The Luxpats

Tag: travel

  • Travel Resolutions and How To Keep Them

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    Maybe you made a New Years travel resolution. Maybe you were flicking through Instagram and decided you should see the alps in person. Here’s how to guarantee that you follow through on your travel resolution. Whether you’re dreaming of a three month tour of SE Asia or working up the courage to get out of your town…

  • Nomad Trade-Offs: One Day, Two Ways

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    You’re a middle class stay-at-home Mom. What is a typical spring day like for you, at home and on the road? What are the nomad trade-offs? It’s interesting to me to compare the benefits and difficulties of both lives–the trade-offs, habit changes, and general trends. This is my entirely personal comparison of the ups and…

  • Productivity and the Power of 15 Minutes

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    What happens to productivity under the constant barrage of change that is nomadic life? How do you keep working when everyone around you is wearing a swimsuit, when your arms are tired from carrying children and suitcases, when you can never quite get all the sand out of your hair, when your flight is delayed and your baby is…

  • That Kind of a Woman

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    I asked my mother if she ever thought she’d find herself sitting naked on a toilet in Africa with a shaved head and a tattoo on her hip. She thought about it. No, she hadn’t, she said. She and Dad have come to visit us and their grandson for three months. Her head was not…

  • 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…

  • 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…