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The Meaning of a Taco

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I have attached a picture of something rather beautiful to this post. To those who live in North America, you are likely to remark, "But that's just a taco."  However fellow expats who have had the experience of residing in the Giant Yellow Spaceship (my nickname for where I used to live), in the barren Kyrgyz mountains, where everything that sustains a person is precious, will understand me when I reply, "there is no 'just a' in the world." While the average North American is seldom more than a 10 minute drive from a cornucopia of tacos and burritos, my life in the GYS often found me hundreds of kilometers from anything resembling a taco or most of its ingredients. I would chuckle to myself whenever someone asked me what my hobby was when I lived in Naryn. I always said traveling or reading as that sounds far less bizarre and is easier to explain than "searching for tacos and burritos." And so I would spend my time searching for ingredients wh...
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20 Years Ago Today: My New York University 9-11 Experience

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Originally Published:  9-11-2021 9-11-2001 seemed like any other beautiful late summer day at the New York University campus at Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy.  I was responsible for the student life of our campus.  Each semester we housed 100 study abroad students in two of the five villas on our 200 acre estate of gardens and groves of olive trees and cypruses.  And we were also responsible for 300 students scattered throughout the city in apartments NYU leased for them.  As you can tell from the pictures, La Pietra was a romantic Tuscan setting that seemed to come straight from a movie.  Mid-afternoon on the 11th got a call from the Head of Student Life for all the NYU abroad campuses who was situated about 20 blocks from the towers.  He told me that there had been an aviation accident and one of the Twin Towers had been hit.  At that point it sounded like a freak airplane crash.  It was when we learned of the second tower being hit th...
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Nirvana

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I decided to escape the giant glass tower, where I have spent 98% of my time this year. So last weekend I enjoyed a 24-hour vacation at the Grand Kempinski Hotel in Downtown Jakarta, wearing my N95 mask and face shield.  Ate lunch at Oku, the Japanese restaurant inside the hotel that flies its fresh fish directly from Tokyo's finest seafood market. I can say that my sushi was as good as one can obtain outside Japan. When the tuna is as smooth as butter and tastes as fresh as the treats from Neptune's table, you know your sushi is special. Add some tempura and gyoza and I attained something about as close to Nirvana one can reach on this plane of existence, with apologies for trivializing the divine with my excessively happy rhetoric, but when one is perfectly contented...
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