By Cheryl B. Engelhardt   As a music composer and New Age recording artist, I have discovered that the cross section of creating music and its intention is the core of my mission as a composer: to provide experience through my own experience of composing. Which is why I made an album on a cross-country Amtrak train trip (and was the first person to do so).  I’m here to tell you the crazy story of how it all went down. ...

By Allison Rapp I spent close to five months living in Glasgow, Scotland, and close to five months traveling throughout the UK. With nothing but a few university classes to tie me down, I was almost entirely free to move about the country on my own. At the tail end of summer I was still nursing some wounds from a failed relationship, and though I had been planning this trip for nearly a year, picking up everything and moving across ...

Once upon a time, a congregation’s nuns would bake the communion wafers. They would mix equal parts white flour and pure water until a crepe-like batter formed; then they added yeast and salt. They would ladle the mixture onto a glorified waffle maker, rigged with flat griddle plates occasionally adorned with biblical symbols. They stacked the sheets into towers and they underwent a daylong drying process before cutting them into individual disks with a stamping machine. What began as a ...

By Tom Godfrey My wife and I sneak down a side street in Osaka.  It is quiet here–a contrast from the main drag that huddles around Tonbori River.  The road is full of cafes, the occasional cyclist, and a handful of traditional buildings with wooden accents that seem to belong to another time.  One of those buildings is the original branch of the restaurant, Hokkyokusei, where to eat omurice.   I am on a culinary pilgrimage with my wife, SiEun.  Our ...

By Julie Kunen The scent of warm spices wafted from the pilau steaming in its clay pot over a charcoal brazier in this restaurant in Zanzibar.  Cumin, a memory of Persia.  Black pepper and cinnamon, brought in dhows on the trade winds across the Indian Ocean.  Rice itself, from the Ganges River delta of South Asia.  Together, these ingredients define Zanzibari cuisine, a fusion not just of flavors but of waves of cultural influences washing over the island for millennia.  ...

By Jorim Alosa Editor’s Note: This story told by a Kenyan student attending school and learning about witchcraft in Uganda made me laugh and gave me insight about how complex belief can be. I hope you enjoy it. CMS IGANGA Of an old railway line and locomotive Corrugated iron sheet buildings now gutted and empty An area strewn with rubbish and rubble. There is a goat so skinny behind me That you can see its ribs And everywhere parking out ...

What does pilgrimage mean in an age of instant communication and high-speed travel? わたしのチイサナココロ [i have a small heart] from Bajir Cannon on Vimeo.

By Lindsay Valentin I Deep in the chest of the Amazon everything beats differently, dually. After some very hard travels, my partner and I finally landed in Iquitos. We took an off-road vehicle into the jungle to an indigenous port town called Nauta where we were loaded into a dugout canoe with a motor that took us four hours into the Amazon. I can still remember it clearly, as if that vast and divine river were a series of roads ...

By Joshua Baker I pull my luggage around the side of an international market where the gurgling of a diesel engine stirs. Parked there is an obviously over-used white bus. The fenders over the tires are blackened with miles and it looks like it hasn’t been washed since the Van Hool C20’s were introduced circa 2000. The side doors are open for passengers’ bags to be loaded in. Just above the bus’s number is something scripted in Mandarin. I turn ...

By W Goodwin Reza is driving. Ever since we entered Turkey he won’t let me drive, even when he’s dead tired, because “Women shouldn’t drive in Muslim countries.” No arguing with him, so I’m in the front passenger’s seat, half-awake, my thoughts rambling… I’m fine with Reza and his religion, but these old-world Muslims we’ve been meeting seem to get confused when they confront a confident woman (me!). Their reactions are clearly affecting Reza and the further east we go, ...