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Graffiti
When I was a kid in Los Angeles, graffiti was a bad sign. It meant gangs had moved into the neighborhood. Or, at the very least, teenagers with a taste for vandalism. No respectable homeowner wanted to find spray paint on his fence. So you hung up lights and bought a dog. Nowadays, graffiti is…
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Sweet Dream
My dream trip is to go around the world. No schedule. No itinerary other than a general direction: east, west, north or south. I’ll go pretty much anywhere as long as it’s a place I’ve never been before. To me, travel is all about the unknown, whether that’s a culture or a people or a…
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Orient Express
The first time I crossed China by train was 1984. I was on a group trip organized by the Smithsonian Institute, the start of a lifelong obsession with Shanghai. This particular train took our group from Xi’An to Luoyang. Back then, the journey lasted for 8 hours. These days, you can take a bullet train…
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Wanderlust
I like to wander. To travel without any clear sense of a destination. I call myself a wanderer in my new Instagram account. The photos there all come from a recent trip to Germany. Hence the title of this blog post. Originally coined in German during the 19th century, wanderlust means an urge, an impulse,…