On the train destined for Stockholm, Sweden on Nov. 1, 2008.

On the Creative page of this site, I have posted a handful of travel essays I wrote for WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com, while podcasting and blogging in Europe.

They are not professional clips, but if you didn’t get a chance to read them this fall on WDSTL, see them here. Direct links below.

• The boy in the train station coffee shop (Oct. 8, 2008): Worlds – yes, disparate worlds – come to some form of a cross-section in red-eyed, late nights in train stations. Early Tuesday morning, we were doing that, surfing the intersection of the young and the acutely itinerant – being reminded of the sociological difference between situational and generational poverty…” Read the rest here.
• Weed and prostitutes: a conversation in Amsterdam (Oct 9, 2008): “We meet Sander and Neek at the outskirts of Amsterdam’s Red Light District. Sean, his brother Brian, and I are on a bridge demarcating where the sex ends and the large, quiet residences begin. A small, sloping bridge over a small canal, 15-feet wide, on which covered bicycle taxis perch to take drunk tourists back to their hotels..” Read the rest here.
• Notes on seeing Europe from a train  (Oct 23, 2008): “You take trains from big cities to other big cities. Lands, untold by tour books and unseen by sloppy tourists like yourself, unfold beneath your high carriage of jetsetting: two months, 10 cities 3,000 miles wide and two or three days deep…” Read the rest here.
• Welcomed by the children (Oct 26, 2008): “He liked the movement of the mouse cursor on my computer screen. So I pried his hands from the keys and opened up Microsoft Paint. With a few interruptions to change color and tool, a four-year-old who stumbled upon me in a park in Budapest, Hungary drew me a computer-generated painting…” Read the rest here.