As 2009 ends and I prepare my annual review à la Chris Guillebeau, I had to stop and think about the insane amount of experiences I've had and people I've met along the way. "Whirlwind" can barely capture the appropriate velocity of the past twelve months, during which time I went from living in Colombia to prepping for a move to Brazil, and an index card bluebrint of arrows and airport codes turned into a series of places and faces that passed all too quickly from dreams to memory. Since bringing in 2009 with millions of people on Copacabana Beach, I've been to 35 cities in 15 countries on five continents. Wow.
It's only now, looking back, that I realize the magnitude of those statistics. After all, while on the road, more attention had to be paid to details like food, lodging, transport, and other logistics than to the entire scheme as a whole. Outsiders had the luxury of awe and wonder; I had to figure out how to get from the airport to my CouchSurfing host's house and where I could find wireless Internet.
Now, I think about the new friendships forged, the old friendships strengthened, the innumerable moments that I yearn to repeat, the people with whom I want to hang out again, dance with again, smile at again, hug again, make love to again, meet again, and say goodbye to again. These memories serve as bittersweet affirmation of the transitory nature of life; that nothing is permanent and every present moment is just that, a present to be treasured.
So, at the end of this calendar year, I give thanks to the Cosmos for 2009 and everyone in it. And for 2010 and everyone in it.
I haven't been on vacation in Florida with my entire family since the mid-90s, and spending this Christmas with them in Orlando brings back and brings up all sorts of memories and madness. Back in March, while still living in Colombia, a bout of homesickness caused me to pen an homage to my home state, a celebration of both the geographic and temporal location that serves as my cultural foundation. Being back home, I find these same sentiments echoed in family conversations and collective memory, in spite of mindless sprawl and cultural homoginization, increased population and pervasive plasticity of modern Florida. For new readers, I hope you find this post enlightening and entertaining. For long-time readers, I hope this re-post is just as engrossing as you originally found it (well, assuming you found it engrossing, originally :-)
Happy Holidays to all the Fly Folk out there. Thank you for reading.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Missing Middle Florida (Originally posted March 10, 2009)
There's the moonlight and magnolias of the North, the kid-centered wonders of Central, and the tropical swing of the South - the geographic regions of the state of Florida. Then there are the temporal zones: the Old Florida of Osceola and Andrew Jackson, of Saint Augustine and the Confederacy, of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The New Florida of Walt Disney and Jeb Bush, of Little Haiti and Little Havana, of Spring Break and Dave Barry. And I grew up somewhere in between, a native Floridian born to native Floridians, who have a connection to the peninsula, know all the secret places, and how to get everywhere in the state without once climbing on one of those new-fangled interstates. I'm from Middle Florida.
Being born at the tail end of the 70s means my memory only extends as far back as 1980, a time of transition for my home state. Since the late 19th century, hell, since the 15th century when Juan Ponce de Leon named the place for the flowers he saw while killing off Tekestas and searching for the Fountain of Youth, Florida has been a tourist haven. But I came of age just as manufacturing and the military - long mainstays of the state's economy, lead by Jacksonville ("The Bold New City of the South") - took a backseat to newly invented mass tourism and an upgraded agricultural sector, just as the Mariel Boat Lift cemented Miami's status as capital of Latin America, after the influx of snow birds and Baby Boomers but before the boom of babies born to folks from other states and other countries. I'm not pre-Disney, but I'm pre-Disneyfication.
I remember taking U.S. 17 to Orlando, U.S. 90 to Tallahassee, and A1A to Daytona Beach, passing the original themed attractions built along winding hightways at the advent of the Motor Age that had already faded in the shadow of their newer, flashier, 2.0 Beta versions in Orlando, before re-inventing themselves in order to compete: the thin, weary dolphins at Marineland; corny water ski shows at Cypress Gardens; determined young synchronized swimmers in mermaid outfits at Weeki Wachee.
I miss those days: school field trips to the fort at the "Nation's Oldest City," Saint Augustine, marveling at the kooky billboards for the Ripley's Believe-It-or-Not Museum and stopping to pick dates off the palms that lined U.S. 1 out of town. Gatorland, Gatorade, the Gator Bowl, and a fierce, sometimes irrational devotion to the University of Florida Gators. Crosstown high school football rivalries between Raines and Ribault and cross-state rivalries between Lake City Columbia and Fort Walton Beach Choctawhatchee back when high school football rivalries mattered. Indigenous place names like Okeechobee, Okefenokee, Ocoee, Loxahatchee, Pahokee, Immokalee, Kissimmee, Ichetucknee, Chattahoochee, Apalachee Parkway, Miccosukee Road (shouts to Tallahassee). The ease of slipping between Southern and tropical cultures as effortlessly as organizing a random crab boil or barbecue on a typical hot-ass April or September afternoon. FAMU's Homecoming Parade, which always started out on a freezing November morning and ended up blazing hot by 10 AM, and the FAMU-BCCFlorida Classic, back when it was held in Tampa, back when the Tampa Bay Bucs sucked. Kennedy Space Center and Melbourne Jai-Alai. Dances like the Tootsie Roll and the Tawlet Bowl, accompanied by syncopated Flawda Bass and the raunchy lyrics of Dade County's poet laureate, Luther "Luke" Campbell. The Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop and Flea USA and the Opa Locka-Hialeah Flea Market (straddling Lock-town y la República de Hialeah). Miami with only a small cluster of skyscrapers Downtown and televised vice on run-down South Beach and the original Orange Bowl and an equal number of everybody from everywhere back when, it seemed, more folks got along better (though the 1982 Overtown riot told a different story). Tropical storms with names. Blue skies in the east and black skies in the west. Miles of undeveloped coastline. Flatness.
No, I don't miss the stench of the pulp mills and the knowing where you could and couldn't go as black folk after dark, lest we forget the Florida was indeed a slave state and didn't desegregate schools until almost 1970. After all, many strange fruit-bearing trees grow alongside palm trees. But I do miss the strong black communities and institutions that were established and thrived in that environment of hate. And I miss being in a place where I have roots as exposed, yet as deep as the mangroves in the Everglades.
NEW YORK— Yeah, there are rats, service disruptions, drunken old men, drunken young women, and the pungent odor of pee, but dammit, the New York City subway runs 24/7. And I mean the whole system, not just a couple of train lines here or there. In the city that never sleeps (an oft-quoted untruth), the 24-hour bars and 24-hour diners and 24-hour pharmacies and 24-hour gyms and 24-hour Apple Store remain connected by underground rail. The late night trains that stop at each station don't convey the same warp-speed urgency of the express trains that race underneath the grid of Manhattan at ten blocks a minute, but the lower number of riders means available seats and fewer obstacles when rushing through the maze-like transfer stations.
There's also the loopier entertainment; at midnight, you not only get the drummers and the guitarists and accordion players, you get to see punchy folks getting jiggy like this in the subway:
On a bottom-lit dancefloor the size of a small hotel lobby, black-white-and-Latin b-boys, Asian ballet dancers, 40ish couples from Spanish Harlem, 50ish couples from Harlem Harlem, Korean-American salsa instructors, A&R execs, mailroom gofers, baldies, dreadheads, girls-with-girls, guys-with-guys, professional dancers, occasional two-steppers, Southerners, Northerners, foreigners, and a middle-aged woman with a cane all samba'd, salsa'd, and shook assorted and voluptuous body parts in the spirit of the way the truth the light the drum.
What might have been an underground incarnation of the nearby United Nations headquarters jammed to an intoxicating, almost religious confection of Diasporic rhythms tracing the triangle from Banjul to Buenos Aires to the Bronx and back, conjured up by musical sorcerer Nickodemus and supplemented by live percussion. As soon as mi gente's hips got used to swiveling, feet got called into glorious church-stomping candences, arms enlisted in jazzy flourishes, and heads involved in breakneck floor spins. Continuous smiles shifted from toothy and excited grins to coy, Mona Lisa-style expressions of contentment that body and beat worked in unison. Couples formed and broke apart, partners shifting among the crowd of one-time strangers who at once recognized each other as disciples of the music. There was no pretense, no posturing, no being too cute or hard or proud to nod, smile, or give a thumbs-up. Of all the people in New York, it's the house heads who embody the ideas of borderlessness, of universality, of humanity in celebration of diversity and ignorant of demographics, all the while charging and being charged by the eternally pulsing heartbeat of enchained masses ferried across the Atlantic centuries ago.
London tries, but this happens no where else but New York.
Here's a little shadow-dancing footage for those of you who couldn't make it to the event. You can't see much, but you can feel it. Sorry I couldn't film more...I was too busy gettin' my own groove on.
Today, I head up to the Frozen North: ten days in New York City (any lurkers in the area, get at me). In honor of the occasion, I'm going to share with you a song that I think speaks more to The City I usually encounter than does Jay-Z and Alicia's new cut, Madonna's homage, or even Old Blue Eyes' standard paean (though I think "Sidewalks of New York" might come close :-) Anybody know this one?
On a related note, I read recently that one should to verbalize one's dreams as a part of manifesting them into reality. That being said, I shall verbalize that, within five years, I plan to be living seven-to-eight months of each year in São Paulo and three-to-four months of each year in New York (the summer months, of course; what could be better?), with each transition bookended by a few weeks of travel. The question isn't "why?" (I mean...why not?). The question is "how?"
On an unrelated note, I came across this song in my iPod recently. If electronic music is supposed to be danceable and joy-inducing, then why does this one make me so sad? :-(
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Macau. Most people haven't even heard of the place: a former Portuguese colony on the southern coast of China established as the first permanent European toehold in the Far East back in 1557 and the final foreign stop on my amended round-the-world trip (Seoul doesn't count, as I was only transiting for eight hours; though I did get to shower in the lavish Korean Air business class lounge and meet up with this sexy sista at Krispy Kreme in the Gangnam District for a short 60 minutes).
Long since overshadowed as a trading and financial center by urbane and much-larger Hong Kong, only an hour's ride east by high-speed ferry, Macau has reinvinted itself as a combination Lisbon-Las Vegas, with its collonnaded colonial quarter framed by monumental, neon-lit casino resorts. Peopled mostly by mainland Chinese in search of capitalist-country incomes and sprinkled with a few expat Portuguese working in the still-lucrative legal sector and assorted Brazilian showgirls, Russian and Australian ballroom dancers, and Romanian strippers who cycle in and out as casino entertainment (of course, I was there the one night the strippers had off), Macau has the distinction of being the first and last European possession in China, having been handed back in 1999, two years after HK. Under the "One China, Two Systems" plan that also allows HK to flourish with a large degree of independence, Macau still bathes in the collective glow of flickering lights, glamorous floor shows, luxury retail, and palacial gaming halls.
Observe:
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Oh, Hong Kong! How the currents of history and culture have conspired to make you the entoxicating urban assemblage that you are. Poised at the foot of Victoria Peak and gracing both shores of a similarly-named harbor, Hong Kong has lost none of her shine after having changed hands from the British colonial power that created her to the Chinese superpower that is her cultural foundation. Expats from all over the English-speaking world keep the financial sector abuzz, hold-up in luxury skybox apartments and tooling around packed and narrow streets in Maybachs and Bentleys (only the service people—accountants, attorneys and such—whip around in Beemers and S-Classes). The masses, and I do mean masses, aspire to these trappings, though, for the time being, whisking around the city in speedy, efficient public tranport doesn't make being part of the proletariat seem so bad. Hong Kong is a city of conspicuous consumption and unbridled capitalism, upward mobility writ large. But unlike, say, Dubai or Las Vegas, she's been handling her business for centuries.
And that's what makes her somewhat imposing. Arriving by ferry into Victoria Harbour, guarded on both sides by walls of skyscrapers, themselves backed-up by mountain peaks, I felt as if I'd just entered a fortified medieval city with high walls and turrets full of sentries. Once inside, the cluttered and exhilirating commercial alleys of Kowloon City or Sheung Wan contrasted with the sleek and chic straightaways of TST and Causeway Bay, and regardless of the cost of rent, a pair of shoes, or a bowl of soup in any given area, the place was crowded, teeming, jammed, packed, populated. Literally, erybody and they mama lives in Hong Kong.
Despite a population density of 15 thousand people per square mile, I didn't find HKers to be particularly outgoing. Unlike other places I'd been, in spite of looking conspicuously foreign, I barely got a second glance from anyone. This in itself didn't bother me. I was annoyed, however, by the few blacks I did come across, and I mean few and far between, who actually looked away as we approached one another on the street. I was aghast; never in my travels had I not crossed paths with a fellow black Westerner (usually distinguishable from black Africans by carriage, demeanor, and hairstyle) and not shared the bruh-man headnod of solidarity and kinship in a foreign land. Well, it was straight "incognegro" in Hong Kong*. Maybe the brothers and sisters thought I was Indian, as there were many in HK, but it was the whites who I was continually greeted by at intersections and on the street. I was hurt to my heart. I was angry.
Fortunately, I had been blessed with a few soulmates in the city who could feel my pain: the lovely and talented Nikita the Traveller kept me company when not parsing French grammar for the kiddies at school; and Victor, novice diplomat and expert translator (homeboy be tawkin' dat Chinese!) who graciously provided a roof, vittles, and wireless Internet for a week in Wan Chai, as well as a crew of fellow FSOs who knew where to go in Hong Kong for the hot beats and hot grits (yes, grits). We were of split opinion regarding the eye-avoidance issue: Victor saying folk greeted him all the time (I say that's because of his dreads), while Nikita parked in my lot, highlighting numerous instances of shade. That aside, Victor and his friends provided me with much insight into life as a diplomat (though, to be fair, HK ain't exactly Kabul or Ciudad Juarez, so I think they might be just a tad biased, understandably), and almost sold me on the idea, until we compared the three-month annual vacation time afforded teachers versus the fourteen days they get in the Foreign Service. You do the math.
When I wasn't hanging with the homies, I hoofed it around the city, wiping the sweat off my brow while snapping photos of open-air meat and flea markets in Wan Chai, wading through the throngs in Times Square, expanding my mind at the Hong Kong Museum of History, politely declining an offer of tailor-made suits by Pakistani salesmen on Nathan Road, flying over to the Big Buddha on the longest cable-car ride in life, zooming up to breathtaking Victoria Peak on the near-vertical tram, coursing back and forth across the harbor on the Star Ferry, uncovering the lone capoeira class in town, and scouting out the nearest Burger King to ease a craving I'd had for the last month.
Hong Kong is hot. I just wonder why the people are so cold.
*Side note: Subsequently, in both Macau and Seoul, brothers greeted me appropriately; one was from Mozambique and the other Canadian. This vindicates Asia as a whole and isolates HK as a mecca for coloreds with no damn home trainin'.
Check the photos:
Then ride with me to the roof of Hong Kong in the glass elevator of the Hopewell Centre:
At this point in my journey, after two months and nine countries, I was operating on borrowed funds and becoming just the slightest bit panicky about where the next cash infusion would be coming from. The original plan had been to have enough money stacked to hang out in Brazil for a few months without having to work full-time in order to bang out a few chapters of a novel. Very quickly, zat plen vent kaput.
Meanwhile, I was still on the dream tour, passing through the Kingdom of Malaysia for a couple days en route to Hong Kong, and crashing with a gangly CouchSurfer of Chinese parentage named Dan. A writer and web designer, Dan took a day off of work to show me around his city, peopled with a mix of Asian ethnicities and served by a modern and extensive transport system. Accustomed to giving tours of KL, Dan had a whole itinerary planned, involving mosques and markets. Our first stop: KL City Centre to check out the Petronas Towers, those twin silver, Islamic-inspired spires of Entrapment fame and one-time tallest building(s) in the world. We knew we wouldn't be able to go to the top, since tickets had to be procured first thing in the morning. In the end, though, we never made it out of the park and shopping mall at the base of the towers.
See, what had happened was, I had found a few teaching job leads online; a couple in Brazil, one in Berlin, and another back in the States. I needed to get my CV sent out to each school, pronto. Immediately. Right away.
There were two Starbucks beneath the towers, both with painfully slow wireless Internet, both chock full o' foreigners trying to access said Internet simultaneously. What started out as a quick five-minute email ended up takng an hour. Then. we decided to get some food and as we were finishing, it began to rain. I felt like I could squeeze in another couple of emails and a Skype phone call or two. And after another almost two hours, Dan let me know in his calm, measured manner, that most of the places on our sightseeing list had closed. I was in town for only two days and had spent five hours in a mall, most of it hunched over a laptop at Starbucks. Talk about misplaced priorities.
Dan had been gracious enough to take off from work and drive me into the capital city of a country to which I had no clue when I'd be returning on a continent I'd never been before. And because of a very American sense of single-mindedness and goal-oriented-ness, I missed out on who knows how many sights, sounds, and other random and beautiful experiences stressing over something that could have been taken care of during one of my many pending airport layovers (especially considering all major East Asian airports have free or cheap Internet access).
Work-related stress without even having a job, while on vacation. Ain't that a...?!
Here's to trying my damndest to never make that mistake again. Cheers, Dan!
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This year, the Hindu holy day of Diwali fell on October 17th.
This year, my twelve-hour layover in Chennai, formerly Madras, fell on October 17th.
As with most religious holidays such as Eid (end of Ramadan) or Hanukkah, Diwali—the Festival of Lights—is celebrated with family. And as I had no family to speak of in India, I was destined to spend my first Diwali alone.
My plane ticket from Delhi to Kuala Lumpur cost me less than $200, but the scheduling called for a half-day stretch in the seaport on the Bay of Bengal for which a juicy cocktail is named. Knowing I'd be stationary for such a long while, I sent messages to a few CouchSurfers in the city hoping I'd have a couple of babysitters. Not knowing I had booked my flight on Hindu's biggest holiday (though not everyone in India is Hindu, Diwali is also an official government holiday just like Christmas in the US), I had several responses to my queries, but they were all very tentative: "I might/might not be in the city," "I may/may not be available to take you around town."
In the end, blood proved thicker than water and my would-be CS day hosts apologized profusely and with great regret that they wouldn't be available; the last host informing me of this after I had already arrived in lush, tropical Chennai. With most tourist sites closed for the holiday, and with the temperature being in the mid-90s, I decided to spend a couple hours at the movies.
I printed up the boarding pass for my international flight, which departed a little before midnight, and after a short stroll around the compact airport which included an abortive attempt to secure a banana-chocolate milkshake (apparently, adding banana to a chocolate milkshake necessitated consultation with the restaurant manager, restaurant owner, and airport authorities), then argued with a rickshaw driver over the price to take me to the Chennai Citi Center mall (got him down to 130 rupees, about $2.80). We arrived at the boxy, but baroque, shopping center after a half-hour of whizzing through relatively empty streets and past shuttered storefronts. I had my mind all set for something Hollywood or Bollywood. I got nothing: every showing of every film was sold out for the entire day. I guess it was for the best, as all the movies were in Tamil anyway.
After another haggling session, this time with a pack of audacious but idle rick drivers trying to finance a very merry Diwali on my lone airport run, I trekked back to the terminal.
I was sleepy and sweaty.
I still had six hours before my flight.
I wasn't allowed through Immigration with a boarding pass printed from the website.
I wasn't allowed through Immigration without a departure form from my airline.
I wasn't allowed through Immigration to just sit and wait at the gate.
The airline counter didn't open until two hours before my flight. There were four hours left.
I bought a bar of soap at the pharmacy and took a bird bath in the bathroom, changing into a clean shirt and the least-dirty of the two pair of jeans I had.
And I sat. Wrote. Sat. Ate. Sat. Whistled. Sat. Twiddled. Sat. Watched the old school departure board letters flap around, spelling the names of far-off-sounding destinations one letter at a time (very cool!). Sat. Wrote. Sat. Ate. Etc.
I checked into the flight and scored a window seat on an exit row.
I marched triumphantly, for the second time, to Immigration. "Happy Diwali," I said to the officer who immediately frowned and gave me a defiant Indian head wiggle.
"Not everyone in India celebrates Diwali, you know," he schooled. "We Tamils celebrate the Harvest Festival in January, called Pongal."
I stood stunned, but I guess I would have responded the same way had I been working somewhere and was greeted with "Happy Kwanzaa." In fact, I know I would have (I told y'all Indians were black).
The moral of this story: Stop trying to be a smart ass by erroneously invoking people's cultures when a simple "hello" would suffice.
Happy Thanksgiving, errbody!
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Dry and monstrously big, India's capital city houses over twelve million people who, despite sprawling over 570 square miles at the apex of the Indo-Gangetic plain, still seem stacked on top of one another. The New Delhi train depot served as my introduction to the city and my most uncomfortable experience in India: thousands of people milling around the dusty platforms, spitting phlegm despite signs discouraging the practice (hello H1N1/SARS/bird flu/regular flu!), kids running around in tiny t-shirts and no underwear, pulverized fecal matter rising with the clouds of dust as trains pulled into the station. I was afraid to lick my lips. At the station, I was conspicuously foreign, which for me is unsettling in chaotic environments like this, and I was stared at more than at any time on my journey. One guy came up to me with a gob of amber wax at the end of a stick and offered to clean my ears for me. I responded in Spanish, and he retreated with a grin that said, "What the hell is this muhfuka speaking?"
Unlike Mumbai, where I stayed with a friend I already knew who doubled as a translator and had easy access to transportation, Delhi meant the renewed adventure of traveling solo. And while I met many interesting people and had numerous profound conversations via that friend, it's always when I'm alone that I meet the most surprising people. North India was not short on surprises. In fact, during my five days there, I met:
Willy and Ula, an inspiring middle-aged German couple I met on the train from Delhi to Agra. With their grown children off raising families, Willy and Ula had already trekked through Latin America for a month with rudimentary Spanish before traipsing off to India with rudimentary English. They had been taken advantage of by the staff of their hotel and were trying to cope with thickly-accented Indian English by the time we met. I decided to ask if my CouchSurfing host could help them once we got to Agra. It turned out to be the best decision I could make.
Rajat, a no-limit soldier stationed at one of the many military installations in heavily-fortified Agra. Soft-spoken and sharp-featured, he commanded respect from his on-base inferiors to the off-base touts and rickshaw drivers swarming around us at the station. He met us with the names and phone numbers of a couple hotels in town and before taking me back to his place to grab a shower (this was post-14-hour train ride from Mumbai), he made sure Willy and Ula were safely tucked away in a hotel and that we had decently-priced transport to the Taj Mahal and Agra Fort the next day. The consummate CouchSurfing host, Rajat introduced me to Tulsi Mulethi tea and the Hindu tenet of present-focused living. 'Preciate ya, brother.
Jag, the film and television director who grew up in Australia to Indian parents and brought her cross-cultural perspective back from Oz. Our paths crossed at another CouchSurfer's house in Delhi and I knew we'd be hanging hard once I saw her large eyes and wide smile. We got our grub on at a frou-frou restaurant on Delhi's periphery, then our club on at a crowded nightspot a few barrios over. It was just a day in Delhi, but memorable nonetheless.
Tino and Tony, dance instructors imported from abroad to establish the Indian National Ballet who happened to be crashing one floor down in my central Delhi guesthouse. Tino, a hip-hop and jazz teacher from the Canary Islands who spoke English with a British accent and black American idioms, sat pulling his hair out over a girl in Mumbai who had turned him out. Tony, a fellow Southerner, whipped up some slammin' gumbo and garlic pasta using recipes he had learned from his ex-wife. Tino and I sat and sulked (in Spanish) in their apartment because it was Diwali—the biggest Hindu holiday—and salsa night had been cancelled. Family holidays always suck when you're on vacation.
I was honored to have this diverse group of miscreants and ne'er-do-wells cross my path. It's the type of interaction that makes traveling alone worthwhile; I'd never have met any of them had I been rolling with one of my peeps. And I'd be six friends short.
See Delhi here:
And watch the Magic Carpet Maker waterproof one of India's famous rugs at the carpet factory in Agra. Sorry about the sideways video, folks. Just turn ya head. ;) Magic Carpet Maker from Fly Brother on Vimeo.
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Photo by AV8NLVR Last week, United Airlinesannounced service from Washington-Dulles to Accra, Ghana, continuing on to Lagos, Nigeria. When the flights start in May, UA will become the second major American carrier to serve the Motherland, giving the large Nigerian population in the DC area nonstop access to the country's largest business center and former capital. Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines already flies to Accra and Lagos, as well as Abuja, Nigeria; Dakar, Senegal; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Cairo, Egypt, though they've announced several routes to other African destinations in the past year that either have been terminated or never took off for various reasons. It's nice to see other airlines taking the (lucrative) chance of serving Africa, but I can't imagine the in-flight service even approaching that of the European airlines already flying from the US to the continent via their hubs.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ AA's new black travel website, featuring Fly Brother
In October, American Airlines started a travel website centered around the black travel experience called Black Atlas. Headlined by writer and "travel expert-at-large" Nelson George, the site highlights 27 domestic and 15 international destinations sure to resonate with affluent African-American travelers. Readers can submit blog posts detailing their experiences on the road, as well as search for airfares with a special interactive map. They've also been kind enough to feature ya boy, Fly Brother, and his scribblings on Salvadorda Bahia, Paris, and Mexico City. Now, that's fly.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Fly Brother Winter Tour 2009
LOS ANGELES, November 18-23 NEW YORK, December 11-20 ORLANDO, December 20-26 MIAMI, December 29-January 6
If I'm headed your way, shout me!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Fly Brother welcomes your views. If this post hit the spot, please comment and/or click.
Fly Brother tackles international travel in unabridged, unapologetic, full and complete color. It's also the blog name of writer and educator Ernest White II, a tall, ruggedly handsome, erudite, occasionally delusional Black American male living in Brazil's largest city.
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