The train ride had gone smoothly, the countryside was postcard picturesque and nightfall was still hours away.
My friends and I strode giddily through the pasture on this last day of spring before finding the rest of our group camped out in a prime spot. We added our blankets to the spread and barely even noticed the misty drizzle that would soon...
I knew before my time at Grady Hospital that I could learn a lot about someone from one personal item or one moment of that person’s life, but I never realized the emotional impact a Xerox of an insurance card in a dead man’s chart — which included the names of his family covered by the plan — could have. Nor did I realize how much I could be troubled by the...
My cell phone rudely wakes me before the first light of dawn. I rise from bed and put on the dirt-caked shorts and pungent shirt I wore yesterday and the day before. In the kitchen, a few of the early risers greet me with wan smiles as they huddle over cold cereal and steaming espresso. The lack of sleep has killed my appetite, but with seven hours of work ahead of me, I...
We were not driving a ’49 Hudson, and we were on a different continent; but our journey west on the roads of Spain would have made Kerouac proud. This is the story of five girls in a strange land armed with suitcases-on-wheels and Elementary Spanish II. “I’m learning Spanish; therefore I will go to Spain” — it seemed a simple enough idea. What I was not...
I’ve always been a sports person. I’ve played sports, watched sports and written about sports. But I played soccer, watched baseball and wrote about basketball — three thoroughly American games. After resigning myself to the fact that I would have to shell out $80 for MLBtv to catch some Dodger games and knowing that “soccer” is one of those...
Interning for a Los Angeles newspaper in the first six weeks of summer, I sought stories relevant to the communities I covered. Some of these articles inevitably related to immigration. Immigration is a complex issue, and I began my work at the newspaper with only a basic understanding of it. But reporting in Los Angeles and working in Latin America throughout the...
They don’t do birthday cakes in Mongolia. At least, they didn’t where I was staying. The round, sturdy gers are supposed to be easily transportable, and ovens are heavy. Kitchen appliances aside, there simply is not much to work with in the way of ingredients. The terrain of the landlocked country nestled between Russia and China is arid, and dinner mostly consists...
The cameras cut to a shot of the barricaded school — as if it was just another mundane news story. As I watched television with my host mother in her Buenos Aires apartment, I was shocked to hear that the city’s most prestigious public high school had been taken over by its students. They were demanding that the building’s facilities be improved. As an American...
When I decided to go to India this summer, my parents, naturally, were worried. I originally attempted to assuage their fears by telling them a small white lie: India is not dangerous, only the Kashmir region is. I didn’t realize at the time that I was only making things harder for myself when I called, three weeks into my three-month-long trip, to tell my parents that...
The casual date is the albino tiger of the dating world — much talked about, highly sought after and questionably accessible. Yet it seems New Haven, and Yalies, have found their sleek white cat: Prime 16, New Haven’s new beer bar-cum-trendy American cuisine restaurant promises a break from the world of coffee dates. A chronic problem arises when trying to identify a...
As I made the short trek to JoJo’s Coffee & Tea, a recently opened coffee shop on the corner of Park and Chapel streets, I wondered: Does the Yale campus really have room for another coffee shop? With Koffee Too (fine … The Publick Cup), Starbucks and the Thain Family Cafe either on or just a few steps from campus, is anyone really going to go the extra block for a...
