In a few hours I set off on a series of budget planes, trains and automobiles, for nearly 24 hours of sleepless, undignified, butt-pounding travel (keep your tsk-tsking comments to yourself Tim Leffel) to get myself from Iasi, Romania back to my travel writing Apartment of Solitude in an abandoned…

The return to my unintended second home – Iasi, Romania – has been filled with equal parts business-as-usual and unlikely surprises. The overnight train ride from Bucharest to Iasi was pure Romania:  The train was full to bursting.  My compartment was all men.  On that note, why am I always…

I’ve been thinking a lot about slow moving events lately – things that take unthinkable amounts of time – and trying to imagine what it would be like to sit through these glacial events as a spectator.  Continental drifting, the lifespan of stars, Bush’s presidential terms… I’ve been doing this because…

Guess what?  I’m going to Romania next week. Don’t worry, I’m not staying for long.  I’m not completely backing down from the vow I announced in August, made at the urging of my lawyer, psychotherapy team and concerned parties at the American Embassy in Bucharest.  Also, my dietitian said I…

Living in this abandoned vacation village in western Sardinia was exotic for about 12 minutes.  When I figured out that I couldn’t even buy bread out here and that it wasn’t going to be warm enough for topless sunbathing all winter, the novelty wore off rather quickly.  OK, the village…

I want to take some time out from the grim topics of homeless travel and travel writing this week and talk to you about something a little more lighthearted: your prostate.    I’ve gotten the impression in recent years through various awareness campaigns, often designed to send people racing in…

I get a lot of polite comments about my writing style. Sometimes people say “insightful”, often they say “accessible”, occasionally they say “Where’d you learn your grammar? The jungles of New Guinea?” But mostly they say I’m funny. I’m perfectly happy with this. Foremost because being funny can excuse one…

First the good news. My Italian is coming along molto f*cking bene (that’s really how they talk, I’ve found my place in the universe). I’ve decided to get gonzo with my ‘vanity language’ by attending free community Italian classes for foreigners five days a week at the local high school….

So I fired off the latest version of my book proposal to my agent a few days back.  We’re on version 573.62 or something by now, I’ve lost track.  On a side note, I’m starting to realize that the content of the book proposal may very well be more important…

The Italian is not coming along as fast as I had hoped. I expected that I’d be speaking like Roberto Benigni in just a few days. Just review some grammar, get a fix on the accent, a few vocab adjustments here and there, zip-zop I speak Italian. But no. Unfortunately,…