Tag Archives: travel

Santa Fe on Thinner Oxygen

Posted on July 11, 2021 by jillbpearlman

How rare to travel as an amateur or emigrant, so ignorant of a well-trod place that you let the place’s magic play with your “free gaze.”   I, Rhode Islander, arrive with little knowledge of New Mexico.  D.H. Lawrence, Georgia … Continue reading →

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Petersburg’s Fresh Waters

Posted on October 25, 2019 by jillbpearlman

Standing by the river Neva, wanting to compose poetry in St Petersburg, I couldn’t hear beyond the lines of great poets – Akhmatova, Blok, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam. History dominates voice, especially in Russia. The Revolution, Stalin’s terrors, the siege, all produced … Continue reading →

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Shape-Shifting in Thessaloniki

Posted on August 15, 2017 by jillbpearlman

The Thessaloniki experience has to include both ghosts and crowds.  Walking through the old souks on a mid-August holiday, its corridors are full of shadows, smells but no people, plastic bags flapping on the skeletal rafters.  This is a good … Continue reading →

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January 20, 2017

Posted on January 27, 2017 by jillbpearlman

January 20 Something is happening back in Washington, though we are 40,000 feet above the Mediterranean. We are rising high, the scalloped edge of the Holy Land a mere hem below, through unraveling skeins of clouds, the hush unearthly. It … Continue reading →

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Summer Junk

Posted on August 19, 2015 by jillbpearlman

There are elements of summer travel that consume the intellect – history and literary settings and reevaluation of the real from the media images we’ve been fed.   There are things that consume the body – sun, mosquitoes.   And … Continue reading →

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Couldn’t we all be a UNESCO Biosphere?

Posted on July 30, 2014 by jillbpearlman

Someone did something right in Menorca. A stone’s throw from glitzy Mallorca and Ibiza, where club kids dance like drug-fueled pongo sticks on their blotto weekends, Menorca remains a gem. Whisper and the person on the other side of the … Continue reading →

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A tiny voice asks: What happened to history?

Posted on July 25, 2014 by jillbpearlman

Israel sensitized me.  That country where history is yesterday and always on the verge of existential struggle changed the frequencies of my antenna.  It was like being in a glass house of history, completely exposed. Running to the bomb shelter … Continue reading →

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“Being There”

Posted on July 16, 2014 by jillbpearlman

Some trips are marked by missing flights and sleeping in Heathrow overnight, or spending a day at the Embassy kibbutzing with the agents to prove you’re who you are so they can replace that stolen passport.   Some trips find you … Continue reading →

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Undercover Travel

Posted on June 25, 2014 by jillbpearlman

These are places I may be going this summer: Tel Aviv, Berlin, Madrid, Menorca, Barcelona. Then again, I may not. There’s a spy in me.   I use guises.  A writer needs a certain anonymity. In this existential “spy” stance, there … Continue reading →

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Vicarious Travel

Posted on June 15, 2014 by jillbpearlman

Before Internet, the color and variety of the “outside” world – outside the adolescent bedroom, outside the Soviet Union or the dictatorship that prohibited travel or rural village – came through international sports competitions. The World Cup.  The Olympics.  Kids … Continue reading →

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