Travel

An excerpt from "Around the World in 80 Dinners"

The approach of evening lures us irresistibly into Singapore’s red-light district, discreetly hidden in residential quarters among the street-side shops of Geylang Road, a major artery. If you know the city-state’s reputation for paternalistic morality, you might be surprised the sex trade flourishes here. The government bans “adult magazines” such as Playboy and even requires ones with “mature content” like Cosmopolitan to carry a warning on the cover, but Big Brother approves of prostitution, as long as it isn’t merely for oral sex (legal just as a prelude to conventional copulation) and doesn’t involve sodomy, a heinous offense punishable by brutal and bloody caning.

I am from Philadelphia, and when I meet someone who isn’t from Philadelphia they always say “Oh! You are from Philadelphia. You must love cheese steaks,” because this is the only thing people know about Philadelphia.

Cheese steaks are embedded into the national imagination as “Philly food,” or “Philly phood” (mad men dreaming up ad campaigns for local Philadelphia business or sports teams love to replace “f” with “ph” whenever possible). Philadelphians bear this and other burdens patiently, but at a certain point, even the most sanguine lose their cool. How many times have I weathered cheese steak-related questions with the same bottled response, which is: the secret to a great cheese steak is the bread, and the secret to the bread is the water, and the water has to be Philadelphia water because otherwise it doesn’t taste quite right.

Charlie Clevenger

May in Maine and the lobsters are crooning. Leaves sprout on the trees around midmonth but you can’t plant your garden until Memorial Day because lingering nighttime frosts are always a threat to wipe it out. The real sign winter’s finally over: In New Harbor, Shaw’s Lobster Wharf opened on Mother’s Day to serve the world’s best lobster roll and a few miles up Route 32 in Round Pond, the Muscongus Bay Lobster Company fired up its boiler; you can sit at a picnic table and devour your crustaceans as you gaze out at the view of water, boats, islands and trees so stunning that it is where superannuated picture calendars go die.

Muscongus Bay Lobster was a tiny affair when we started going 20 years ago, a half dozen tables and a small cook shack. Dan Renny’s family ran it but about 10 years ago (he’s in his 30s now, as hard working a guy as you’ll ever meet and handsome as the devil) he took it over and has managed growth without sacrificing the rustic charm. The wharf has been enlarged, more tables added to handle the crowds, a bigger cooking shed. The big news this year is that he’s put light bulbs in the port-a-potties.

Can we talk about how strange a yoga class in London is?  Stretch out your kidneys, she kept saying.  Elongate your kidneys.  Her British accent easing me from one pose to another…but…kidneys?  Really?  I don’t even know where my kidneys are.  Honestly, I know they’re somewhere in my torso region but to the point where I could isolate them into a stretch.  It was really strange. 

And it got me thinking about other body parts that in my opinion have nothing to do with yoga.  Like my esophagus.  And my appendix.  And, well, my stomach.  Was it grumbling?  Or was I distracted?  By the time we got out and started wandering around Primrose Hill, the gray sky somehow bright and exciting like I wouldn’t mind if it started raining, by that time my stomach definitely was growling.  I’m still not sure what my kidneys were doing but I was hungry.  And it had to be breakfast