The Trip

Latest Episodes:

Episode 97: Queens Aug 11, 2020

Show notes

How do you travel in a world on lockdown? Just start at home. And in this, now, I have a mighty advantage. Because this month, I moved from Manhattan to the Borough of Queens, the most linguistically diverse place on earth. This episode has three would-be guides to this new life: writers Laurie Woolever and Tiffany Langston, along with Astoria souvlaki legend Elpida Vasiliadis.

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Episode 96: Remembering Kim Wall Jul 27, 2020

Show notes

This episode, we’re not talking about how the gifted journalist and traveler Kim Wall died, we’re talking about how she lived. And we’re doing it by talking with journalists Caterina Clerici, Christina Ayele Djossa, and Ingrid Wall—who is also Kim’s mother and author of A Silenced Voice of a new book about her life and work.

This episode opens with the beautiful singing of Aidi Songlong, a musician who sings a traditional Moso music style called ahabhala. Christina Ayele Djossa reported on this remarkable matrilineal ethnic group who live near China's border with Tibet.

Show notes:

A Silenced Voice: The Life of Journalist Kim Wall

Christina Ayele Djossa on Twitter

Christina Ayele Djossa's BBC report on the Moso music style, produced with funding from the Kim Wall Foundation

Caterina Clerici homepage

Kim Wall and Caterina Clerici on Haitian Tourism for Roads & Kingdoms

Kim Wall Memorial Fund at IWMF

Kim Wall Memorial Fund: Donate

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Episode 95: A New Album in Madrid and Other Good News Jul 13, 2020

Show notes

As the pandemic grinds on, I find myself unseasonably emotional about newborns and weddings, like some kind of weepy grandpa. Any good thing to latch on to in these twilight year, I guess. I feel that way about my old friend’s new album. Como Vivir en el Campo is a Madrid-based rock trio, and their drummer is Carlos Barros, who has been both friend and family to me over the years. Carlos has introduced me to many things, not least the nearly inexhaustible pleasures of Julio Iglesias’ album Hey. He talked to me from a village in Aragón, Spain about the process of making the album, and about how they were aided by the great global collective subconscious. You’ll see. Also in this episode, a conversation with American artist Aaron Firestein in Bogotá about what the US can learn from Colombia. And I’ll have a bit of good news about The Trip podcast, this very podcast, at the end of the episode.

Show notes:

Como Vivir en el Campo Bandcamp

Aaron Firestein IG

Where to Invade Next by Michael Moore

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Bourdain Day Jun 25, 2020

Show notes

A bit of tape and a brief message on Bourdain Day 2020

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Episode 94: Bali, Three Ways Jun 16, 2020

Show notes

I know I don’t often cop to it, but this is a travel podcast, and this week, we’re going to travel. Far, far away, to Bali, Indonesia. And we’ll do it through the perspectives of a traveler (Travis Levius), an eater (Duwi Satrio), and a legendary pastry chef (Will Goldfarb). Along the way, of course, we’ll talk a bit about race and migration and surviving cancer, because life isn’t all suckling pig and ginger flower daluman, even in Bali. Let’s start with Travis Levius, a luxury travel writer who has covered Bali for Conde Nast Traveler and other publications.

Show notes:

Travis Levius homepage

Room 4 Dessert Bali

Duwi Satrio IG

Perfect Dish: Jakarta with Anthony Bourdain, Jennifer Neal and Duwi Satrio

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Episode 93: The American Diaspora Jun 09, 2020

Show notes

Michelle Borok is one of something like 9 million Americans who live overseas—nobody’s quite sure how many there are, nobody cares much about counting them. But one thing is certain: they are a more diverse group than you might think. This week, I’m talking with three American women, writers all—Michelle Borok, Sarah Souli, and Ruth Terry—about what it’s like to be Korean-American in Mongolia, Arab-American in Athens, and Black American in Istanbul, watching all this nonsense from afar. I’ll start with Ruth Terry in Istanbul, who talks about anti-blackness among white Americans overseas and about her dreams for what travel writing could become in a post-lockdown world.

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Episode 92: The African-American view, from Taiwan Jun 01, 2020

Show notes

The writer and comedian Jennifer Neal used to have a deeply smart travel column for The Root called Blaxit, with one very simple premise: things are just too twisted for Black Americans, so they might, like she had, be feeling the urge to go live in some other, freer country. But where? What is it like being black in different parts of Asia, Europe, elsewhere? Jennifer’s column was a way to find out. I recorded with Jennifer in Berlin for a pre-COVID episode of this show that I hope we can play soon enough, but this week she connected me with someone she had written about in her Blaxit column: Reggie Robinson, a African-American native of Dallas who is a middle-school history and English teacher and a longtime resident of Korea and now Taiwan. I had originally wanted to do an episode about Americans abroad generally, but that will wait. For now, as the police are rioting through my city and our nation, and as our miserable president says all the quiet, dirty parts of America’s social contract out loud, I’m glad to be able to spend the entirety of this episode with Reggie and his unusual vantage point from the other side of the world.

Show notes:

Blaxit: Seoul Edition by Jennifer Neal

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Episode 91: A Very Simple Pleasure May 26, 2020

Show notes

Along with twitterfights, long calls to the unemployment office, and heartfelt conversations with your new sourdough starters, alcohol seems to be a defining obsession of this pandemic. I’ll leave it to the rehab centers and 12 steppers to clean up the mess afterwards; this week, I just need a drink. But not just a box of wine or something, I want something escapist, evocative, alluring. I want a cocktail dammit, something with some class, and this week I’m taking the Trip to Angola, Japan and Austria to get it. That means tequila cucumber elixirs with Ioanna Morelli, in Hokkaido, Japan. That means a Sichuan Daiquiri with Alexa van Sickle in Vienna, and, to start it all off, a beachfront gin-and-hot-pepper drink in Luanda, Angola with Claudio Silva, the founder of Luanda Cocktail Week.

Show notes:

Luanda Night Life (publication)

20 Things to Know Before You Go: Luanda by Claudio Silva

Luanda Cocktail Week

Gyu Bar Niseko

Early Bird Sapporo

The Sign Lounge Vienna

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Episode 90: In Defense of Wet Markets May 18, 2020

Show notes

Conversations about wet markets with four people who know them very well: Ro Vasquez of Eat Like a Local in Mexico City, journalist Austin Bush in Bangkok, Paul Rimple of Culinary Backstreets in Tbilisi, and Auburn University food historian Xaq Frohlich.

If you’ve had the feeling recently everything seems extra bad all at once, in a way that exceeds even your worst and darkest thoughts, well here’s a theory: maybe it’s because everything is related. It’s all one sweater, and this global tug on a single thread just unwound the whole damn thing from. So the big issues—from climate change to corruption to racist bullshit—have just been laid naked by this pandemic, and they there flashing us right outside the window, all at the same time.

But if we know now that it’s all related, we can perhaps contemplate how to win these longstanding battles in the years to come. And one of those battles will be over markets, the subject of this week’s episode. Traditional markets like the wet markets of Asia are being labeled as the enemy, when in fact, they are our once and future salvation. This episode opens with the sound of the quotidian pre-quarantine bustle of the Deserter’s Bazaar in central Tbilisi, Georgia. It’s the sound you get when a butcher named Jumber with forearms like fire hydrants makes short and joyful work of a side of mutton inches away from the person who is going to take that meat home to cook for their family. That sound is precious, that sound is endangered, that sound needs your attention and protection, in the Republic of Georgia or wherever you are.

From Roads & Kingdoms, this is The Trip: The World on Lockdown.

Show notes:

Breathless Australian 60 Minutes Wet Markets in Bangkok investigation

Culinary Backstreets Tbilisi tour

How to butcher a side of lamb at Tbilisi’s Deserter Bazaar (video)

Eat Like a Local CMDMX

Austin Bush website

The Food of Northern Thailand by Austin Bush

Xaq Frohlich’s writings on Roads & Kingdoms

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Episode 89: Covid Vibe Vacuum May 12, 2020

Show notes

This week on The Trip, a restaurant opens in Oslo, an Ontario activist wants to reform hospital food, and a New Orleans writer calls out the exploitation of hospitality workers.

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