On the train destined for Stockholm, Sweden on Nov. 1, 2008. By Christopher Wink | Oct 23, 2008 | WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com 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 jet setting: two months, 10 cities 3,000 [...]

By Christopher Wink | Oct. 8, 2008 | WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com 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 [...]

By Christopher Wink | Oct 26, 2008 | WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com 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 [...]

By Christopher Wink | Oct 9, 2008 | WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com 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 [...]

By Christopher Wink | Dec. 30, 2008 | Publish2 It is 11:55 p.m. on Dec. 30, 2008: minutes before deadline. Perfect. I am very young and very green. Sometimes I spend entire hours thinking about everything I don’t know. Then I go ask a journalist. My name is Christopher Wink, and I am the future [...]

By Christopher Wink | June 9, 2008 | Newsweek submission Bill Cosby told me I shouldn’t worry. No one was going to remember anything I said anyway. In May, I graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia and was honored to address my peers and their families as our student commencement speaker. For my portion, I urged [...]

By Christopher Wink | May 08, 2008 One week from yesterday three strangers riding beside me on the 3 bus will be dead. But I can’t know it. It hasn’t happened, and I’ve never spoken to them before and won’t in the future. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even like know they were [...]

By Christopher Wink | May 06, 2008 There is a suddenness to life in this city. Surely it is exaggerated in the minds of those who live mostly in fears of their own creation. Four hundred dead of 1.5 million isn’t anything to the pain and poverty of many in this world, but murders on [...]

My grandmother died on the Monday before Thanksgiving, November 2006, two months beyond my father’s parents celebrated 54 years marriage. The thought of the weight of loneliness, left after a half century of practiced, dependent love, made me shiver one night, then a continent away, studying in Tokyo. I made an effort to call my [...]

By Christopher Wink | Mar 18, 2008 My grandmother died on the Monday before Thanksgiving, November 2006, two months beyond my father’s parents celebrated 54 years marriage.The thought of the weight of loneliness, left after a half century of practiced, dependent love, made me shiver one night, then a continent away, studying in Tokyo. I [...]