The Luxpats

Category: Destinations

  • Life Lessons from My Time in the Airport Bathroom

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    Title photo credit: Matt Chan @ Flickr.com I had a character defining moment. I never thought it would be in an airport bathroom. I thought when the moment came, I would learn who I really was as I was saving another person’s life, or confronting a robber in my home, or something equally righteous and…

  • Getting Dissed by a Dolphin

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      Growing up, there were two kinds of kids in the world: kids who had been to Disneyland and kids who hadn’t. If you were in the first group, we poor kids naturally hated your guts. My own family’s version of a vacation was a 13-hour non-stop drive to Salt Lake City to visit relatives…

  • The Philippines: Steam and Ghosts, Part III

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    The zoo is an hour’s drive in the rain, through soupy fields of rice paddies. Occasionally we pass a farmhouse that seems to float in the water around it. A family sits on the porch: a grandmother,  a mother, and a small boy watching a teenaged boy steering their water buffalo through the muddy furrows.…

  • The Philippines: Steam and Ghosts

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    They send a car to fetch me in the morning, even though the call center is only a kilometer from my hotel. I am a client, and they are careful about security. On the drive we pass through shafts of dusty sun that pierce the dome above us. Even the sunny days steam here, even…

  • Conversations: Gypsy Bar

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    One evening, I had drinks with a black friend at a gypsy pub at the foot of the mountain. I say black because it would matter, when he said, unprovoked, “What some people don’t understand is that the whites came and built everything. Some black people just want to take it all without working. They…

  • Conversations with the Tribe

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    “The gardener is Luke. He’s wonderful, he’s from Malawi.” I follow Bronwen’s elegant pointer finger to the smiling man on the lawn. His grin splits his face into deep lines. “How are youu?” he calls. … “Don’t worry about making friends,” Amanda says.  “We’re not as cliquey with foreigners as we are with each other.”…

  • Dear Aboda: The Carousel of Houses Part IV

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    The money they suddenly wanted to charge us is more than David makes in a month. On that restless night in windy Vredehoek before we finally moved into the mansion, David and I had been asleep when the agent called from Seattle. She wanted to confirm our move the next day. From the bedroom I…

  • The Carousel of Houses: Part III

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    In the afternoon we sat together on the couch, waiting to move again. Including hotels, it would be the fifth and hopefully final move in two months. We fanned ourselves in an amicable silence. We don’t always analyze our fights anymore, at least not right away. Before Spencer, we performed constant maintenance. Ours was a…

  • The Carousel of Houses: Part II

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    Green Point, where we’d been living, is an upmarket little neighborhood that slopes gently up from the beach. Cool breezes dry the sweaty foreheads of its residents as they enjoy sundowners on their porches, and there is little real wind there. In Vredehoek, where we moved the next day, you are perched upon the steep…

  • The Carousel of Houses: Part I

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    On New Year’s Eve, David was in the middle of his nightly relaxation routine, putting a rack of ribs on the barbeque, when we got a call from the rental agency woman. “I just wanted to make sure you found accommodations for tomorrow,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to be homeless!” We were supposed…