Travels in the Riel World

I’ve always been intrigued by the character of different cities. Every urban environment, it seems, has a different vibe, a unique feel. The coffeehouses of Seattle, the universities of Boston, the Latin beat of Miami. Each place has such unique traits that it’s not possible to mistake one for another, and individuals who love one city may actually feel somewhat off kilter in a different environment.

Therefore, I read with interest this recent essay that I stumbled across by Paul Graham, titled “Cities and Ambition,” in which he discusses the characters and ambitions of various cities. An excerpt:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.

What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.

When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

That’s not quite the same message New York sends. Power matters in New York too of course, but New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. The reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone…

The big thing in LA seems to be fame. There’s an A List of people who are most in demand right now, and what’s most admired is to be on it, or friends with those who are. Beneath that the message is much like New York’s, though perhaps with more emphasis on physical attractiveness.

In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you know. You want to be an insider. In practice this seems to work much as in LA. There’s an A List and you want to be on it or close to those who are. The only difference is how the A List is selected.

O.K., so cities have different characters. Does it matter, though, where you live? Well, it depends. According to Graham, it could matter a lot.

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment…But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time…

No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do…

Even when a city is still a live center of ambition, you won’t know for sure whether its message will resonate with you till you hear it. When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It’s an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn’t like the people there…You’ll probably have to figure out where to live by trial and error. You’ll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.

What do you think?

Few people think of Bulgaria when contemplating a European vacation, but Tim Jones found the country to be an intriguing mixture of the old and the new. He reported on his experiences for the Chicago Tribune.

This is a dark, fascinating and, unfortunately, forgotten country, an Iowa-sized Balkan beauty with snow-capped mountains and lush green fields. It is here that the undeniable forces of the New World order meet a stubborn Old World speed bump defined by donkey carts, shepherds, a sclerotic and often corrupt governing bureaucracy and an economy that, for the most part, lags behind its old Eastern Bloc brethren.

Don’t come to Bulgaria if you’re looking for some glossy European elegance interspersed with Starbucks and all those Western, touristy accouterments that make travel so comfortable and reassuring.

But do come if you’re up for something a little wild and pretty rough around the edges. Come if you’re interested in watching the noisy, tectonic shifts of a former communist satellite in awkward transition to wherever it is it’s going. Come if you’d like to see the Old World, before it’s gone.

There is a lot of money being thrown around on development projects these days across the Gulf kingdoms of the Arabian Peninsula, and no place is more emblematic of this construction frenzy than is the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Nevertheless, some projects still boggle the mind, like Dubai’s proposed “moving skyscraper” - an 80-story building in which each floor can spin independently, thus creating the effect of a shape-shifting building. Not only that, but the entire structure will be powered by built-in wind turbines. The BBC has the story and a video.

The Dynamic Tower design is made up of 80 pre-fabricated apartments which will spin independently of one another.

“It’s the first building that rotates, moves, and changes shape,” said architect David Fisher, who is Italian, at a news conference in New York. “This building never looks the same, not once in a lifetime,” he added.

The 420-metre (1,378-foot) building’s apartments would spin a full 360 degrees, at voice command, around a central column by means of 79 giant power-generating wind turbines located between each floor.

The slender building would be energy self-sufficient as the turbines would produce enough electricity to power the entire building and even feed extra power back into the grid.

I’ve posted previously on the topic of medical tourism, that growing health care field where people travel to a country such as India or Thailand for medical treatments because the care is both excellent and inexpensive. But while it’s a great deal for Westerners or others who get quality care for less than it would cost them at home, the reality is that the same level of care is not always available for locals, as this article in the International Herald Tribune notes.

“To get the best care,” Robin Steeles said gamely, “you gotta pay for it.”

Steeles, 60, a car dealer from Daphne, Alabama, had flown halfway around the world last month to save his heart, at a price he could pay. He had a mitral valve repaired at a state-of-the-art private hospital here, called Wockhardt, and for 10 days, he was recuperating in a carpeted, wood-paneled room, with a view of a leafy green courtyard.

A dietician helped select his meals. A dermatologist came as soon as he complained of an itch. His “Royal Suite” had cable TV, a computer and a minirefrigerator, where an attendant had that afternoon stashed some ice cream, for when he felt hungry later. Three days after surgery, he was sitting in a chair, smiling, chattering, thrilled to be alive.

On his bed lay the morning’s paper. Dominating its front page was the story of other men, many of them day laborers who laid bricks and mixed cement for Bangalore’s construction boom, who had fallen gravely ill after drinking illegally brewed liquor. All told, more than 150 died that week, here and in neighboring Tamil Nadu State.

Not for them the care of India’s best private hospitals. They had been wheeled in by wives and brothers to the overstretched government-run Bowring Hospital, on the other side of town. Bowring had no intensive care unit, no ventilators, no dialysis machine. Dinner was a stack of white bread, on which a healthy cockroach crawled while a patient, named Yelappa, slept…

Where you stand on the Indian social ladder shapes to a large degree what kind of health you’re in, and what kind of health care you receive.

The irony, which the writer points out, is that while Mr. Steeles was able to get excellent treatment in India, he went there only because he fell through the cracks of the U.S. health care system. In their own ways, the systems of both countries were failing to meet the needs of all their citizens.

…as far apart as they were, their tales followed a somewhat parallel plot. The American health care system could no more care for Steeles than the Indian system could for Amin.

Steeles came here because he is uninsured and could not afford heart surgery in the United States, he said, without liquidating most of his assets. After five months of research and e-mail messages to doctors worldwide, he chose a heart surgeon here in Bangalore.

“I’m over here for a fraction of what I would have paid in the United States,” he said. “In my personal situation, I’m just delighted I took the road that I did.”

Steeles’ Royal Suite, incidentally, is available to anyone, Indian or foreigner, who can pay for it. After his stay here, he would move to a room at a private club for 16 days of further recovery, before flying home. All told, he said it cost him about $20,000, a tenth of what he would have paid at a private American hospital.

Yeah, I know, not a likely activity. Unless you’re like Matthew Forney, who lives with his wife and two children in Beijing - where they have acquired tastes for decidedly non-Western cuisine. Forney wrote an amusing story about his family’s culinary adventures for the NY Times.

In Beijing, where my family lives, I once returned home from a restaurant with a doggy bag full of deep-fried scorpions. The next morning, I poured them instead of imported raisin bran into my 11-year-old son’s cereal bowl. I wanted to freak him out. The scorpions were black and an inch long, with dagger tails.

“Scorpions!” shrieked my son, Roy. “Awesome!”

I had to stop him from chomping them all then and there, like popcorn. Then an idea struck him. “Dad, can I take them to school as a snack?”

This is what eating is like in my household. My children eat anything. My 9-year-old daughter reaches for second helpings of spinach, and when we eat out I have to stop her brother, now 13, from showing off the weird things he’ll consume by ordering goat testicles. Think of a child staging a sit-in at his suburban dinner table because there’s a fleck of dried parsley on his breaded fish finger, and you have imagined everything my children are not.

So when I read of American parents who hide spinach in brownie mix and serve it for dessert (“Your kids will never guess,” Parents magazine promised), it spurs me to offer advice to my compatriots back home.

It’s not a vacation for the faint of heart, given the chaotic vagaries of Vietnamese traffic, but Margo Pfeiff had an exhilarating time during a biking tour of Vietnam. She wrote about her experiences for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Sucking in a deep breath, I launch myself into one of the most exhilarating and terrifying adrenaline sports I have ever undertaken - riding a bicycle in Vietnam.

Plunging into traffic here is like swimming amid a vast school of motorized fish. A wave of wheels - cars, trucks, mopeds, bicycles, dragon fruit vendors and buffalo-drawn carts - surges through broad boulevards where green and red traffic lights are mere ornaments.

Off my left handlebar, so close I can smell her perfume, a lovely schoolgirl perches on a scooter in a flowing white ao dai tunic with matching elbow-length gloves. To my right, a family of five balances atop a motorbike.

I get the sense that if anyone swerves unexpectedly, a domino effect of tumbling transport will be felt halfway to Hanoi. But somehow, magically, it all works, and when a pedestrian steps off the curb the stream flows around him as if Moses were directing traffic.

Before arriving, I had thought that visiting Vietnam without bicycling would be like visiting the Arctic without dog-sledding or visiting the Sahara without straddling a camel. But I hadn’t taken into account that this is a country where simply crossing the street is an adrenaline sport, and for the first few hours bicycling ranked for me in the white-knuckled realm of whitewater kayaking.

Cycling in Vietnam is a great way to get a feel for the tempo of the country. You don’t get any closer to the culture than wheeling atop levees between rice paddies, teetering dead slow through chaotic fish and vegetable markets, or swerving around steaming speed bumps left behind by the herds of cattle and buffalo that create frequent rural traffic jams.

I came across some interesting cultural insights in a recent article about Egypt in the International Herald Tribune. Although the story, on its surface, is about Egyptian perceptions of the U.S., just begin reading and you’ll discover some anecdotes that shed light into Egyptian and Arab culture.

My favorite, at the start of the article, describes the local penchant for giving a wrong answer rather than no answer at all:

Emad Refaat strode out of his workshop with purpose, his grease-covered hands pointing down the road even before he could see the road.

“Come here,” he said, his voice strong with reassurance. “Go to the light, make the first right, that’s Salah el-Din Street.”

Sure?

“I am sure, totally sure.”

But he was wrong, totally wrong..

“I wanted to help,” said Refaat, 28, who was slightly embarrassed when he was asked why he gave the wrong directions with such conviction. “I was actually going to tell you to ask the flower vendor on the corner. He knows all the streets.”

Navigating Egypt can be a challenge of understanding, not just the language, but its culture, values and norms…In Egypt, it is routine, absolutely routine, to get the wrong directions.

That is not because people are mischievous, but because if you ask for help, they feel obligated to try to help - even if they send you off in the wrong direction.

Why in the world, you might now be asking, would someone think it was helpful to give wrong directions? Here is the answer:

Egyptian society values hospitality and personal honor over precision and directness…”Here, even if someone sends you in the wrong direction, he still feels that he did what he was supposed to do,” said Hamdi Taha, head of a charity, Karam al-Islam, and a professor of communications at Al Azhar university. “He doesn’t think he misguided you. He helped. Right and wrong is a relative thing.”

This cultural explanation is as logical to an Egyptian mind as it might be illogical to a Westerner. That, to me, is what makes culture so fascinating.

Americans work more hours and take fewer vacation days than pretty much anyone else in the industrialized world. Now, though, comes evidence that vacations are more than a fun perk - they may actually help you stay healthy and live longer.

Here are the vacation stats:

A global study by Expedia.com found that about a third of employed Americans usually do not take all the vacation days that they are entitled to, leaving an average of three days on the table. This is not so unusual. About a quarter of the workers in Britain do not take all their vacation time, and in France a little less. The only difference is that the British get an average of 26 days of vacation and the French about 37 — compared with our 14 days, Expedia.com said.

According to John de Graaf, executive director of Take Back Your Time, a nonprofit organization that studies issues related to overwork, 137 countries mandate paid vacation time. The United States is the only industrialized country that doesn’t…

And the Conference Board, a private research group, said the number of Americans who said in April that they were going to take a vacation in the next six months is at a 30-year low.

That’s all well and good, you might be saying, but I can’t leave work for very long or I’ll be swamped when I return. Besides, how can I use all my vacation time if my boss or co-workers don’t use all of theirs? Well, now there are studies supporting the short and long-term health benefits of regular vacations.

(In one study) women who took a vacation once every six years or less were almost eight times more likely to develop coronary heart disease or have a heart attack than those who took at least two vacations a year…

The study, published in 1992, was controlled for other factors like obesity, diabetes, smoking and income, Ms. Eaker said, and the findings have been substantiated in follow-up research.

“It shows how the body reacts to a lifestyle of stress,” she said. “This is real evidence that vacations are important to your physical health.”

Another study, published in 2000, looked at 12,000 men over nine years who were at high risk for coronary heart disease. Those who failed to take annual vacations had a 21 percent higher risk of death from all causes and were 32 percent more likely to die of a heart attack.

Want more evidence? Here it is - but remember, the real health benefits go to those who take a real vacation, and not those who stay hooked up to work from the beach.

After a few days on vacation — and it usually took two to three — people were averaging an hour more of good quality sleep. And there was an 80 percent improvement in their reaction times.

“When they got home, they were still sleeping close to an hour more, and their reaction time was 30 to 40 percent higher than it had been before the trip,” Mr. Rosekind said.

The trick, these days when going on vacation, is not only to physically remove yourself from your normal routine, but mentally as well. Checking your BlackBerry every few hours or rushing to the nearest Internet cafe doesn’t cut it.

For 10 years, the Faculty of Management at Tel Aviv University has conducted a study looking at what is called “respite effects,” which measure relief from job stress before, during and after vacations.

Professor Dov Eden, an organizational psychologist who has conducted the study, found that those who are electronically hooked up to their office, even if they are lying on the Riviera, are less likely to receive the real benefits of a vacation and more likely to burn out.

Nile River, Egypt

Sunset over the Nile River near Luxor, Egypt.

According to a global survey sponsored by the British magazine Monocle, the Danish city of Copenhagen has the highest quality of life in the world, edging out Munich and Tokyo. The U.K. Independent published a story about the survey.

For many it conjures up little more than beer and Lego, but Copenhagen has been crowned the best city in the world in a survey of global urban treasures.

The Danish capital was awarded top spot for its quality of life and status as a cutting-edge design centre, said the authors of the report, which looked at factors from the ease of buying a good glass of wine at 1am to the quality of architecture and the number of cinema screens.

Researchers … praised the city’s compact planning, its “frictionless” transport system and infrastructure, as well as its contemporary buildings, top-notch restaurants and renewed focus on environmental issues.

Seven of the top 10 cities in the quality of life survey were European. Tokyo was the top Asian city at #3, Vancouver led the North American list at #8 overall, and Australian cities Melbourne and Sydney came in at #9 and 11.

A new study is out with evidence that cultural differences and misunderstandings often lead to disparities in medical outcomes. According to this story in the NY Times, patients and doctors who have different cultural backgrounds are often on different wavelengths when it comes to dispensing and following medical advice.

… a new study of diabetes patients has found stark racial disparities even among patients treated by the same doctors.

The lead author of the study said in an interview that he attributed the differences less to overt racism than to a systemic failure to tailor treatments to patients’ cultural norms. The problem, said the author, Dr. Thomas D. Sequist, an assistant professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, may be that physicians do not discriminate in the way they counsel patients.

“It isn’t that providers are doing different things for different patients,” Dr. Sequist said. “It’s that we’re doing the same thing for every patient and not accounting for individual needs. Our one-size-fits-all approach may leave minority patients with needs that aren’t being met.”

For instance, he said, counseling black or Latino patients with diabetes to lower their carbohydrate intake by cutting rice from their diets may not be a realistic strategy if rice is a family staple. “We may be listing fruits and vegetables that are part of one person’s culture but not another,” Dr. Sequist said. “We’re not really giving them information they can use.”

What happens when a prominent Thai businessman takes over a British football team that is managed by a Swede? Perhaps a clash of cultures was inevitable.

Regardless of your interest in sports, there is a fascinating recent article in the Financial Times that illuminates many of the cultural differences between Thailand and northern Europe. The story specifically recounts the management issues that arose between Thaksin Shinawatra, former prime minister of Thailand and a wealthy entrepreneur who last year took over the Manchester City Football Club, and Sven-Göran Eriksson, the team’s now former manager. The article includes numerous insights for anyone who works across cultures. An excerpt:

Mr Thaksin … is fond of promoting “modern” business techniques, yet he remains steeped in Thai culture. He tends - like most Thais - to trust family, friends and old associates, above all others. So he placed loyal executives and a son and a daughter on the Manchester City board.

A boss who commands awe and respect in Thailand will also expect to be obeyed in a fashion that Mr Eriksson may have found alien. “Over the centuries, the kings of Thailand have been feared and adored. Thais have grown to expect a leader to demonstrate a blend of authoritarianism and benevolence,” writes Henry Holmes in his book Working with the Thais .

There are arguments among academics about how deferential Thais really are these days, but no one doubts that society is much more hierarchical than in the west. The nuances are complex but, crudely, traditional Thai bosses delegate less and are less inclined to discuss their plans with people outside their inner circle.

“Traditional Thai and western management practices are like night and day,” says Stuart Raj, an expert in cross-cultural management.

The Thai boss is very likely to be a rather paternal figure, who is never “off duty”. Every meeting with subordinates is, in this sense, formal. A senior Thai is expected to consult with his juniors but to have the authority, strength and wisdom to make his own decisions. On the other hand, as a father-figure, he is expected to look after his loyal staff, family and friends…

Mr Eriksson, from conspicuously egalitarian Scandanavia, may not have been comfortable as poodle, as he might have seen it. Once relations had cooled, the Swede would most likely have found himself further outside Mr Thaksin’s circle of favoured advisers and - as wins became rarer - increasingly distrusted.

Any sharp comments Mr Eriksson might have made will have been taken badly. “Thais are extremely sensitive to criticism. Everything is about relationships, so criticism becomes very wounding,” says Somjai Pakapasvivat, a Thai management expert at Chulalongkorn University.

On the wonders of travel…

“I recall my younger self as a dazed longhair gazing slack-jawed day after day at monuments, ruins, beguiling countrysides, and strange new cultures. From the bazaars of Marrakesh to the mosques of Istanbul and into the Hindu Kush, I could feel history and geography transforming me, and I fell stupidly in love with travel.

“I met other globe-roamers, and with them shared meals, beaches, and bus seats, and climbed peaks to celebrate sunsets. At night we huddled in cafes or around campfires, swapping tales and swearing that travel was the best thing that had ever happened to us, the best thing that could happen to anyone.”

                                                                                   - Brad Newsham, Take Me With You

The website New West has an interview online with Heather Hansen, co-author of the new book, Disappearing Destinations, which looks at the environmental challenges that are plaguing popular tourist destinations worldwide. An excerpt from the interview:

How did you come up with the idea for Disappearing Destinations?

Kim and I were at a conference in Denver, talking about the book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, which had just come out. We tossed around the idea of “1,000 Places to See Before THEY Die.” Once we started looking at our favorite places in that context, we became obsessed with writing a book that could help travelers see their dream destinations as whole places with real issues that affect the lives of the people who live there and, ultimately, the viability of the locations themselves.

Global warming seems to be the cause of many of the problems you describe … Do you think it’s more difficult for local people to respond to the situation when the cause is so widespread?

In the case of climate change in this region, there’s plenty that people can do on a daily basis to mitigate its effects…It may be difficult to see immediate results but that doesn’t mean we aren’t making a marked difference at a critical time. As Gerald Meehl, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder says in the book: “The longer we wait, the worse the problem gets. Every day we’re committing ourselves to climate change in the future. When you view it that way, it’s not something that you should just give up on…

Since our expertise is in how to travel more mindfully our message is also that all us have control over the way we move around the world. We have the power to affect change–for worse, or we hope better–in these places with the choices we make. For example, if you go to the Galápagos, you have the choice whether or not to support an outfitter with a proven record of environmental stewardship and investment in the local community.

What do you suggest that people who are concerned about the issues you raise in your book do?

What needs to be done really varies from one location to the next. In some places, responsible tourism is the “great green hope” as I talk about in the Appalachia chapter. Just going there and contributing to the diversification of the economy makes a difference (this is also the case in the Congo Basin and the Amazon where tourism revenue can sustain a population in the long term, while logging cannot).

I hadn’t planned on following up yesterday’s post with another one connected to politics, but I think it’s important to take a moment to reflect on how the U.S. presidential election is being viewed around the world, especially in light of the history that was made yesterday when Barack Obama became the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.

An obvious place to begin is in Kenya, where Obama’s family roots have sparked an outpouring of interest and celebration. This is how The Standard newspaper of Kenya described events in an article published today:

Prime Minister Raila Odinga said Obama’s victory was a momentous occasion in history. “Barack Obama’s success will inspire us all to break the shackles of ethnic preoccupations in determining political leadership,” Raila said…

Obama’s grandmother, Mama Sarah, 86, led villagers of Alego Kogelo, Siaya, where the senator’s father — Barack Obama Senior — was born, in thanking American voters for nominating her grandchild. At the home of Obama’s father, relatives, neighbours and students celebrated the triumph…

Amid song and dance, Mama Sarah announced she was preparing for an epic journey to America to witness the swearing in ceremony of her grandson as the country’s first black president.

She said: “I will go there to witness the swearing in ceremony, and to pray for him, his family and the people of America for demonstrating unity and love beyond race and colour by picking a black person to lead them.” …

At the nearby Senator Barack Obama-Kogello Secondary School, which neighbours Mama Sarah’s home, students danced, sang and shouted: “Obama Juu! Obama Juu!” The school principal, Ms Yunita Obiero, said she announced the good news to the students at assembly in the morning after hearing of Obama’s victory.

Of course, you’d expect Kenyans to be interested in this historic event, but take a look at the front pages of these newspapers from around the globe.

The Globe and Mail from Toronto, Canada:

El Mundo from Madrid, Spain:

Peru 21 from Lima, Peru:

The United Evening News from Taipei, Taiwan:

Well, you get the idea. Needless to say, this is a story that is fascinating the rest of the world.

U.S. News and World Report has a story this week that explores how the multicultural nature and “aloha spirit” of Hawaii helped shape the beliefs of Barack Obama as a young man. It’s a glimpse into the culture of one of the most famous but perhaps least understood states in the U.S. An excerpt from the article:

In Hawaii, they call it Barack Obama’s ohana or family—a reference to his philosophy that America at its best should be a big, harmonious community like his idealized version of the Aloha State, where he was born and spent his boyhood and adolescence.

Of course, Hawaii has its own history of conflict and prejudice, but that’s not the part of the islands’ culture that Obama chooses to emphasize. Instead, it is the parallel tradition of respect for diversity, tolerance, and inclusion that he prizes as a model for what he hopes to bring to the country if he wins the presidency this fall. In fact, his Hawaiian background is, in many ways, a key to understanding who the Democratic front-runner really is and what an Obama presidency would mean.

There are other important parts of Obama’s past that also provide insight into his values and his modus operandi, but Obama says the “aloha spirit” remains his personal and political inspiration.

“I do think that the multicultural nature of Hawaii helped teach me how to appreciate different cultures and navigate different cultures, out of necessity,” Obama says. “That carries over now to the work that I do because obviously that’s part of my job, not just as a candidate but also as a senator. The second thing that I’m certain of is that what people often note as my even temperament I think draws from Hawaii. People in Hawaii generally don’t spend a lot of time, you know, yelling and screamin’ at each other. I think that there just is a cultural bias toward courtesy and trying to work through problems in a way that makes everybody feel like they’re being listened to. And I think that reflects itself in my personality as well as my political style.”

Most visitors to Venice experience the famed canals in a gondola. That is, when they’re not walking along the canals, crossing bridges over the canals, or having dinner at a canalside table. But David Kocieniewski wanted a more authentic experience, so he and his girlfriend spent some days paddling the canals of Venice in their own kayak, an experience he then wrote about for the New York Times.

They helped fleeing Romans evade Attila the Hun and held a glittering city aloft for more than 1,500 years. But the wooden pilings rising out of the Grand Canal in Venice are so decayed that as we clung to them one afternoon it wasn’t at all clear whether they would be sturdy enough to prevent us from capsizing into its murky waters.

It was rush hour in Venice, so the canal’s usual tumult of crosscurrents and tides was churning with the wake of water taxis, ferries and delivery boats. Each volley of waves slapped against the side of the inflatable kayak we were using to cross Italy’s most storied waterway; the pilings were our best chance to avoid being immersed in it.

This probably wasn’t quite what my girlfriend, Audrey Lynn Gray, had in mind when we first started thinking about a trip to Venice…But as novice canoers, we were intrigued by the thought of exploring the waterways ourselves…

And for a traveler seeking a sense of place, there is little to compare with the sensation of drifting through the same waters as Renaissance princes, past 17th-century palazzi with mollusks embedded along the waterline, while a parade of delivery boats putt by and gondoliers shout “Oye!” as they approach a blind turn to warn other boaters they’re tilting around the corner.