We were supposed to leave Louie with a nice lady upstate, but she cancelled at the last minute. The day before our flight, we drove Louie to a dog camp and went to bed early for our crack of dawn flight.

I kept getting an error message when I tried to check in. I ignored it and showed up at the airport the next morning to find out that my confirmed upgrade had in fact been revoked, and I would be placed in a random seat in the back of the plane. The thought of 14 hours in a middle seat made me go literally berserk. Nobody at the airport could help me, nobody on the phone could help me. We went home and rebooked our tickets for the next day.

We finally arrive to find out my bag didn’t make it.

All things considered, I’m actually in a good mood when we leave the airport. The sun has only just set, and maybe after we get to the hotel we can walk around the neighborhood and find dinner somewhere.

We get into a cab, which takes us on a shortcut under the city inside one of the longest tunnels in the world. Traffic slows to an ooze and this is where the nightmare begins. We are fully stopped. Slowly, slowly, we round a corner and I expect to see the exit. This repeats for the worst two hours of my life, in which I am fully convinced I’m in the midst of a mass casualty event, and that all of us trapped in that tunnel are slowly being poisoned to death. My hands get shaky and my vision blurs as I furiously google the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. It turns out they are very close to the symptoms of a panic attack.

We finally reach ground level, after two and half excruciating hours, and I burst into uncontrollable sobs of relief and terror and awe. I am traumatized; I accidentally traumatize the taxi driver. He apologizes profusely when he drops us at the hotel and charges us a discounted rate for the drive that should have been around 30 minutes.

We get inside and somehow, our room isn’t ready even though it’s 8pm. I am silently fuming, furious. They bring me a bouquet to celebrate our anniversary and I am still mad, but now I’m also mad at myself for being a jerk.

But the next morning, there’s a view of Mount Fuji out our bedroom window and a room service breakfast laid out on the table. And over the next week, we find out that it’s basically impossible to ruin a trip to Tokyo.

tokyo style icon:

The inimitable Yayoi Kusama. You have to reserve tickets to her museum in advance (and it DOES sell out), but it’s well worth a half hour and you get to learn all sorts of things about her. I had no idea she was such a pervert (and I mean that as a compliment).

what i saw:

Meiji Shrine on a rainy day, when the forest was lush and misty and it felt like we were definitely not smack dab in one of the biggest cities on earth.

The Bonsai Museum that’s really more of an incredibly beautiful bonsai store/nursery where the employees will tell you all about their $7million, 600-year-old bonsai. When we asked him how he knew how old the tree was, he said “master told me.” (This is a hobby more billionaires should get into, IMO.)

The Nezu Museum and the insanely lovely gardens. The Folk Crafts Museum. We couldn’t stay away from all the weirdly addictive claw machine stores all over the city.

But mostly I just loved going on psychotically long walks and finding some tiny little gem in the midst of a random residential neighborhood.

what i watched:

Wept a little bit on the plane watching Perfect Days (incredible soundtrack). Before I left, I also used this upcoming trip as an excuse to rewatch two of my favorite movies of all-time: Spirited Away and Lost in Translation.

what i listened to:

On our last night in Tokyo we had no plans and wandered through Golden Gai and Kabukicho, ending up at a tiny jazz bar on the sixth floor of a weathered apartment building. There were two lonely people at the bar and the nonagenarian bartender was blasting Sketches of Spain. Absolutely incredible experience I will never forget.

Another music highlight was a long leisurely walk to Taiyo Record, a Brazilian CD shop and cafe on the first floor of a tiny house in Kagurazaka. We got João Gilberto’s In Tokyo. I brought a whole extra suitcase on this trip, so we also came home with armfuls of records from Vektor Shop and Diskunion.

what i read:

It will surprise no one that Tokyo is home to one of the world’s greatest book emporiums. I could have spent hours and thousands of dollars at Daikanyama Tsutaya. But instead I just bought a copy of Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto (excellent), Come Rain or Come Shine by Kazuo Ishiguro (love those tiny books), and Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga (still have yet to read this one).

While I was in Japan I finished Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto and I left my copy at the hotel, tucked into a bookshelf in my room. I wonder if it’s still there.

Some other all-time favorite Japan reads include: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Pachinko, Number9Dream, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

what i bought:

Since Delta lost my bag, my first stop was Isetan, mostly because I heard the fruit situation at the basement grocery store was bonkers and it was close to my hotel.

(That grocery store is one of the most magical places on earth. I will say the fruit situation was not crazy - $20 for six perfect strawberries seems perfectly reasonable to me - and as a person who loves a fancy grocery store even though I can’t cook, it was one of the highlights of the trip.)

Anyways, I ended up buying some fancy skin and hair products from Shiro, some ridiculously expensive glittery socks that were the only choice in the whole store, and some other “necessities” I can’t really remember. Delta reimbursed me for everything.

I also panic-bought a vintage silk kimono because it was only $30 and I wanted to take it to my seamstress to have it turned into a coat, but now I’ve decided the color is all wrong and I should have gone with black or silver instead of cream.

Haley and I went HAM in kitchen town, which means we spent about $19 total on an assortment of sponges, a wildly useful wooden ladle, a teeny tiny pair of fold-up scissors, several different sizes of chopsticks including ones for cooking that are about 2 feet long, and, of course, a mini corndog magnet from the store that sells food replicas.

At the airport gift shop on the way home, I bought a very cool and hideous “Japan” tshirt with gold foil cherry blossoms that I wear about once a week.

what i didn’t buy:

I wanted to buy clothes, but apart from the $$$ department store, the vibe in Tokyo right now is very quiet luxury. Everything just sort of looked like 1990s J Crew, but less colorful and more cropped. I heard the vintage shopping was good, but every store that I went into was extremely normcore/preppy. Random US college apparel is big there. Haley found a great deal on a 1998 Yankees World Series sweatshirt with the twin towers on it, and he wore it every single day for the rest of the trip.

I really wanted a silky sukajan jacket, but the only ones I could find were exquisite $1500 pieces made by artists or $25 versions that looked flammable. What I wanted was a $150 version (and I randomly found the exact perfect one in Stockholm a few months later).

where i stayed:

The Park Hyatt Tokyo has been on my hotel bucket list for years. We stayed right after the renovation and I am sorry to report that

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I read The Snow Leopard while I was in Nepal last month, and now I’m obsessed with Peter Matthiessen: Zen master, drug fiend, CIA agent, deadbeat dad, founder of the Paris review, and the only guy to ever win the national book award for fiction and nonfiction. My favorite travel writer.

what I’m clicking:

Seeing before naming | How to rebuild your broken attention span | The smuggler’s guide to food souvenirs | When dining out is political | Alone but not lonely in Paris | The education of a food critic | Smuggling butter home from France | Aboard a celebrity impersonators cruise | The Black polar bears of Martha’s Vineyard | Bartending on the edge of fame | Is 10pm dinner still a thing? | In search of belonging in Korea | The billionaire’s vagina club | Rob Walker’s splitsville | An AI love song for your mistress | How student journalists broke the Cornell Seven story | The dark power of fraternities

what i’m wanderlusting:

I went to a dinner last week at the Explorer’s Club to celebrate Scott Dunn’s 40th anniversary, which is where I learned about the Echo Charlie private jet trips and now I want to go jungle-hopping from Colombia to Guatemala.

what i’m listening to:

I have been on a lot of flights lately, which is when I like to put on Promises and read.

what i’m watching:

I somehow totally missed that there was a new season of The Night Manager, which I really should have watched before I went to Colombia. (I stayed in that same hotel in Cartagena!) It turns out I’m really into spy thrillers, so please tell me some others I should read and watch.

what i’m eating and drinking:

Stumbled upon a new bakery in Long Island City called Ghaya, which was started by the Tunisian-born, James Beard award-winning pastry chef at Daniel. Coincidentally, we had a belated birthday dinner plan to go to Daniel (so fun) later that night, where I got to have a fancy multicourse dinner *without* taking any photos or notes for work. Don’t ask me what I ate because I have no idea! What a delight!

what i’m coveting:

A bejeweled bandana from Marie Lichtenberg (but I would settle for one of the insane lockets)

what i’m recommending:

This face balm/solid serum from Credo. It smells good and makes me feel fancy.

what i’m reading:

I am currently enthralled with On the Calculation of Volume, but I have a terrible memory so I have been parcelling them out every few months so there’s not too much of a gap before the final translation comes out next year.

I’m somehow the last person on earth to read A Thousand Splendid Suns, which is a depressing book that gets even more depressing when you think about current events.

So devastating that I sobbed on the airplane: Claire Keegan’s Foster.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the highly-anticipated Villa Coco was sort of a letdown but still pretty amusing.

La Carmina is an award-winning travel writer, blogger, and TV host. I first got to know her when we worked together on an article for Fodors.com about traveling to Brazil with the late Elizabeth Wurt…

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My father-in-law Simon Parkes was a prolific landscape artist and an avid collector. Some of his works are going up for auction on September 17 (and in the meantime you can see…

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One thing I have learned lately is that it’s less about the where and more about the who. Unlike many of my travel writing peers, I do not particularly enjoy traveling solo, mostly because it’s not very fun. My main issue is that I like to be around people, but I’m also too shy to talk to strangers.

There are certain places where I’m perfectly happy to go it alone, though there’s something about being alone in a city that always makes me feel a bit lonely.

But Paris is different. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much time here, but I feel perfectly comfortable solo. I’m never alone here, really, since the city is a map of memories from previous visits. Some places are crystal clear, while others have been erased and rewritten multiple times. Many of the locations that define Paris for me I would never be able to find again, even if they still exist: the weird “Mexican” restaurant that let us drink for cheap on my study abroad program; the random apartment we rented that was full of family albums; the restaurant where my aunt accidentally told the waiter she loved him. Sometimes the memories that pop up are totally expected, and other times you’re walking down a random street and you’re like “oh wait, this was the secret entrance to that underground bar that looked like a chapel.” Memories have a way of keeping you tethered to a place.

what i saw

The only good thing about solo travel in a city is getting to see museums at your own pace. (For me, that means very fast. I basically have a one-hour time limit.) I had one full day and decided to see three things that have been on my list for a while, starting with The Pinault Collection at Bourse de Commerce. I went to their location in Venice a few years ago during the biennale and saw this incredibly spooky and memorable show of Pierre Huyghe’s creepy aquariums where the artist designed shells in the shape of Brancusi masks and real crabs were living inside.

When I visited in Paris, there was supposed to be some kind of fog sculpture in the rotunda. I strolled through the rest of the place (loved the witchy paintings by Romanian artist Victor Man) but I think somebody pooped their pants on the third floor so I had to escape the galleries quickly without taking in much of the rest of the art except a great Rothkoesque photo by Wolfgang Tillmans. It turns out the fog sculpture was broken, which I only discovered after sitting there for 15 minutes waiting for something to happen. They gave everyone refunds.

Then I went to 59 Rivoli, a former artist squat that I read about in the Messy Nessy guide a few years ago. Maybe a little touristy now, it’s six floors of artists studios that are open to the public. I wanted to buy a lot of stuff, but my husband has sort of tried to ban me from coming home from trips with armloads of random things to frame. I have not adhered to the ban, but out of respect for him I am trying to be a bit more discerning. But I could think of like 45 people who would want these alpine landscapes by Katrin Hinterholzer in their house, and at least 3 people who would want this extension cord by Jeanne Gourlaouen. (I would have absolutely purchased it if it worked with American voltage.) I also fell in love with Occulta Dama’s freaky-deaky puppets.

I had also never been to the Grand Palais. I had seen lots of buzz online about the Matisse show, but then I saw a poster for a Hilma af Klimt show and went to that instead. (I missed the one at the Guggenheim in 2018.) She is totally unmedicated and kooky but I would join her cult. I think she was really onto something, but I’m too stupid to tell you exactly what. I will say, though, that the exhibition space was slapdash and depressing and had elementary school gym vibes. I felt like I was going to vote. I don’t know if I would go back there to see art, but I want to go back for dinner at Le Grand Café and a rave under the big glass dome.

what i wore

It was 100 degrees in Paris, so I sweated my way through my favorite silk maxi skirt, a pair of cotton twill palazzo pants I bought on the street in Rome that take up so much room in my suitcase that I have to wear them on the plane, and a couple of tissue-thin t-shirts. I wish I had worn a bathing suit so I could have jumped in the canal.

what i ate & drank

My husband’s uncles live in Paris, so on my first night there I invited myself over to drink icy cold mojitos during the heatwave. Once it had cooled down enough to go outside, around 9pm, we walked over Pont de la Tournelle from their place to a restaurant I have wanted to visit for a very long time:

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Last weekend I was one of the first travel writers to [redacted], where I accidentally channeled this scene from Robin Hood by wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant dress with ho…

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Francesca del Balzo and Alice Russotti are the co-founders and creative directors of PORTA, a treasure trove of expertly curated tableware and hand-crafted home furnishings.

Before opening the shop, F…

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I am obsessed with Stella Jean’s take on Haiti’s soccer jerseys

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I went to the opening night of Grace Ives’ Girlfriend Tour at Underground Arts in Philadelphia and it was very fun.

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Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl

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I watched The Lost Boys for the first time recently and I still can’t stop thinking about the greased-up saxophone player. Can’t wait to see him on Broadway.

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10. Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin

9. Ghosts by Dolly Alderton

8. Circe by Madeline Miller

7. The Destroyers by Christopher Bollen

6. Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell

5. God of the…

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Since about 2010, I’ve visited a new country every year, including in 2020 when I went to Costa Rica for the first time that January. I didn’t go to any new countries this year, but…

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I was in Harbour Island earlier this month and got to go to the last Junkanoo practice of the year. On Harbour Island they celebrate on January 1st, but many moons ago we spent…

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Push their boundaries with a freaky-deaky co-ferment from Rose Hill Farms

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When my sister Abby was in town a few weeks ago, we made an early evening pit stop at Neue Galerie, which is basically my ideal museum because you can see everything in under a…

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The day I boarded the ship, I got a message from my editor that there had been a change of plans. Now, they needed a full photoshoot, and I’d have to model — face and everything. Luckily, I packed a suitcase full of gowns. (But in retrospect, I should have hit up the on-board salon for some professional hair and makeup.)

I spent the week with Natali Afsar, a Belgian photographer who has carved out a niche as THE chic ship photographer. I think getting my photo taken is actually kind of fun. Models have literally the easiest job in the world and if any of them try to convince you otherwise, just take that with a grain of salt because they’re probably too beautiful to have ever worked a real job.

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where I went

The cruise started in Athens with stops in Milos, Chania, Ortigia, Taormina, and Sorrento before ending in Rome. If I could only choose one of those places to return to, it would probably be Crete, a Greek island that is so unique it should basically be its own country. (They agree.)

Otherworldly natural wonders, great food and wine, and some of the best beaches in the Med. We went to what is probably the worst beach in Crete and it was still pretty ideal: walking distance from town and crammed with loungers, but soft sand and crystal clear water.

who I met

Most of the people I met were first-time cruisers, lured by the promise that the RC yacht is not like other cruises. (It is in fact exactly like other cruises, only better.) Everyone on board was surprisingly young (lots of couples in their 40s) and surprisingly hot (there was a literal Victoria’s Secret model onboard). I already wrote about the most enigmatic person on board, a septuagenarian Italian woman who dressed exclusively in couture gowns and diamonds. The only other time I have seen this $500k Bulgari serpenti necklace was at a museum exhibit in Moscow. The rumor on board was that she did the inaugural sailing with her husband the previous week and loved it so much she just didn’t get off the boat. I hope she is still onboard.

what I ate

The food on board was better than it needed to be. I had the best spaghetti carbonara of my entire trip, and that’s saying a lot since I spent a week in Rome after the cruise. But the best thing I ate was this cold sesame noodle with crab. I still think about it sometimes. (Please tell me where I can find this in New York!)

My one critique of the food on board is that there was no breakfast buffet. I am not a breakfast person, so I love when I’m at a fancy hotel and I get to have some weird little salads, an Asian soup, and a chocolate croissant first thing in the morning. (Shout out to Velaa in the Maldives for having the best breakfast buffet in the world). The breakfast situation onboard was a little whack, honestly, since they had no non-egg, non-sweet, hot items. (But they did make me congee one morning, which is my ideal breakfast.)

My meals off the boat were mostly unremarkable except for on the Amalfi coast, where our boat driver took us to this restaurant for maybe the best spaghetti alle vongole I’ve ever had in my life, accompanied by some Furore from Marisa Cuomo.

what I drank

My mom is famously not allowed to drink gin because “it makes her want to rob a bank” so in solidarity with her, I tried a non-alcoholic Negroni made with actual zero-proof Tanqueray, vermouth, and Campari. (I also had plenty of real Negronis, French 75s, Americanos, and who can say no when a staff member cracks open a magnum of Whispering Angel?)

what I read

I’ve killed too many brain cells to reread The Odyssey, so I opted for the next best thing: Circe.

what I packed:

A Georgia Hardinge number similar to this one and a long mauve version of this Good American dress paired with a boxy silk kimono from Poochki. I packed but didn’t end up wearing a floor-length mesh dress that I got for $10 at one of those pay-by-weight vintage stores in Paris. My bag was a sparkly number similar to this one from Jennifer Miller. I also packed my silk robe from Kayll, which made a cameo in the photos. But most of the photoshoots happened in a bathrobe.

what I listened to

One night on board, they had a party where they had local musicians play and it was literally the best cover band I have ever heard in my life? Future brides, this is your sign to have a Dolce Vita wedding and hire these guys.

what I bought:

Since I was going back to Taormina, I made a plan to visit Antonio lo Turco to buy some earrings I regretted not getting last time I was there. He remembered us and was so happy we returned that he gave my mom and I each one of these little horn charms made of coral. I wear it all the time next to my shark tooth charm. I bought a pair of giant gold cross earrings that I wore to the Vatican a few days later.

is it worth it?

Did I have fun? Yes. Did I eat delicious things and see new places? Also yes. Would I pay $25k for this?

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For my birthday a few weeks ago, Haley and I went to see one of the last performances of Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. It was maybe the best performance I’ve seen on Broadway an…

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Finally went to one of those shows under the BQE this weekend and now I’m obsessed with everyone in TV on the Radio.

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Cole Escola as Little Edie in the Hamptons issue of NY Mag

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