Category: Travels

I am toying with a new concept, namely The Work Vacation.  Pick some exotic locale and bring your laptop.  Write your book and blog as usual.  Go out every now and then to see some sights.  In essence seeing sights replaces the time at home you would spend doing chores and taking care of family.

I find the idea of The Work Vacation appealing.  I am convinced many people don’t find their vacations that much fun in the first place.  ("What are vacations for anyway?," I can imagine Robin Hanson’s voice echoing in my head.)  People are losing the feeling of flow, and of accomplishment, from their workplace.  Often they argue more with their spouses when together all day.  They feel stress at coping with regular decisions and unfamiliar languages (of these, only the loss of work and flow describes me, I might add, but that is significant).

Perhaps many people take vacations for social reasons, to accommodate their spouses, to signal what kind of person they are, for memories, or to check countries off a list.  A Work Vacation would accommodate (some of) these motives to considerable degree.

I love Indian cities, but if only for reasons of air pollution, I don’t want to spend most of the day outdoors running around.  And many interesting and worthwhile parts of India don’t have many tourist sites but are still worth a bit of time.

Natasha finds the concept of The Work Vacation deeply distressing.  First, it suggests I can leave home without abandoning work.  Second, it implies it is permissible to work on vacation.

Surely the Coase Theorem can solve these problems.

Upon my return home, Natasha’s first question was to ask why I was talking in a funny way.  "You sound hoarse.  Were you screaming at the Indians?"  Alas, it is just a few days of breathing in the air pollution in Hyderabad.

The monsoon is far less scary when they turn on their windshield wipers or for that matter when they have them.  For abandoned rusted tankers in the water, Goa is #1.  For non-abandoned rusted tankers, Goa also does well.  Many are carrying iron ore to China.  The Portuguese colonial churches are eerily like colonial Brazil, yet no one lives in old Goa any more.  My guide claims the state of Goa is 45 percent Christian.  My hotel practices Restaurant Apartheid and won’t let me sit with the Indian customers.  They try to talk me out of eating the Goan foods ("don’t you want the chicken breast Sir?  Very nice pastries…", etc.).  The white pumpkin curry is amazing.  Goa is far less densely populated than I had expected; the major city has only about 80,000 people.  One meal experience can involve being served by eight different people, none of whom ever stand more than ten feet away from you and each of whom you must say goodbye to.  Need I compare this to Bordeaux?  Cashews are the gift of choice.  When it stops pouring, which does happen occasionally, women flock to the beach in beautifully colored saris.  My taxi driver looked quite a bit like me; I believe he has Portuguese blood as I do.  I have read that the state of Goa has the highest per capita income in India; this appears to come from the entire distribution and not just from the peaks.  Malcolm Gladwell books are seen everywhere, as is Freakonomics, which has Angelina Jolie on the cover.  There is less here than I had thought but I’ve ended up liking it more.  Next is Hyderabad, and back to work.

"Of all possible debauches, travel is
unsurpassed by any I know. It’s the one invented after all the others
have ceased to excite."

Gustave Flaubert, letter to Ernest Chevalier (April 9, 1851)

Here is the permalink, from Terry Teachout’s blog.  Did I mention that I fly to Goa tomorrow, monsoons permitting?  I’ll have two days of pure vacation there, so your tips are welcome…comments of course are open…

Bordeaux is one of the loveliest and most architecturally consistent 18th century towns in Europe.  There is otherwise little to see here.  The restaurants you find are amazingly good, but there are fewer than one might expect.  Only the immigrants keep their shops open on Sunday.  The town feels oddlly empty on all days.  The professors give the graduate assistants knives and expect them to peel the white asparagus for dinner.  That is how it should be.  Michel Houllebecq’s Possibility of an Island is available here (but not yet in the U.S.) in English; he is France’s most vital current author.  The wines are wasted on me but the raw oysters are not.  I saw Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinettte in the local multiplex.  You would not expect a mix of Kirsten Dunst, indie rock, and the Versailles Palace to be a winner, but this is a beautiful and quite fantastic film; a must-see on the big screen.  Imagine a combination of Clueless, Peter Greenaway, and Lost in Translation.  The city of Bordeaux would be wonderful and charming as France’s ninth largest city.  But it is the fifth largest, which makes me wonder where all this is headed.

And now for something completely different, here is Bryan Caplan’s class autobiography.  Mine would involve lots of sports, a mother who brought me to chess tournaments, a father who didn’t believe in college, and a grandmother who loved Victor Hugo and Shakespeare.

"Tim Harford says we shouldn’t buy rental car insurance!"  That was not The Economist in the Family, that was Natasha (!).

"Now the Chinese are second after the Dutch in overnight stays," Mr.
Noll continued, adding that about 100,000 Chinese citizens visited
Trier [Germany] last year, and about 40,000 of them spent at least one night.

"And they come all year," he said, "even in the low season."

Try to guess why, but you will find the answer under the fold…

1. My favorite demographic charts: Track population changes by borough.

2. My favorite NYC dining guide blog: Click on the categories on the top row of the blog to see the whole thing.

3. Favorite neighborhood: To live in?  Manhattan is getting so uncool.  I will pick the corner of Hudson and Barrow, which is near W. Houston and the West Side Highway, just north of the Saatchi building.  There it still looks and feels like the New York City I grew up with (from New Jersey, that is).  But when will I have the money and the courage to try?  The Upper East Side bores me and the best food is in Queens; neither is suitable for real life.

4. Favorite book about: Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan, by Philip Lopate.  I am surprised how few people know this one.  Compulsively readable, and it makes me want to write a comparable work.  But "A Drive Around Fairfax"?  No way.

5. Favorite dim sum: Oriental Garden, in Chinatown, Elizabeth St., make sure to arrive early.  Don’t forget Flushing, especially if you have time to kill at LaGuardia.  The juicy pork buns at Joe’s Shanghai?  Jackson Diner is still great Indian food though it is not the revelation it once was; the competition has caught up with it.

6. Best lunch bargain: Nougatine, the bistro attached to Jean-Georges.  Get the venison with green chiles for its amazing mix of textures and heat.

7. Favorite Seinfeld episode: How about Master of His Domain?  Soup Nazi is overrated and in fact I don’t even like it.  The one where Jerry and Elaine try to be together again is another favorite, plus Show Within a Show.

8. Favorite free activity that even most New Yorkers don’t do: Browse the auction displays at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, especially before the major auctions in May and November.

Movies, music, literature?  Not today.  You might as well try "My Favorite Things Not in New York" for an easier task.

Here are three items I always bring on long trips.

1.  Kensington noise canceling headphones. These are much cheaper than the heavily advertised version by Bose and they work very well.  With the headphones on you can actually listen to music on an airplane, but don’t think that you are going to sleep all that much better.  One AA battery will get you there and back although I always bring a spare in case I forget to turn off the noise canceling switch.

2.  Paul Fredrick Non-Iron Dress Shirt.  Although not sold as a travel shirt this non-iron shirt looks almost as good on the second wearing as on the first and you can wash it in the sink, hang it to to dry and wear it again on day three.   I have "non-iron," and "wrinkle-free" dress shirts from other manufacturers but none are as good as the Paul Fredrick.

3.  Kodak DX7590 digital camera.  There are plenty of things wrong with this camera – like almost all digitals it’s slow to start and has a long refresh rate between pictures (and thus is not good at capturing action) and it’s bulky.  This camera, however, has two redeeming features.  First, and most importantly, it has a 10 times zoom and not a useless digital zoom but a real 10 times optical zoom.   The zoom makes all the difference when you want to get the close-up of that gargoyle on top of Saint-Chapelle.

As noted, the real lens makes the camera bulky but do you want to impress your friends with your "cute camera" or do you want to impress your friends with your photographs?  (Also, if you want impress your friends with your photos be sure to delete 80 percent of them.)

The other redeeming feature is the battery life.  With an additional 256mb memory card I can take well over 100 pictures, about right for a week trip, and can leave the battery charger at home.

As I arrived at the Bastille Metro a mass of students exited, marched across the 5 lane roundabout and sat down.  Chaos ensued.  Unfortunately for them the road was so wide they could manage a blockade only 2 to 3 students deep.  This was not enough as angry young french men with jobs drove their mopeds through the crowd kicking the students along the way.  Apparently the workers of the world are not united, at least not in France.  Unable to maintain their ranks the protest fell apart.  Today, however, some 40,000 students protest across France and the police presence in Paris remains strong. 

Here is my previous post describing the economics behind the protests.

1. A few of the best restaurants are Pierre Gagnaire, Taillevent, Le Cinq, and perhaps Guy Savoy.  Most critics might put Gagnaire as number one.

2. Michelin "two-forkers" are quite good, but you must book to get in.  In general you can’t get a seat in a decent Parisian restaurant unless you either book or show up at opening.  If you are wandering around looking for good food at 8:30 p.m., or for that matter 1 p.m., you are unlikely to do well.

3. In The Louvre, spend an hour in the Poussin room and also obsess over Watteau’s Voyage to Cythera.

4. In Musee d’Orsay, gaze at Courbet’s Origin of the World (sorry, I can’t link to the image on a family blog but do Google it) and Puis de Chavannes, in addition to the usual delights.

5. Go see the medieval tapestries at Musee Cluny.

6. Spend a few hours walking the main roads of the Left Bank.  Start at Invalides and take the major arteries through to the Islamic Center.  Walk, walk, walk.

7. Watch The Triplets of Belleville and spend hours walking through the (rapidly gentrifying) working-class neighborhoods of the Right Bank.  The Metro is splendid but it robs you from seeing the greatest walking city on earth (Buenos Aires is number two).  Don’t take it.  Walk, walk, walk.

8. Go into a good cheese shop and spend $40.  Focus on the weirder cheeses.  Buy the non-pasteurized delights.  Sit down with a baguette and some fruit as well, finishing the meal with small squares of outrageously priced dark chocolate.  Throw in a sausage for good measure.  Keep the cheese leftovers in your room at night and eat them for breakfast the next day.  And the day after that.  See how many days they will keep, you will be surprised.

9. Rue de Bussi and thereabouts has a convenient collection of cheese, fruit and bread shops, and it is in an excellent part of the Left Bank.

10. Internet Cafes are hard to come by.  You must rely on the dumpy area near Centre de Pompidou.  I find Paris to be the hardest city to blog from.

11. See a "world music" concert from Algeria, Madagascar, or the Congo.  Or try contemporary music at IRCAM.

12. Here is my previous post My Favorite Things French.  Douse yourself in Godard films  before going.  Start with Breathless, Band of Strangers, and My Life to Live.

13. If you want to read recent French social science (if you can call it that), try Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Jean Baudrillard, Alain Badiou’s Metapolitics, and Gilles Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus.  Don’t get too upset if these books only make intermittent sense.  At least they are alive.  For a recent hit novel, try Houllebecq’s The Elementary Particles.

Comments are open, and I encourage all of you but especially John Nye and Barkley Rosser — both Paris experts — to make a few suggestions for my friend.

Worth a look, taken from www.digg.com.  And here are some pictures of the new species found in Indonesia’s "lost world."

2. Many of them came from rural Western Canada in the 1920s.

3. They left Western Canada, as they had left Holland, Prussia, and Russia before that, for fear they would be forcibly assimilated, in this case through public education.  Mexico offered them a special (Spanish-language) contract.

4. Most of them are blond.

5. Each village has a number, not a name.

6. Unlike many of the American Amish, they use cars and electricity without hesitation.  They are quite prosperous, in a Mennonite sort of way.

7. They still make cheese using methods from centuries ago.

8. Their best cheeses, which are non-pasteurized, are illegal in the United States.

9. Many of their road signs and advertisements are written in hochdeutsch, but they speak eighteenth century plattdeutsch.  Their Spanish is sing-song and halting all at once.

10. They bake little cookies called "Galletas Menonitas," and they eat borscht and tacos.

11. The adjacent Tarahumaras make for a striking contrast.

To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, when a man is tired of Mexico he is tired of life and death.  My short time here has been just splendid:

1. From the air one sees many enclaves of small condominiums and townhomes, a’ la Orange County.  This is the Mexico of the future.

2. When it comes to median income, this is the wealthiest part of Mexico I have seen.  It is not a city of peaks and excess, but real poverty is hard to find.

3. The town is neat and orderly and the streets lie in a near-perfect grid.  Imagine Mexico run by the Swiss or the Singaporeans.

4. Downtown there appear to be more Chinese than Mexican restaurants.  The Chinese, however, came here in the 1880s, and have since had little contact with Szechuan grannies.  Imagine them having imported the menus for Chinese food, but not the recipes, and trying to recreate those titled dishes using their imagination and Mexican ingredients.

5. The weather is truly perfect.  In January, that is.

6. My guide insists on telling people I am from the more-recognized "Carolina," even though he knows full well I live in Virginia.

7. The town square has lovely fig and orange trees; both fill with squawking blackbirds as night approaches.  Otherwise there is absolutely nothing to see here in the way of tourist sights.

8. Sonoran beef compares favorably to that of Argentina.  Eat in Jardin Xochimilco, better yet are the street places.

9. The flour tortillas are much grainier (and better) than what we receive in the States.  They are wonderful toasted over burning sugar cane.

10. Try the coyota, the town specialty.  It is the most delicious baked sweet I have sampled, ever.  Scroll down to this recipe.  A coyota alone is worth the price of the trip, which was only $120 and 75 minutes from LA.