Spectator Life

In the run up to the Super Bowl, writers were tripping over themselves trying to capture the essence of the Philadelphia Eagles Fan™. Most of these observations focused on the degenerate behavior of a few diehards after key games, or the nonsensical yet diverse array of superstitious traditions (looking at you, guy who runs into the underground pillars on the Broad Street Line on purpose). Some dug up the old chestnut about Santa Claus getting pelted by snowballs at an Eagles game — ignoring that many of the fans responsible for that misadventure died without ever seeing the Birds win a ring.

I rarely open, let alone read, promotional emails, but one I got last summer about the World Equestrian Center in Ocala, Florida captured my attention. The place was described as a “playground for the 1 percent... where that Ralph Lauren picture-perfect fantasy is within reach — if only for a night.” The message referred to rubbing elbows with the rich and famous and I wondered what on earth they were talking about. After all, the super-rich in Florida mostly congregate further south in Palm Beach and the affluent bits of Miami, right? Ocala is a small city ninety miles northwest of Disney World and it’s long billed itself the horse capital of the world.

I am completely naked, shivering and mildly terrified. The word “vulnerable” goes partway to describing my state as my toes curl over the edge of a slippery jetty, in pitch-darkness. Did I mention that I am completely naked? This is not a fever dream, but a midweek wellness pursuit on the island of Nacka, where Stockholm city and countryside meet. It’s 7 p.m. and the sun is long gone. I inwardly curse a previous incarnation of myself, who booked this intrepid getaway while holed up in my warm apartment. The trip grew from my preoccupation with two Nordic lifestyle concepts currently in vogue: Swedish lagom (loosely translated as “balanced living”) and Danish hygge (retreating somewhere cozy, often with friends).

While most travelers compile bucket lists of dream destinations, some revel in the pursuit of everywhere. Self-styled “extreme travelers” are seduced by hard-to-reach islands like Norway’s Bouvet, South Africa’s Prince Edward Islands and hundreds of other geographic oddities, in the same way children are tantalized by Disney World. In this subculture, visits to forbidden destinations like Guantánamo Bay, the Gaza Strip and India’s Andaman Islands, where the missionary John Allen Chau was murdered by spear-brandishing natives in 2018, confer status. And so do visits to pariah states and conflict zones, at least until Russia invaded Ukraine. The close-knit, extreme-travel community, who you might think would be an anything-goes bunch, is divided over the war.

The next time you arrive at London’s Heathrow Airport, you might be forgiven for wanting a welcome fit for a king. Yet under the now nearly three-month-old reign of King Charles III, there is a persistent rumor that Buckingham Palace, that symbol of the British monarchy since its acquisition by America’s favorite monarch George III in 1763, is going to pass out of private hands and into public ones. There has been talk of its being turned into a giant permanent art gallery and museum, showing off treasures from the Royal Collection Trust. There's even chatter of — and I can hear the gasps from here — its being transformed into a five-star hotel. You, too, can pay an exorbitant amount of money to sleep where kings and queens have trod.

I first visited the Greek monastery of Agios Stefanos on the rocks of Meteora in the early spring of this year, one week after my baptism into the Orthodox Church. Greece was heavy with Great Lent fasts and preparations for Christ’s resurrection — Easter. I had just escaped the clutches of an extremely sweet but annoying young tour guide with whom my very Greek now-father-in-law had set my fiancé and me up for a tour of the ancient churches. I wanted nothing to do with this young man in a tour van who sounded like he was reciting words from a tape recorder. Later I found out he was, and had taught himself English by doing so (which is pretty endearing in hindsight).

Turin at the end of August is pleasingly melancholic. The city has emptied after the feast of Ferragosto on August 15 and won’t fill up again till September. Solid bourgeois streets, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings now housing banks, are deserted save for the occasional confused tourist. What brings others to Turin in August I cannot say. For me, it was a wedding in Milan at the end of the week and the prospect of a little vacation ahead of it. Turin was a whim. I was meant to meet a college friend in Genoa on Monday, but my Sunday-night redeye from New York was canceled. Saturday was the only option, and so I was left at a loose end. Options abounded: I could stay overnight in Milan and head to Genoa with my friend the next day.

I am a Party City Bavarian: wearing Doc Martens, pulled-up cotton socks, a polyester smock and pair of buttock-hugging lederhosen. Drowning men have more breathing room. My range of motion is limited to a ceremonial waddle. Thankfully, I do not have far to travel — and there is plenty of beer. Allow me to explain: this weekend I took the trip ninety or so miles north of Atlanta to Helen, a small city not far from the North Carolina state line. In the late 1960s, city officials passed a zoning regulation to turn Helen into a replica of a Bavarian alpine town (hey, it was a weird decade). The result is a unique slice of Americana: an Oktoberfest in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, as Appalachian as it is alpine.

It is a common thing we have all experienced to be true: events that forever fix themselves in our memory of a certain place. Call it the “I’ll never forget where I was on December 7, 1941 or September 11, 2001” syndrome. On the Sunday Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, my father was on a train passing through western Pennsylvania after a job interview in New York City; he preserved a copy of the Pittsburgh paper to prove it. On the morning of September 11, I was breakfasting at home, awaiting my driver for Dulles International Airport; due to fly that day, I did not.

I got out of the taxi in front of my hotel in lower town Ottawa and was immediately accosted by a homeless junkie looking for a donation to the cause. It was a Sunday evening, well after sunset, and not quite the greeting I had hoped for upon arrival in Canada’s leafy capital. The smell of pot was in the air, a lot of it — there was a cannabis store across the street, and another around the corner. After checking in and dropping off my bags, I went in search of a late dinner. A two-block journey to a trendy tap house with a wide selection of craft beers witnessed another half-dozen, very animated homeless people. One, eyes closed, was dancing in the middle of the sidewalk, his arms flailing in the air, oblivious to everyone and everything around him (mind the lamppost!).

In the awfulness of LaGuardia Airport, the small 1939 Marine Air Terminal stands out as a reminder of earlier and better days. Today it is arguably the oldest American airport terminal in operation. Shuttered for decades, the building was resurrected by the Pan Am Shuttle in the 1980s, then the Eastern Shuttle, then the Delta Shuttle, and most recently JetBlue. Here was a terminal made for commercial aviation before the age of the “airbus.” You might miss the Daily Planet details of the main hall if you only pass through the side door. Designed by William Delano of Delano & Aldrich, the terminal connects the classicism of the Beaux-Arts with the thrust of Art Deco.

I haven’t come close to dying of thirst in Texas, where I live. In Spain’s little-known Extremadura, however, I found the odds increasing. Wandering through wide-open scrubland in hundred-degree temperatures, my only company was lots of Spanish bulls, unfazed by the blistering heat as I sweated my heart out. The population of Extremadura has been sparse since the Muslim occupation, but there are plenty of cattle. As I headed north from Seville on the Via de la Plata, the latest leg of my extended Camino de Santiago pilgrimage crisscrossing the Iberian Peninsula, Extremadura struck me as remarkably like Texas ranching country.

“DO NOT shoot weapons [at] #Irma,” the sheriff’s office of Pasco County, Florida, posted when Hurricane Irma approached our free state’s Atlantic coastline in 2017. “You won’t make it turn around [and] it will have very dangerous side effects.” The danger of stray bullets was all too clear to those who failed to detect the sarcasm behind 22-year-old Ryon Edwards’s mock Facebook event, “Shoot at Hurricane Irma,” which appeared to invite his fellow Floridians to open fire on the storm. Edwards’s message, “Let’s show Irma that we will shoot first,” attracted over 86,000 responses. Most were funny pictures and memes mocking the #FloridaMan stereotype.

Recently, early one morning at my sprawling estate in Swampland, Mississippi (a census non-designated place), I saw a bare-chested man walking across my back lawn beneath my office window. He wore a headband light, which gave him a semi-official appearance, but if he was working in some professional capacity, I reckoned, he’d be wearing a shirt. So I strolled out to the back deck and paused at the iron rail fence that surrounds it, connecting it to our guest house. Just beyond is an open outdoor shower that we use to clean off dogs and swamp muck. In it, with the water running was the bare-chested man — only now he was bare all over. I said, “Hey, buddy, what the heck are you doing?

During the best of times, I left New York for gonzo journalism in Moscow; and during the worst of times, I fled a jingoistic wartime Moscow for the post-Covid euphoria of a resurgent New York City. My life in a sense has come full circle: I left New York for Russia in my freewheeling, bohemian twenties in search of future adventure and returned in my fifties when the rose-tinted dreams of the future that fueled Russia’s hedonistic capital were snuffed out in a murderous rage. That rage of a crumbling empire also engulfed lovely Ukraine in flames, battering its gorgeous capital Kyiv, where I had spent a blissful decade. With two of the three cities that I had called home caught up in a fratricidal zero-sum war, New York is once again King of the Hill.

"Oxford or Cambridge?" No, it isn’t just shorthand for which of Britain’s most famous universities you attended — or were rejected from. It’s also a question about your taste in weekend vacation spots. Oxford is an urban, bustling city, full of multiculturalism, wide-eyed gangs of tourists and a literary heritage that’s long since tipped over into cliché. Think Alice in Wonderland, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, even — God help us — Harry Potter, claimed for posterity because of its use of Christ Church as a filming location. But its Eastern cousin — decidedly not Cambridge, Massachusetts — is a very different proposition.

I grew up in a northeastern state, and when I moved to Washington, there were plenty of culture shocks I had to get used to. The Metro seemed like a revelation, a magical train that whisked you under the White House and the National Mall (this was back when DC public transportation actually worked). Less appealing were the crime notices slapped about my neighborhood: I saw one once — I'm not making this up — that reported a real-life nunchuck attack. But the biggest shock of all was, and still is, the heat. Where I grew up, a 100-degree day was an event. That's all the more so because my parents didn't have so much as a window air conditioner until I was around ten years old. In the frozen reaches of Up North, this was a perfectly normal way to live.

Getting there was penitential. The coach from my home in Bad Ischl, Austria, to Salzburg stopped a hundred times, to let on women in dirndls carrying shopping baskets. The train to Munich was subject to delays, messing up subsequent connections. The S-Bahn linking Ostbahnhof with a place called Pasing suffered a derailment, so I had to struggle backwards to the Hauptbahnhof, only to discover my alternative train to Murnau was canceled, then reinstated on a distant platform, resulting in mass confusion. (The Germans are bewildered very easily when things stop going to plan.) At Murnau there was a long wait for the two-carriage shunter service to Unterammergau, outside Oberammergau, where it was by now pitch dark and pouring with rain.

Manchester, England Making plans for a European city break this summer? Seeking somewhere with centuries of history and culture, fine wine and, above all, sweltering temperatures? There’ll always be Rome, Barcelona, Athens — but chances are you haven’t considered Manchester, the northern English industrial powerhouse that inspired Karl Marx to write The Communist Manifesto and gave the world the Smiths, Joy Division and Oasis (you know, the ones who wrote “Wonderwall”).

Everyone comes to Bogotá looking for something. It’s always been that way. A thousand years ago, indigenous traders traveled to the markets in the Bogotá savanna to barter with the Muisca and exchange gold, emeralds, salt and cotton. The Spaniards arrived five centuries later in search of the treasures of conquest and the mythical city of gold that now lends its name to the international airport: El Dorado. The great revolutionary Simón Bolívar came in search of the capital of his South America republic Gran Colombia and to liberate the continent from Spanish rule. I didn’t know what I was looking for when I first arrived in Bogotá.

For the first time in my adult life, I left Washington, DC for the Fourth of July holiday. Apparently this is a very popular move: locals usually prefer to escape the concrete jungle in favor of sunny shores, winding rivers, or, well, anywhere but here. Not me. Party hopping around the nation's capital before settling in at a secret spot away from all of the tourists to watch fireworks on the National Mall makes this one of my favorite days of the year. However, driven by both a desire to visit family and check out what everyone was raving about in our July magazine, this year I hopped on a southbound plane to the Sunshine State. The weekend took me from Tampa to Sarasota to Naples, experiencing all of the weird and wonderful that Florida has to offer.

Two weeks before Covid began to hit Europe, I stood in the Basilica Cistern beneath Istanbul, steadily getting dripped on. Built during the reign of the Emperor Justinian I in 532, just before another deadly pandemic — the plague of Justinian — the cistern lies beneath Istanbul’s tourist hotspot, and despite it being damp, dark and having stands of 007 merchandise at its entrance and exit, it is one of the most enchanting places in a city that has captivated its visitors for over a thousand years. "If the Earth were a single state," Napoleon once pronounced, "Istanbul would be its capital," and upon visiting you begin to understand why.

Just before the pandemic, I spent several months traveling through Europe, from the north of Norway to Istanbul and beyond to Azerbaijan. I saw unforgettable sights: the endless daylight of the Arctic summer; the vast Hammershus castle on the Danish island of Bornholm; Vienna’s ornate Prunksaal library; and the sandy beaches of Corfu. But the focus of my journey was precisely those things that most travelers to these places often ignore. I was following the route of the Iron Curtain. My aim was to visit every part of that old great divide, all the places where NATO once abutted the Warsaw Pact, where overwhelming military might stood constantly primed for apocalypse.