For Story Shuffle 7, held in a fine rowhome in the Newbold section of South Philadelphia inside a beautiful and eventually stormy night, I told the story of my first hitchhiking experience in South Dakota. My lesson: trusting in strangers is a great risk that often comes with great reward. Check out all the stories [...]

Four years later, I’m finishing this piece of archiving business. A couple months ago, I announced I had moved my honors thesis to a subdomain of this site for the sake of organization and archiving. Following up on that resolution to make more tidy a rambling online portfolio, I have brought another dated, collection of [...]

A full-length travel story of mine focused on the five year anniversary of CouchSurfing.com at first destined for the Philadelphia Inquirer last January never found a home there. After a back and forth, I went another direction and it got a tad stale for the daily’s travel editor. So, because I’ve shared other stories that [...]

Travel is most often the privilege of the privileged. Two years ago last month, I was returning from a trip that was certainly a great privilege. If you can’t go out to eat with friends without referencing something you learned or experienced from some travel experience you had, then I think you’re doing it wrong. [...]

I was asked to guest post on Dateline Accra, the small, personal travel blog of Stephen Zook, a young journalist whose spirit I adored when I was editing his copy a few years ago at The Temple News, the college newspaper I once worked and this year he’ll lead. He is studying in Accra, the [...]

A personal journey essay of mine appeared in today‘s Sunday edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. If I keep my hand steady long enough, I just might get a photograph of me racing down the steepest hill in Zürich on a bicycle. But I’ll have to settle for the shot of me standing on a dock [...]

This is a conversation I’ve had too many times. I am in Washingto D.C. today, the day after Martin Luther King day, for the inauguration of Barack Obama. While I will have much more to say on that in coming days, being here reminded me of how often we in the mid-Atlantic take for granted what [...]

I am going to the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington D.C. tonight, to get settled and look around town, where I will be covering the inauguration of Barack Obama on Tuesday. More on that to come. Obama left yesterday from Philadelphia to head to D.C., also making a stop in Delaware. Leaving from Philadelphia is a [...]

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 [...]

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. Number of Views:28