Travel

It was an overcast day in Hong Kong as my friend Mark and I boarded a double-decker bus with no destination in mind. We just wanted to see where it went – part of what became our theme of deviating from the group’s tour itinerary.

Both decks of the bus were so packed there was barely room to stand, as we rode away and ventured into the unknown.

With each stop, the crowd gradually thinned, and all of us standing now had a place to sit.

As we traveled on, we watched the Hong Kong skyline disappear beyond the horizon. The bus continued to empty out, until Mark and I were the last remaining passengers.

My roots are in Prague. Not my real hereditary-type roots — they lie somewhere in Lithuania, in some long-forgotten shtetl in the Pale of Settlement.

I’m talking about my cultural roots, my identity as a bohemian, or in the current vernacular, a boho. The bohemian movement started in Prague, or at least was perfected there. Also, Prague is the capital of Bohemia, which is an historical region that takes up about two-thirds of the current Czech Republic. So, Prague is Bohemian and bohemian. Around 1912, Franz Kafka met a Yiddish-Theater actor named Isaac Löwy, who introduced him into a world of writers, artists, thinkers, physicists and anarchists.

They hung out in bars or in Berta Fanta’s salon – upstairs from her husband’s pharmacy; they drank absinthe, they had sex with actresses (I’m sure they did; I don’t have historical data at my fingertips, but believe me, they did); they stayed up all night and talked about Expressionism and Modern Music; they discussed the ideas of Einstein and Freud, who were both kicking up their heels around this time.

On our recent trip to Chicago, my husband and I found ourselves fairly secluded from the outside world as we cared for my aging father-in-law while my mother-in-law got a much needed vacation. With only one day to ourselves – thanks to the brief appearance of his brothers – we decided to meet up with some friends on the shore of Lake Michigan, in Michigan. It would have been easier to hook-up on the Chi-town side of the water (they only live 20 minutes away from my in-laws), but since they were off boating there, we like to road-trip and I had never been to Michigan, we tentatively agreed to meet in a small town on the lake called New Buffalo.

Spontaneous is a word rarely attributed to me, especially when I travel. The advent of the Internet has been a godsend to my obssesive need to pre-plan and find exactly the right place to go before I leave my living room. Sure, I might miss the best local "whatever" that just opened yesterday or is too obscure to be on the web because of my control-freak nature, but I'm too old and particular to leave lunch to chance. If I'm going to make the effort and take the time, I want better than even odds that I'll enjoy the excursion.

Around the first of June, we’ll fly to our house in Italy for the summer, but until then I’ll just close my eyes and dream about Umbria in the spring.

The poppies are starting to pop right about now and our whole neighborhood looks like the road to Oz. Everybody’s tucking into abbacchio, spring lamb, roasted in the oven with potatoes, rosemary and garlic.

Or simpler yet, scottadito, lamb chops pounded thin, brushed with olive oil and flash-grilled over a wood fire. You hold the chop by the bone end and eat it with your fingers. Scottaditi means burned fingers.

The thing about the lamb in Umbria is that it tastes better. That’s about all you can say. Americans have great beef and they’re starting to figure out how to raise pork – not there yet, but better — but as for lamb, forget about it; go to Italy.

It has something to do with the way the lambs eat over there, how they live and also how they die — at a much younger age that anyone would allow them to die in the States. American lambs get older; Italian lamb tastes better.