ABBAS
ZAIDI "Lumut, Pakistan: Queen's Street":
Close to my gate stood an extremely thin bare-footed Tamil-looking
boy about five years of age; he was wearing the Batman costume,
holding the Batman mask in one hand and a big toy machine gun in
the other; an enormous fake moustache was his most pronounced facial
feature. He was looking up at the mango-laden tree inside my house.
He fired the gun at us and ran away
MARK
TERRILL "Five Prose Places": The old dented
black Peugeot taxi hurtles through the streets of nighttime Karachi
Pakistan at breakneck speed seeming to catch each & every pothole
& rut with a shuddering slam
JOHN
VERLENDEN "Road to Damascus, Part Two":
Damascus, dusty by day, shimmered red, blue, white and green courtesy
of neon. A shakily amplified muezzin wailed out prayer hour, but
my sidewalk's crowd kept chattering
ROBERT
E. GARLITZ "South America: The Traveler and the
Beauty": By most accounts Bolivia is a harsh and striking
country, marked by extremes of altitude, climate, barren terrain,
and great poverty and some of the worst living and working conditions
in the world
MARALYN
LOIS POLAK: "Expat Land: Guatemala City; Tuesday
They Poisoned the Dogs": It was a Tuesday when they poisoned
the dogs in Guatemala. As a Philadelphian, I felt right at home
PETER
WEVERKA "Punta Desolacion": Today I went
to the bank and tried again to exchange the gold ingot for paper
currency
KIRBY
OLSON "Mexico": It had not been long after
I had embraced the Mexican aesthetic when my wife began to grumble
JOSEPH
GELFER "Anarchy in the PRC": Everyone I'd
met in Hong Kong, whilst securing my Chinese visa, who had just
come from the mainland had a look of vague trauma about them
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STEVAN
WEINER "From America to Kosova and Back":
Kosova is destruction, ugliness, sorrow, stubbornness, but also
pride, solidarity, beauty and triumph
ALLAN
GRAUBARD "Sarajevo Notes": I first came
to the Balkans in 1997 -- in search of a Croatian production of
Radovan Ivsic's King Gordogan, which I had previously opened off-off
Broadway at the Ohio Theater in New York
STEPHEN
F. ANDERSON "Team Boracay: 200 Miles South of Manila":
This dumbbell-shaped island is only four and a half miles long (about
75 soccer fields) and little over a half-mile wide at its narrowest
midsection
STEPHEN
RAHAIM "First Impressions, New Orleans":
It's an amazing thing to get caught in a cross wind, a particular
spot on the street where you can hear three or even four bands melding
together into that singular song of the Quarter
STEPHEN
CLAIR "Mack and Stan in New Orleans": Mack
and Stan are spending the summer in New Orleans, housesitting an
apartment just outside the French Quarter
MICHAEL
STANDAERT "Down & Out in Brussels & Bruxelles":
The barmaid struck me eye first off, all buxom blonde and brass-eyed,
a corset setting off her bosom which gravitated toward the night
sky, cross-laced in the fashion of an Octoberfest beer-maiden
lDEAN LENANE "English
Culinary Atrocites": England without a doubt, offers the
most execrable collection of edible dreck you are likely to encounter
anywhere in the world
BRETT
PERUZZI "Driving in Italy": One of the
tricks the locals seemed to employ was to only look straight ahead,
never back, or not even to the side
MICHAEL
BACKUS "Santa Fe Cab": I'm parked on the
edge of the city, right where it turns to scrub brush and red sand
hills
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