A year or so ago a friend of mine wrote a story for the website of a national women’s magazine that was something along the lines of “How to Dine at a Four-star Restaurant with Kids.” It was one of those list articles that magazines love, the sort that websites love even more, and her editor had asked for 10 tips. By tip #8, she had run out of ideas so she threw in “don’t breastfeed at the table.” She was envisioning dinner at a super high-end restaurant, the sort of place that you would probably never take a baby in the first place, but that would have a lovely women’s lounge nursing mothers could retire to just in case. Two days later there was a Facebook page dedicated to getting her fired for daring to say anything against breastfeeding in public.

This morning’s news that Malaysia Airlines has banned babies from first class struck me as a very similar sort of story. The airline has actually had the policy in place for awhile, but just officially announced that it will be expanding it across all of its flights. The general public and the media have just caught wind of it, and it’s turning into quite the hot-button issue. On the one hand, we’ve all been the passenger stuck next to a crying baby on a long-haul flight…it’s no fun, and I can imagine feeling even less positive about it had I dropped several thousand dollars on the ticket. Still, parents are outraged at infants being outright banned from anywhere. Is this some sort of Baby Jim Crow?

Eh, no. But demand for child-free flights, or at least child-free zones on planes is increasing. British Airways and Virgin America both floated the idea of child-free flights earlier this year, and a recent survey found that 60 percent of travelers were in favor of creating “family-friendly zones” on planes that would essentially contain all the crying babies and fidgety toddlers to one area. Which, in the end, might make moms more comfortable too–most parents I know feel terrible when their kid is the one getting the stink-eye on a flight, and if they were surrounded by other parents and kids, it may not feel like as big of a problem.

As for the First Class thing, to me this is indicative of a broader trend toward integrating children into absolutely every experience and space. I see babies at cocktail lounges, in the lobbies of swanky hotels, at high-end restaurants, and in designer boutiques. These are clearly not people who can’t afford a babysitter so much as people who seem to think that having a kid shouldn’t change their life at all. But you know what? It does. Much like my friend’s suggestion about babies in high-end restaurants, there are just some places that aren’t baby-appropriate, and maybe people need to change their lifestyles a bit during the baby and toddler years. Is flying Business Class for a couple years really such a tough compromise?

The post Should Babies Be Banned from First Class? appeared first on The Faster Times.

As print newspapers fight to stay alive, travel sections lose pages and steadily increase service journalism while operating under more scrutiny than ever. In support of our paper/e-ink colleagues, here’s the Sunday print travel news that’s fit to post about.

Most weeks, the New York Times travel section puts every other paper’s travel section to shame. On the basis of column inches alone, it is the Queen of newspaper travel sections. Lately, though, the Grey Lady seems to be struggling with an element that has never been more important than it is today, as attention spans are shrinking daily. I’m speaking, of course, of the intro or, in journalist-speak, the lede. That first sentence or two that grabs the reader’s attention right away and makes them want to keep reading past the jump. This week’s section, filled as it was with historically focused pieces and advice about waking up at dawn, was particularly in need of some good bait, and it just wasn’t there. The one story that did draw readers in failed to deliver once it got us there. “Chaim Kahanovich, an 18-year-old Polish Jew, caught his first brown glimpse of the Holy Land from the deck of a steamer in November 1924. He would never leave,” begins a story on Israel. What should be a fascinating story about one of Israel’s first modern-day settlers devolves instead into a sentimental recounting of facts, delivered by Chaim’s Seattle-based descendant.

Stories about a quickly disappearing historical district in Shanghai, ways to catch a glimpse of Atget’s Paris, and an incongruous village of sculptures on the outskirts of Moscow, on the other hand, suffer from the opposite problem: All three stories are fascinating, they just start off with a yawn. “On Duolun Lu, also known as Duolun Road Cultural Street, a short but history-studded pedestrian street in the Hongkou District of Shanghai, working-class residents mingle with tourists — mostly Chinese — seeking to commune with the progressive literary giants who lived and worked there in the 1920s and ’30s,” begins the Shanghai story. It turns out to be a great read, but it’s hard to keep the eyes from glazing over when the first sentence is a paragraph long.

In general, the section was a bit of a miss, but I suppose even the Queen has an off day now and again.

SCORE: 5/10 carry-ons

The LA Times, on the other hand, seems to have its mojo back. I’ve been to Oklahoma City and it’s not really a destination I feel a burning desire to return to, but the story on its 100-year-old stock yards kept me reading, regardless. This is the last large stockyard in the country, writer Jay Jones tells us, “the last place on the plains where cattle are bought and sold in huge quantities.” Purely as a history lesson it’s an enjoyable read, whether or not readers take Jones’ advice about where to buy a cowboy hat when they’re in town.

And Christopher Reynolds handles history with his usual verve in a piece on Old Santa Fe as it celebrates its 400th year. “‘Oldest house,’ panted Robert Chavez, steering his pedicab past a 17th century adobe,” Reynolds begins. “‘Oldest church,’ he added a moment later, nodding left toward the 17th century San Miguel Mission Church. Santa Fe — rich, tan, relentlessly artsy and frequently artificial — is really old, by American standards. The city turned 400 this year.”

It’s a great intro, a perfect blend of local color and simple facts. The third feature in the section–about birdwatching in Sacramento–is about as boring as it sounds, although bird watchers will no doubt appreciate the amount of information it contains.

SCORE: 6/10 carry-ons

The Washington Post delivered its usual stellar (if short) section this week, with a wider variety of stories than it has been running lately. The sections features included an adventure piece on rock-climbing in China, a weekend-trip piece on Nantucket in the off-season, and a well-crafted story on enjoying Aspen during shoulder season. I’m convinced that what makes the Post’s section so good is the fact that it’s always at least partially written by the same staffers every week. The occasional outside contributor pops in and out, but the staff writers deliver consistently good work every week. Take this week’s Aspen story: Really, it’s just another story on the benefits of traveling during shoulder season. But because writer Andrea Sachs has handled this sort of content before, she knows it needs extra effort to keep from being boring. Her care and time are evident in lines like, “The 44-mile highway wiggles like an elongated snake, winding past sparkling lakes with small islands of aspens and peaks that crowd the sky.”

And rather than just rave about the great deals and availability in shoulder season, Sachs tried out the city’s new “Adopt a Tourist” program, which paired her with a local upon her arrival and gave her a new way to breathe life into an old story.

The short piece on Nantucket in the off-season had the same potential for boredom, but writer Ted Weesner’s staccato pace kept the story interesting.”Wake early. Roll out of bed. Trip down a flight of stairs and out the door and along a path of bramble, rose hip and sand,” he begins. “Skitter down a powdery cool dune and fall upon: more than 10 miles of untouched beach. Endless ocean, endless sky, fiery sun peeking over a shockingly broad horizon. Not another mammal in sight.”

In contrast, the story on rock-climbing in Yangshuo, China loses steam as it slips into generic descriptions of the region’s craggy rocks, and list-like “I did this, then I did that” sentences. In one particularly bland paragraph, the writer describes getting his equipment set in painstaking detail: “They lent us a rope, which I fastened to my harness with a figure-eight knot. Tom fed the rope through his belay device. As I scrambled up the face, he took in the slack until I was suspended 60 feet off the ground.”

SCORE: 7/10 carry-ons

The post Weekly Travel Scorecard [10.03.10] appeared first on The Faster Times.

By Neil and Merle Berman

“O God, dis die Pa.”

(Translation from Afrikaans: “O God, it’s the father!”* Note: Afrikaans culture is patriarchal. The father is the consummate authority, never questioned, and never crossed.)

“There are lions behind that mound,” the cook told our guide, Mike. A moment later, a compact, sinewy lion emerged from the bushes 30 yards away, strolling towards our rudimentary campsite. I turned to see how Mike was reacting. “It’s a young male. He’s just curious, not hungry. Stand still and don’t make a sound,” he said confidently. My daughters turned to me, searching my face for guidance. A thousand thoughts raced through my mind. The truck was only 10 yards away, enough time for two girls to make it to safety, maybe three, but definitely not all of us. I had this crazy vision of two of them getting stuck in the door of the truck, and being bitten from behind… Suddenly I noticed that somehow the cook was already sitting in the truck — how did he get there? After about two seconds, it became clear: I had no idea what to do. Mike was our guide, experienced in dealing with this kind of situation, and I had no choice but to entrust the safety of my family to him. I signaled my daughters to follow Mike’s directions; the lion strolled around our campsite, and then casually departed.

We had just returned to our campsite from a game drive. My wife and I had had spent a little time in the Botswana bush before we emigrated to U.S. and always wanted to give our three American daughters a taste of Africa, to see what it was like to be visitors in the animals’ environment rather than having them as guests in ours. Now they knew.

Mike was our charismatic twenty-something guide. Shedding mirrors, cell phones, and television for a makeshift canvas-frame shower and a portable potty happened easily as we absorbed instructions for survival from our fearless leader. Under his direction, we saw lions, wild dog, hyena, hippos, giraffe, and many different varieties of antelope. We survived an elephant cow ramming the front of our truck, aggressively protective of her young baby. Mike fixed the truck, prepared our food, spotted our game, protected us. Every night, he regaled us with tales of safari trips with labile groups of Italians or filming cigarette commercials among formidable wild life. My wife and I listened, fascinated, our daughters hanging on every word.

Traditionally, the final night of such a trip was a “civilized” dinner at a hotel in the town of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Mike and his brother Pattie, also a safari guide, joined us. The evening was pleasant enough, but the two young guides clearly had something else in mind. Before we knew it, they had secured our permission to take our two older daughters to a local disco.

How could I refuse? After all, Mike had protected us from irascible hippos and a lion that was presumably not hungry. I had entrusted my family’s welfare and security to Mike for the past ten days.

One a.m., two a.m., three a.m. passed. I paced the hotel grounds. What was I thinking? Letting my daughters go off with two strange young men to a disco in a foreign country? At 3:10, a car roared into the parking lot. Mike stumbled out one door, beer in one hand, my oldest daughter’s hand in the other.

“O God, dis die Pa!”

Our daughter’s assurances that everything was okay contrasted comically with the expression of total terror on Mike’s face. Mike was now just a young suitor dealing with the girl’s father. All semblance of his authority dissipated. We were no longer in the bush.

The post Afrikaaners Don’t Eat Their Young… Right? appeared first on The Faster Times.

By Taber Wood

As a child I had an indiscriminate palate and would eat just about anything, a concept offensive to my displaced French mother. She often worried she was losing her cultural grip on her U.S.-born children and considered my democratic take on food a symptom of her daughter’s oafish American-ness.

Like the anti-Michael Pollan, I gravitated mysteriously towards food that least resembled its origins. Sitting on the cart in the supermarket, I would sneak Spam, concentrated lemon juice, Fruit Roll-ups and hot dog buns from the shelves, slipping them through the register. My looting would remain secret until months later, when the shell of an artificial lemon, sucked dry and imploded, was found wedged between the couch cushions.

The summer I was 10 years old, on our way back from visiting French relatives, American Airlines served my family a beige-colored 1950′s-style Chicken Stroganoff for dinner. Repulsed, my mother urged my family to avoid the meal, but I alone happily consumed it without chewing, and I know this because on the car ride back from JFK, it came up whole.

Our brown 1970′s Mercedes-Benz had been baking in the airport parking lot all summer and by this point felt like a convection oven. My father sped as usual, probably doing his “no hands on the wheel” tricks with his knees to make my mother angry.

I felt a surge in my stomach, so I unrolled the window and aimed the best I could, but we were driving 70 mph. and the forces of aerodynamics were against me. I saw vomit in my lap, in my hair, on my seat belt. The smell was atrocious. In the small back cab, my two brothers, Walter and Kendrick, screamed and scrunched themselves as far away from my toxic explosions as possible. My mom whipped her head around to see that they stayed trapped in their seatbelts.

I requested a stop, but it was Labor Day weekend and my dad was determined to make it home before we hit rush-hour traffic. Suddenly, my suffering was a game of endurance, with him encouraging me to “hang in there.” The concept hurt my pride, and encrusted in vomit, I began to cry.

My mother turned around to offer some pity but also remind me that somehow this sad path was a sign of my own failed Frenchness. “Own your stroganoff mistake,” her face seemed to be saying. Embarrassed, my face streaming with tears, I leaned out the window to air-dry my hair, but the wind only tangled it, turning into a sharp wet whiplash against my face.

I cried harder and my father cut into the breakdown lane to speed up. We were suddenly going 90 mph, and I felt more stroganoff needed to leave me. I heaved up another serving, aiming vaguely for the window, but soon my two brothers were covered in a light spray. The smell was now unbearable. Almost forcing himself from the car, Kendrick stuck his head out the window as far as he could, screaming blindly into the airstream for me to stop it. Immobile in the middle and blanketed in vomit, Walter (the youngest) began to dry heave. In vain he tried to lean past Kendrick and use the window; predictably, he soon had Kendrick covered. And like a link in the chain of a home-made vomitorium, Kendrick indiscriminately vomited all over himself. Trying not to heave, too, my mother reached back from her seat with some Dunkin’ Donuts napkins she had found in the dashboard. It was like trying to tidy up an oil spill with a Q-tip.

We ended up hitting traffic anyway. It was midday and the heat began to bake the bile to our skin. We kept crying, our tears a refreshing rinse for the vomit on our faces.

By nightfall, none of us had any bile in us. We got out of the traffic, and I threw up a little in my mouth. Not wanting to cause any more trouble, and still snugly seat-belted, I suffered quietly as we rolled into our town. My dad stopped the car in the driveway, and instantly my mom stumbled out, heaving, into the pachysandra. Leaving her there, I took the keys from her bag, and solemnly made my way towards the door. I calmly went upstairs to the bathtub, where I released my final outburst of stroganoff nobly over the clean white tile.

Taber E. Wood is a writer living in Bushwick. She likes the young Al Pacino and burnt toast.

The post My Failed Frenchness appeared first on The Faster Times.

By T.R. Foley

I pedaled to the passenger window of the Mitsubishi sports car and pleaded with the gaunt-faced, middle-aged driver to be more considerate of cyclists. He shot back with insults and verbal abuse. I threatened to call the police.

A minute later his wiry frame exploded from the car, a beige University of Tennessee football hat resting atop his mangled gray coif tumbled, as he charged in a wide-eyed, flailing attack.

“I’m going to kill you, motherfucker!” he repeated, spit flying from his mouth as he ran with the flimsy and uncoordinated gait of a drunk. I cranked on my pedals, gaining fifty yards on him quickly and hid behind a yellow-and-red circus tent selling infomercial kitsch and Halloween masks. Crouching behind a display, bike in one hand, small knife in the other, I watched as my attacker returned to his car.

He patrolled the parking lot for the next ten minutes, dedicated to finding me. When his car turned away I sprinted to the nearby garage of an air conditioning repair shop and waited for the police.

It was mid-October, and I had left New York City a few weeks earlier on an unassisted bike trip to profile voters during the 2008 presidential election. My goal was to cycle from my Manhattan apartment to the porch of friends in New Orleans and talk to strangers everyday, all day, for fifty days. My friends worried. How safe would I be in the South, talking politics in the age of Obama? They feared a derelict, moonshine south — caricatures of real people made famous in movies like “Deliverance” — while I thought of my southern neighbors as a mint julep drinkin’ southern aristocracy, or a happy gaggle of Bud Light boozing NASCAR fans. But on the heels of hiding from a rage-aholic underneath a circus tent, I felt a deepening resentment and shyness around strangers. The idealism I packed so proudly in Manhattan and had hailed as my greatest asset to friends now seemed lost in Dixie.

I arrived in Jasper, Georgia — a small marble-producing town in the North Georgia Mountains — a few days later. But because of a bad online address, my iPhone sent me to a chicken farm instead of my hotel.

The houses surrounding the chicken farm were early 20th-century, single-story structures with weedy flowerbeds and old farm implements rusting in the yard. Across the street were a couple of brand-new, two-story brick homes standing firm and apart on a large green hill. The area around the farm felt desperate and alone. The evening was silent and porch lights started to flicker on. As I sat, straddling my bike and scanning the neighboring yards for help, a motorbike appeared from the woods, circled to my right, and came to a stop.

Enter Brian: a well-built 26-year-old construction worker, missing several important teeth, en route to see a friend. Brian listened to a brief explanation of my difficulties, and then pulled a mayonnaise jar full of grapefruit juice, orange juice, and vodka from between his legs, drunkenly insisting that I try some of his brew. I politely declined. Noticing I was sun-burnt and without water, he appealed, “C’mon, I know you need some Vitamin C!”

“Quite alright,” I said as Brian shrugged his shoulders and drank to contentment.

Brian went on to explain that he would have liked to drive me, but he’d just received a second D.U.I., and the court had mandated a breathalyzer ignition lock as part of his probation, leaving the motorbike as his only transportation. “Tell you what, I’ll grab my buddy and his truck,” he said. “It’ll just be a minute or two.”

Fifteen long minutes passed but Brian didn’t return.

Frustrated, I crossed the street to the two-story brick McMansions, hoping the well-to-do family with their new truck and jetski might be in a better position to lend a hand. Alas, despite their well-lit kitchen and living room, and despite an open garage door, and despite the fact I could hear the sound of children playing, this family, like Brian, chose to ignore my heat-stricken and pathetic ass.

Out of options, I stood silent on their porch for a few moments and pondered the complications of complete darkness and how this day might be the end of my trip. Suddenly, and as unexpected as a Tennessee death threat, headlights appeared at the chicken farm.

Brian had taken his sweet, vodka-drinking time, but had finally arrived with a sober-ish friend, truck and directions to the hotel.

“I didn’t think you’d come back,” I said.

He scoffed, “I wasn’t gonna leave you out here all alone, buddy.”

With more than seven hundred miles left to cycle in Dixie, that felt pretty good to hear.

The post Cycling Dixie appeared first on The Faster Times.

Nador, Morocco — on the border of the Spanish enclave of Melilla — seems typical for border towns between nations in varying stages of development: long lines to get out of less-developed country and no line or any semblance of security to get in. Tiny women weighed into a crouch by giant bags of contraband with or without children on their backs hustle to or from the border. Caucasian Americans and Europeans, holding border-crossing permits, in fancy taxicabs, wait in one car line, some admittedly ill-at-ease in their air-conditioned sedans while the masses sweat outside. All in a day for Nador, Tijuana, or Juarez.

Caucasian backpackers pretending to be Spanish fit in here somewhere, and that’s what we were. We had arrived in Nador after ten days in Morocco, following what ended up being a 10-hour train from Fez, and needed to cross the border to Melilla to catch our boat to Malaga. When the taxicabs offered us a ride, we tried to convince them that our English was limited (therefore we weren’t American), thereby convincing ourselves that we would get a better deal and garner less hate. We did that, but in Morocco there were always competing transport offers, and this time, sleek black cabs were the only game in town.

We sat down at a table in an outdoor tea house to drink our fourth cup of deliciously lukewarm and minty sweet tea, debating whether or not the pricey taxi was necessary to get to Melilla.

As often happened when drinking tea in Morocco, someone asked us for money. As usual, I tried to chat with the very skinny, white, and rumpled woman standing in the sunlight before us. In his usual manner, my traveling companion Dave reached good-naturedly into his pocket for change.

Walking toward us, I could tell the woman was a little angry. She was definitely talking to the flies that circled her. But her next move shocked even our waiter.

As Dave searched for every last Moroccan cent (we were leaving the country, after all, and had no use for the currency in America), the woman, who was quite tall, reached down and picked up Dave’s glass of tea, inspected it for errant flies, lifted it to her mouth, and gracefully poured it down her throat, pinkie daintily astray from her glass and pointed in our direction.

Dave was speechless. I laughed nervously and looked around for a reaction that I could model. Our waiter watched us, doing nothing. Other patrons watched intently. Still, no one reacted: no knowing looks, no scowls, and no nods of empathy. I produced a laugh, again.

Our newly hydrated visitor produced a hand — money, again. Dave was incredulous; I was confused. “Did you give her any?” I asked, thinking that he had to have given her something (his street-change-giving was a source of pride for him).

“No,” he said. He was finished giving change to her (to anyone?). He looked frustrated, defeated. He was angry, and he didn’t understand how a strange woman could drink his tea and then have the audacity to ask for money. I wondered: didn’t the ridiculousness of her behavior eclipse its rudeness? I suggested we take the lavish cab and leave Nador.

The civilized cab ride improved our spirits, but I was still consumed with the hilarity of the situation. It made perfect sense. In this town, everything was upside down and inside out. Street beggars were white and spoke English well. Cab drivers were Spanish.

Unlike the rest of Morocco, there was no permanent street culture: no orange juice sellers, no men filling the tea shops, staring at the usual sluggish horde of tourists walking, watching, and stopping traffic with their lazy gazes. There were no “tourists” at all, actually — just travelers.

It was a city in limbo. Everyone was moving somewhere quickly, and often in opposite directions. The clash of societies, the chaotic yet languorous mood, so unlike the rest of the country, unlike the rest of any country. It just seemed just right to me that this woman should come to Nador and carry on her inexplicable behavior, without consequence. It was time to return to a land where up wasn’t down.

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