I spent the last week on a road trip dotting across the southern half of cloudy Ireland.
Touring with longtime friends Michael Butler and James Spadola, I knocked off a couple items on my list. We drove more than 600 miles and roughly hit this map. Our itinerary here and expenses here.
See highlights of the tour below.
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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 here. Listen to mine here or by using the player below.
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 work of which I am proud under this house.
I spent the better chunk of 2006 in Tokyo video podcasting, writing, traveling and learning on behalf of NBC Universal Digital Studios. Now all of that work can be found at japan.christopherwink.com.
See all the Episodes here and all the Archives here. Go and explore.
A few things interested me from my work in 2006:
On Christmas Eve, why not discuss gifts.
For, what, the past few hundred years, the more far-flung and exotic the purchase or discovery, the better. Those emotions are mixed up into colonialism and exploration and Manifest Destiny and so many human and American spirits that I don’t care to explore them.
But I think there’s something changing there.
In 2005, I spent a small fortune in the local currency on hand-crafted wood carvings and jewelry from new friends and acquaintances in a Ghanian mountain village, all to be given to friends and family at home. I was back home for no more than two weeks before I showed off a necklace I was particularly fond of and someone remarked how similar it was to something she had seen at Target.
Oh.
I was brought back to this thought and what it means by a great last-page essay in the strong Philadelphia sustainability magazine Grid.
Continue reading The exotic nature of local: or why generic foreign gifts suck
In 2005, when I came home from a summer studying in Ghana, I was on the phone with my grandmother, and she said “Now all you need to see is Alaska.”
For my grandmother, who died in 2009 as the last of my grandparents, Alaska was truly the last frontier. I found it so interesting that she was so enamored with this distant, oil-producing extension of the United States, of which it accounts for a fifth of its size.
Then you should go see it, I told her. Maybe, she said, but I don’t think so, not now.
So I went.
Continue reading Alaska (backpacking through the Last Frontier)
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 didn’t run as planned, I’ll do so today. Additionally, as always, I also like to share some grafs that were reworked and items I cut from my original story, which also can be seen below.
Continue reading Inquirer: My first couch surfing experience
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.
Great travel writers, I think, tend to have always done so for a personal love for travel — not primarily to be a travel writer or to tell someone else about what you did.
Of late, I was reminded.
There are nearly a dozen different, conflicting things I believe strongly about travel:
Continue reading Travel writing and why no one wants to hear about your European backpacking
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 capital city of Ghana in West Africa, this summer.
This was my contribution:
Don’t be afraid of the satchel water.
Pretty quickly on in the urbanized sprawl of greater Accra in coastal Ghana, you just might notice that the kids buy plastic bags of water, a corner of which they bite off to chug the contents. If no one convinces you otherwise, you just might stick to the bottled variety.
Don’t be afraid of the satchel water — that much I learned.
I spent a portion of summer 2005 studying at the University of Ghana in East Legon outside of the capital city of Accra. It wasn’t long enough to fully familiarize myself with even the university, set aside the city, the country or the region and Hell if I have even a taste of the continent, as one of the great lessons from travel should be that cultural learning comes from decades not days in a place. I did, however, pick up that the satchel water was refreshing, cheap and unique. Read the rest here.
Before he left, I promised him a beer when he returned. Now, I think he owes me one.
I hope he has a transcendent summer, explores and shares everything he can on that site. I also hope he builds traffic to share his story. He’s using Twitter, though he has some ground he can certainly make, as he’ll have plenty of compelling stories to tell.
Of course, this made me realize I follow a handful of low-traffic, personal travel blogs of friends or acquaintances who offer interesting reading. After the jump, peep seven such blogs that might be worth your time, whether you know the writers and their locations or not.
Continue reading My guest post on studying in Ghana and other personal travel blogs of interest
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 on Lake Zurich, shadowed by the yellow sun, framed in crystal blue skies, as I peer at the Swiss Alps, not 20 miles away. Read the rest here.
See related video, another photograph and read some details on the story below.
Continue reading Inquirer: Zurich bicycle-trip personal essay
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 we have: five of the most influential cities in the country and among the more meaningful in the world.
All Americans have relative access to them, but the densest collection of our residents can visit Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore or Washington D.C. for the weekend.
Continue reading The Northeastern U.S. Cities: an embarrassment of urban riches
