The clock ticks faintly as I sip from my ever-present water bottle. It’s the refillable type, of course, but that’s not really the point.
As I sip, I read familiar words on the screen. Some newspaper desperate to monetize is going on about things I already know: Americans aren’t using their vacation time and are less happy than their European counterparts.
By EBK Riley
My daughter Delia is disappointed that we can’t go to Paris for her seventh birthday this September. I don't know when it really started, but now, she's all about the City of Lights. Her favorite mug in our mismatched collection is one that features a line drawing of the Eiffel Tower, and when Angelina Ballerina ended on PBS Kids last Sunday morning and Rick Steves’ Best of Europe: Paris came on, she watched the whole thing as if it were a Taylor Swift special. She tells me that she needs to bring a sweater, even in the summer, and that the best value for a stay in Paris is an out of the way two star hotel: nice beds, continental breakfast and some evening room service, for little more a night than a one star hotel in the center of the city. If she had a bag, it would be packed.
By Erica Nikolaidis
In September, I turned 33. I have not yet succumbed to the fear and dread with which many people experience birthdays. Sure, I could do without the ravages of age—the new lines crinkling my face, my butt’s slow and steady southward migration, the sad Vince Guaraldi music that plays in my head whenever I see my boobs. But it seems silly to get neurotic about the inevitable (oh, that I could apply this sage insight to my other neuroses). Why not embrace the new number, enjoy the concrete justification to Treat. Yo. Self? Open presents, eat cake, get your feet rubbed. Get your feet rubbed while eating cake and opening presents!
Three-meter long ropes of pink and red padlocks reach up to the ivy-covered balcony, known as Juliet’s Balcony, in Verona. People would like to believe that this was the balcony made famous in the scene when the ‘star crossed lovers’ declare their love for each other in Shakespeare’s play. Visiting tourists close small locks on the building as a sign of their unbreakable bond to each other, and as a romantic gesture of sympathy to Romeo and Juliet, who died for love. Watching the teenagers who go into the nearby shop to buy locks or write graffiti on the street walls, or the older couples who come in to take photographs, it doesn’t seem to matter to them that the government of Verona built it in the 1930’s. All around the rose marble city there are sites like this: Juliet’s tomb is in fact unoccupied, and her house picked simply because the family name resembles Juliet’s family name, ‘Capulet’.
