, Italy. I've been to all three of those. The granita costs about $6 and comes in almond, lemon, and coffee. The granita I had with my cousins was purchased somewhere in Biancavilla, Sicily. If you visit, I'm sure you could just ask someone for good granita and they'll tell you. That is, if you can find anyone in Biancavilla who speaks English. Which you probably can't.

The High Line: The Park Up There

Of all the design and public space projects to have gripped New York City since I moved here, few have gotten as much attention as the High Line. A park built on top of an abandoned strip of elevated rail line on the West Side, it had its own exhibit at MoMA when it was still in its design phases. And now it's open. Well, a piece of it is open. A portion above 20th Street is still under construction and the unrestored line near 34th Street could still be demolished.

It is not the first park of its kind—the Promenade Plantee in Paris is similar (but more traditional in terms of approach) and others are now planned in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle.

After a quick visit yesterday afternoon when the crowds were relatively thin and the sun was blaring, I have to say. It's pretty awesome. The designers worked to incorporate the site's original use—the rail line—into the design, so some of the original track is still present. The plantings are based on the foliage that grew naturally on top of the High Line after it was abandoned in the 1980s. There are places where the path melts into the garden, where it swings to the right or left and splits as a rail line would. There are vistas to admire the view and seating to catch rays or read a book. Maybe it won't be like this on weekends when the crowds come and when the chic Meat Packing District and Chelsea hotels start putting lawn chairs on the perimeter, but on a Monday afternoon, the High Line was sunny and serene—an escape from the chaos below.

Go there:


The High Line is located on the West Side of Manhattan and runs from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street, with sections north of 20th opening on later dates. It's open from 7am to 10pm. For more information, call (212) 500-6035.

Travel Sundries: NYC and Beyond

I was told by a friend that I'm not allowed to complain too loudly about last summer. (I was backpacking the Mediterranean, so.) But I missed New York City terribly while I was gone—I'm allowed that much—and by the time I returned to it in August, most of the Fun Summer Stuff here was winding down or done. In short, I am psyched about my summer. And I'm psyched to write about it. Here's a smattering of travel-related and sort-of-not-travel-related stuff I've had my eyes on.

• My sister's photography is in Review Santa Fe this month and they've set up a nice page with her work. Check out her photos from our little trip to Mont Saint Michel in the north of France last spring.
  
• My friend Ola at DiverseTraveller wrote about travel companions on her blog, and she wrote a bit about traveling with me. We hardly knew each other when we set out for Dalmatia together in April, and it really was a wonderful experience. I've traveled with some incredible people—many of whom were strangers at the beginning of the journey and good friends by the end. This is, to be sure, one of my favorite things about solo travel.
  
• My favorite New York City recession special of the moment is the $35 chicken dinner for two at Smith's on Macdougall.
  
• Recently discovered: Locomotoring. A travel site after my own heart.
  
• I think my next trip will be Turkey? It's shaping up that way.
  
• A year ago today, I left Paris for the south of France and continued onto the rest of the Mediterranean. It was maybe the best thing I ever did. The photo is from the top of the hill in Marseille, near the basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde. The guidebooks tell you that you won't like Marseille as much as other places on the Riviera, but we loved its weird combination of frenetic and chilled out, its very un-Parisian grit. If I ever went back to France to work (or play), I would go to Marseille.
  

The Souvenir Shop Cleans Up: Aqua in Dubrovnik

On the rainiest of rainy days, the water cascades along Dubrovnik's marble streets in rivers. It rolls down its steps and through its alleys in gushes, as though the hard white city can't bear to absorb a single drop. Water pours off the terra cotta roof tiles. I roll my jeans up to my knees.

I had planned to visit an island or a ramshackle seaside town, but the weather nullifies my plans, makes them seem stupid and pointless. So I walk. I search for souvenirs.

Any European city will give you trinkets, and Dubrovnik is no exception. Shops along the Placa offer snow globes and postcards, scraps of fabric covered in traditional Croatian embroidery patterns for exorbitant prices—the equivalent of 20 Euros for something the size of a napkin. What you'll also see, whether in Dubrovnik or any other place deemed a “destination,” are the orphan souvenirs, the items that have nothing to do with tradition or place. In one dark store, a woman stands guard over racks of hemp necklaces and colored candles that seem better suited to the parking lot of a Phish concert. In another, pictures of Jesus—whose image is, I suppose, more versatile. In another, giant ceramic roses.

And then, I am saved. The store crops up clean and white amidst the chaos of the other shops, its windows orderly and well styled. The store is called Aqua, and it's made it its mission to create quality Croatian souvenirs. (Although their eyes, I'm sure, are on the entire Mediterranean.) Some will balk, I know, at the idea of something so calculated. Don't travelers—real travelers—search for something a little more authentic to bring home?

Well, sure. If you fancy yourself something so important as a traveler. Most of the time, I don't, and I like souvenirs that know what they are. Silver spoons engraved with skylines, logo-printed shot glasses and golf balls. Aqua is that concept, but beautifully executed. The entire line of souvenirs is done in shades of white, blue, and gray, to reflect Croatia's relationship with the sea, and they offer several signature patterns, from grown-up nautical to an adorable, cartoony fish print.

There are bathrobes and beach towels, sure, but I flipped over the small goods. I assembled an entire pencil case in the fish pattern—complete with pencils, a sharpener, a ruler, a tiny roll of tape, and an eraser—for about the equivalent of 10 American dollars. It's maybe the best thing I've ever brought home from anywhere; it's lovely to look at, I'll actually use it, and it doesn't take up an alarming amount of space in my bag. On a rainy day in Dubrovnik, it seems, Aqua was just what I needed.

Go there:

Aqua Maritime stores can be found in seaside cities across Croatia, including Dubrovnik, Split, and Rovinj. The Dubrovnik location can be found at Placa 7, Stradun.