I was waiting to board a train at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station in August 2014 when I received a call from my friend who used to live in Hong Kong. I picked up, since there was no logical reason he would be calling me at half past seven in the morning unless it was something urgent. Upon answering, he asked me if I was sitting down. I told him I was just about to go to the bathroom and was trying to decide between the squatting toilet or the western one, so that was yet to be decided. He went on to tell me that Cathay Pacific was releasing a promotion at eight o’clock to celebrate winning Skytrax’s World’s Best Airline award for the fourth time. The drop, he said, was 2,014 round-trip business class or premium economy tickets at $100 HKD or about twelve dollars each, and he would text me the link.

My train to Hefei for a business meeting was departing just after the sale opened, so I knew if I was to have any chance, I would have to enter the site right away. I milled by the gates waiting to board, and as the clock ticked down, I tried pulling up the link. Sure enough, there were flights to Sydney, New York, and London in premium economy for $100 HKD and to cities like Osaka and Bangkok for the same in business class. At 8 am, as I descended an escalator to board the high-speed rail that would ferry me across the flatlands east of Shanghai, the sale went live, and after clicking to purchase was greeted with a message that the page was not available. This, however, was a common occurrence behind China’s great firewall and in an era of 3G and 4G signals. Not knowing what it was, I turned on my VPN, which was set to the United States, and got the same message. As I sat in my window seat on the train, dejected, I had one final thought and changed my VPN to Hong Kong. The page opened.

As the train that would ferry me at close to three hundred kilometers an hour pulled out of the station, I feverishly typed in information knowing full well the signal would soon break between towers or within tunnels. I found the one I had been targeting: Sydney, for dates in November when I happened to know my uncle and cousin would be traveling there. As the sprawl of Shanghai sped past, the page reloaded to display a confirmation message. In November, I would fly to Sydney on the best airline in the world, and it had only cost me twelve dollars.

I then spent the rest of the train ride to Hefei figuring out how to explain to my employer that I would need an additional week off in November

Cathay Pacific never won the top spot again. After 2014, the award rotated among the usual names: Qatar, Emirates, and Singapore Airlines. A few years later I moved from Shanghai, and Cathay Pacific had become just the airline I told my story about rather than something I flew. In 2019, amid the upheaval that consumed Hong Kong that summer, Cathay lost its CEO. Months later, COVID arrived, and the airline cut a quarter of its workforce and shut down Cathay Dragon, its regional subsidiary that was often my carrier from Shanghai to Hong Kong, after 35 years. To my surprise last year, Cathay had climbed back to third in Skytrax.

Last week, I flew Cathay again.

The problems began before we departed for the airport. Upon check-in 48 hours before departure, despite being new Cathay members, we were unable to check-in early, pick our seats, or assign our membership to our booking as we were told by the online agent it was impossible to use our membership on the booking until they have verified that I was, in fact, a human. Frustrated, I told my wife it was ok: check-in opened 24 hours prior for everyone, even us androids. My attempt the next day got me slightly further until I was greeted by errors and bold red fonts that indicated that I was trying to do something they absolutely would not allow. I once again got on the chat feature with an online agent and politely explained that we are flexible people, stressing the fact that we were indeed people and that if they could just confirm an aisle/middle anywhere on the aircraft we’d handle the rest at the airport. Naturally, the agent explained to me they had a better solution, and that was to divide the guests in the booking up and seat us randomly around the plane.

At Heathrow, after boarding but before take off, I asked the man who was sitting in the aisle next to my wife if he minded switching; I had ultimately gotten into a nice aisle myself, so the trade was fair and was eagerly made. The plane pushed back 25 minutes late, taxied to the runway, and then stopped. The pilot came on and announced we had a technical fault and would be brought back to the gate. Once we had returned, he came back on to add in his same measured tone that Heathrow had a curfew of 11:30 pm, and so if the plane was not fixed by 11:10 pm we would not fly. It was not resolved, and we deplaned into an empty terminal, taken back through immigration, collected our bags, and put onto buses and driven to a nearby hotel. Which I did while simultaneously trying to coordinate with the hotel to allow our other family who was inbound on another flight to still check in under my name. At 3 am our heads finally hit a pillow.

Calling what followed a slow drip of information would be too complimentary. Having heard that breakfast would be at 9, we roused ourselves to eat and returned to the room. In the app, it showed our flight had been rescheduled for the same time at 7 pm. Then, a half hour later, we were rebooked completely on a route that would make a 12-hour nonstop now 20 hours via Kuala Lumpur, departing at 9:30 pm, and cost us two days. I called Cathay, and the lady assured me that not only was there nothing else possibly available to get to Hong Kong even outside of their alliance, but she could also give us the most random seats possible on Malaysia Airlines.

It was around this time my wife began referring to them as Cathay Horrific.

Given the later departure, I called the front desk and asked how late check-out could be extended to and was told not only that check-out was in 10 minutes, but lunch had started, and so if we wanted to eat we should go down. In fact, there would be a representative for Cathay Pacific there who would update us all. We never saw or heard from another representative from Cathay Pacific again. When the buses did arrive, they had been instructed by Cathay to take us not to the airport but to another hotel, which took an additional thirty minutes to sort out. After languishing at the airport for six and a half hours, we boarded our flight to Kuala Lumpur.

This first leg was now 14 hours, but I had at least secured seats together from the gate agent. Seated next to us in our row of three was a lady with two lap infants. We wedged ourselves in as I speculated wildly as to how this was going to work. Eventually, her husband came and collected the younger child and left to go to another part of the plane. They had been split up too. I offered to swap our middle but they had the bassinet in the other seat so could not give it up. The staff or others in that row found inconveniencing themselves unnecessary. The child who remained could not have been more than a month from turning two, which is the limit for a lap infant. The child was so big that the flight staff checked her passport again before take off. I had been only slightly dejected to now be flying during the World Cup final rather than watching it over dim sum, but the child next to us kicked my wife, me, and the seat in front of her like she was playing in it.

We landed at Kuala Lumpur and sat on the tarmac for another hour waiting for a gate to clear while she got in a few more. By 3 am, two days later than we were due to arrive, our heads finally hit a pillow in Hong Kong.

In 2014 I bought a twelve-dollar ticket to Sydney with 3G and a VPN and considered myself to be at the top of my travel game. Writing this, I realize how little of that story was actually about me. Cathay was just a great airline with great systems. I know far more about travel now than I did then, but none of it matters if the airline on the other end is a shell of what it was. 🛬

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My guide was standing beside the Aswan High Dam, talking about the Soviets. Behind him, the Lotus Flower rose seventy meters into the sky, five concrete petals built by Soviet architects to commemorate their role in the dam’s construction. When the West refused to fund the project in the 1950s, the Soviet Union stepped in with more than a billion dollars in loans and sent its own engineers and heavy equipment to get it built. My guide was proud of the engineering and its control over the Nile. He assured me that if I wanted to swim in the north I could, but that crocodiles, they had no way to pass.

Aswan itself was easy to like. The corniche ran along the east bank, offering views across to Elephantine Island. The souk behind it was busy with a local hum, narrow streets selling much more than spices, prayer mats, and Mo Salah football shirts. Fueled by street koshari a mash of rice, macaroni, lentils, and chickpeas mixed together I spent two days walking and taking photographs before hiring a driver to go south.

Abu Simbel is 280 kilometers into the desert, near the Sudanese border. Since 1997, when militants killed sixty-two people at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, tourist vehicles traveling the road have had to register with the Tourism Police and pass through checkpoints along the highway. The road closes to tourist traffic after five in the evening. You leave early, and you need to be accompanied by a driver and guide.

The drive is long, flat, and empty, three and a half hours of open desert where you can see the road ahead for miles without another car on it. The checkpoints were orderly, with only a few words exchanged between the driver and the officer, while our documents were all checked before being waved through.

Ramesses II had the temples carved into the cliff face in the thirteenth century BC, four colossal statues of himself flanking the entrance, each about twenty meters high and visible from across the water in an era when the Nile still ran this far south. In the 1960s, when the Aswan High Dam threatened to submerge them, UNESCO cut the entire complex into blocks and reassembled it sixty-five meters higher on the cliff. The engineering of the rescue is as impressive as the original construction, and these two achievements tend to compete for attention.

After the temple, we went looking for lunch and found it down a side street in the town, a small place with a few tables out front. The man who ran it served us and then sat down across from my guide to talk. I ate fried fish with tahini — sesame paste thinned with lemon juice and garlic — rice, and a salad while a small boy ran between the tables. From my seat I could see trucks on the road carrying Sudanese men in the back. The border was twenty kilometers away, and Wadi Halfa, the first town on the other side, was sixty-five.

The next morning I hired a different driver to take me north to Luxor, a journey of about 245 kilometers that most tourists do on a Nile cruise, watching the same landscape pass from the deck of a boat with a drink in hand. I was doing it by car, which is a different experience.

We set off while it was still dark. The first stop was Kom Ombo, about an hour north of Aswan, a double temple built during the Ptolemaic period and dedicated on one side to Sobek, the crocodile god, and on the other to Horus. The Nile cruise ships were docked along the bank with passengers eating breakfast on deck, but I had the temple to myself before they disembarked. The museum next door has mummified crocodiles from an era when they still swam this stretch of the river.

As we left Kom Ombo and started north, the driver glanced at my camera on the seat beside me. For this next stretch, he said, it was probably best not to take any photos. I told him I understood.

The road snaked through agricultural country along the Nile. Children darted out of sugarcane fields and banana groves that lined the right side of the road; everything was green after two days of desert between Aswan and Abu Simbel. We shared the road with tuk-tuks, pickup trucks, and donkey carts stacked with produce. Speed bumps appeared every hundred meters or so through the villages.

I noticed graffiti on some of the street signs — a four-fingered hand, spray-painted in black. I asked the driver about it. It was a symbol of the Muslim Brotherhood, he said. That was part of why he had asked me to keep the camera away. He had no idea if any of them were still around, but in his mind, it was better not to find out.

On the back of a tuk-tuk pickup cab, I saw a large stencil of Saddam Hussein’s face. I asked the driver about that too. Oh yes, he said, Saddam is quite admired here. He stood up for the Arabs. He said it as it was obvious, and reached for the stereo and moved on to the next song.

Driving through these small towns, slowed to cycling pace by the speed bumps, brought me closer to life along the Nile’s banks than anything else on the trip had. This was a different Egypt than the cities I had visited, and further still from that depicted in the temples.

At Edfu, we crossed the Nile and turned west, leaving the river road behind for a newer highway that cuts inland through the desert toward Luxor. The government has been upgrading this road as part of a national infrastructure push, and it was wider and faster than even the road down to Abu Simbel.

While the checkpoints along the Abu Simbel road had been formal and part of a system with a history and a reason behind it, the checkpoints on the Luxor-Aswan highway were something else — police officers standing beside cones in the road, stopping cars, collecting money, and waving them on. Fifty Egyptian pounds at each stop, the driver told me, and there were enough stops between here and Luxor that it added up to a meaningful share of his fare.

He reached into the center console and pulled out a high-visibility vest, neon yellow with Chinese characters printed on the back. It had the logo of China Energy Engineering Corporation, one of the state-owned companies building solar installations across Upper Egypt, including a 500-megawatt plant at Kom Ombo and a massive energy storage facility near Aswan, both adjacent to the highway we were driving on. I asked him about his new fashion. He explained that these informal checkpoints had sprouted up along the road, and by wearing the vest, he could tell the officers he was just a driver taking a worker to a site, and not have to pay the “toll”. I asked if it worked. So far, he said, he had had pretty good luck with it.

I was wearing a button-down and sunglasses, and it occurred to me that I could pass easily enough for someone being driven to a construction site. At the first checkpoint he pulled over, had a brief conversation with the officer, who leaned down and looked at me in the back seat. I raised my hand in a small wave and nodded. He waved us through.

This happened several more times over the next hour and worked every time. We stopped at a gas station along the highway, and the driver got out, still wearing the vest, and stood smoking a cigarette while I had a drink. I asked him what he was actually saying to them when they stopped us. He smiled. Just that you are an engineer who is running late, he said.

As we approached Luxor the desert gave way to the city gradually, the road filling with traffic until we were fully enclosed by the hum of entrepreneurship in the city center. He dropped me at my hotel, shook my hand, and told me to let him know if I ever needed a ride again. I told him I would, and thought about thanking him in Mandarin for good measure. 🦺

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Hi,

It’s been a little over two weeks since you last heard from me, which is the longest gap since this newsletter began. There’s a reason for it, and today I finally get to show you.

For the past few months, I have been building something, and it can be summarized in one statistic: 80% of travelers visit the same 10% of destinations around the world. None of this will surprise you, but the extent of it is unbelievable. The famous places grow more crowded every year while the rest of the world goes largely unvisited, even as much of it becomes easier to reach, safer, and more interesting than it has ever been. A traveler willing to look past the usual list has more of the world available to them right now than at any point in history.

This is what Scott Monaco is for: covering these places well, and making them feel as reachable as they actually are. The writing stays here, as it always has — nothing about this newsletter changes (although there was a refresh here, too). What is new is scottmonaco.travel, which went live this week and the things that come with it. Have a look around when you have a minute.

That said, the tent is now getting bigger. A larger platform means more stories from more corners of the map, more opportunities for the destinations that deserve attention, and more opportunities for you.

The Open Call

Scott Monaco is now a publication, and it carries more bylines than mine. You’ve already seen the first guest work appear here and here in recent months. Today, that becomes formal: from now through July 31, submissions are open to everyone.

Essay — 1,000 to 3,000 words of personal narrative or reported feature grounded in firsthand experience. Pays $200.

Photo Essay — 6 to 15 documentary images with 700 to 1,500 words of prose, telling a single story. Pays $200.

Humor — 500 to 1,000 words, travel-related. Pays $50.

Every submission is read blind. Your name, bio, and links are collected by the form and set aside until after the decision is made, which means the work is judged on the work. Decisions go out on a rolling basis, and accepted contributors are paid within a week of publication and featured on the main site with a bio and links to their own platforms. Work you've self-published on your own newsletter or blog is welcome.

Full guidelines, eligibility, and formatting details are on the submission page.

Who Should Submit

You do not need to think of yourself as a travel writer. If you write about travel, culture, food, art, history, or daily life in the Global South or the less-traveled world, this call includes you. That is true whether you're writing about the country you live in or one you traveled to. What matters is firsthand experience and a real story. If you're unsure whether your story fits, spend a few minutes on scottmonaco.travel to understand the mission and the types of experiences we cover.

I read constantly, and some of the best writing about these places is being published by people doing it entirely on their own. This call is a way to pay for that work and put it in front of readers who come here looking for exactly it.

Where This Comes From

There’s precedent for this. When and launched Strange Pilgrims, they described it as “attempting something rare” — a reader-supported, ad-free literary magazine that charges no submission fees and pays its writers. By all accounts, it has worked, and watching them build it has been genuinely inspiring to me.

When I look at travel writing, at destinations that need coverage and rarely get it commissioned, at the talent already writing about these places on their own, I believe the same mechanics can work here. I hope that reading this, you believe it too, whether that means submitting your work or becoming a paid subscriber who helps fund it.

And in a happy piece of timing, ’ summer reading window is open right now. If you have literary work (fiction, essays, flash) I recommend you send it to them.

How This Gets Paid For

Contributor payments come from paid subscriptions. When you upgrade, your subscription goes toward paying the writers and photographers whose work you’ll read here, along with the time it takes to read and evaluate every submission properly.

Paid subscribers also get year-round submission access. When this open call closes on July 31, paid subscribers can keep submitting in every category, at the same rates, through the paid subscriber’s link on the guidelines page.

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What's Next

New work from me resumes next week, and I’m sitting on stories from a recent trip that I’m very excited to share with you soon. Guest pieces from this call will publish as they’re ready.

The goal now is to put this call in front of as many people as possible who might want to submit. If you know a writer or photographer whose work belongs here, please share this with them. Together, let’s tell the stories from the other 90%.

— Scott

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Wimbledon is one of the few major sporting events in the world where you can show up the day of and buy a ticket at face value. All tickets sold through The Queue, including Centre Court, No. 1 Court, and Grounds Passes, are at face value with no dynamic pricing or service fees. A Grounds Pass during the opening week costs only £33. The cheapest Centre Court seat on opening day is £80. If you can get to southwest London and you are willing to wait, you can get in.

I have done this and have gotten Centre Court tickets. I have also been turned away, or more accurately, I turned myself away after a steward told me my queue number was unlikely to get me through the gates before mid-afternoon. Both experiences were well worth the trip, and both taught me something about how The Queue works and why it remains one of the most interesting ticketing systems in professional sports.

In 2023, one of my good friends was in London visiting family, and we made the plan to meet up and arrive at The Queue between 5 and 6 am. We took the District Line to Southfields and walked the five minutes to Wimbledon Park, where the stewards issued us our Queue Cards numbered somewhere in the five thousands. Clouds were overhead, and the weather was cool, which I would later understand was one of the reasons we got as lucky as we did.

The Queue is well-run in a way that is specifically British. There are food vendors and coffee vans, water refill stations, portable toilets, left luggage lockers, and stewards around the clock. It is polite and orderly. The Queue operates according to a formal code of conduct that governs tent sizes, noise levels, and how long you can leave to use the bathroom (30 minutes). If you have ever wondered what it would look like if the national love of a good queue were given its fullest institutional expression, this is it. We talked to the couple in front of us from the Netherlands who had been doing The Queue for 23 straight years, which turned out to be common: people who just loved this and came back every summer. We had coffee from one of the vans, caught up on our lives, and talked about the matches and the chance of rain with everyone around us.

Only around 9:30 did the line start to move as people at the front were directed to the ticket counters ahead of the grounds opening at 10 am. Even then, it moved slowly. By 11, we were still inching toward the only visible gate, unsure if we would get through or when. Past that first gate, the line continued to snake through what is called the Queue Village, a stretch of sponsor stands with free samples and games that you pass through on the way to the ticket booths. Then finally we were at the sellers, and the one with no line waved us over. “So, Centre Court, yeah?” he said. I was so tired I just said “What?” and he repeated it: they had Centre Court tickets if we wanted them, and mentioned the section. I was already looking back at my friend in disbelief and said OK, two, and we had our tickets.

We started by walking the surprisingly compact grounds. The matches happening on the outside courts have simple rafters and the intimacy of a high school match on some of the smaller courts. As someone who played competitive tennis until college, watching Ben Shelton’s serve from 30 feet away like it was a high school match felt surreal. We walked the Hill with its big screen, the Tea Lawn, and the Centenary Garden. Huddles of ball boys and girls formed and dispersed on their way to and from the courts.

Then the rain that had been threatening all morning arrived, and the teams moved fast to tarp the uncovered courts and pause the matches. Players whose matches were paused just walked through the crowd carrying their own racket bags. We made our way to the American Express lounge behind No. 3 Court (which is free for any Amex cardmember), but it was full. So we decided to head to Centre Court early, since the first match was not until 1:30.

By the time we found our seats the retractable roof was closed and the rain was steady outside. The Princess of Wales entered the Royal Box, and the crowd rose. Then at 1:15, the screens lit up with a highlight reel of Roger Federer’s eight Wimbledon titles. Federer himself walked in wearing a cream suit and sat down between his wife Mirka and the Princess. The ovation lasted around ninety seconds. He stood there tapping his chest and mouthing “thank you” while the arena made it clear they were not ready for him to have retired the previous year.

Then Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan took the court to defend her title and the tennis started, and I was watching it from a seat I had purchased seven hours earlier from a tent at the edge of Wimbledon Park. After Rybakina, Aryna Sabalenka played her opening match, and the day ended with Andy Murray. Outside, the rain ultimately canceled the remaining matches that were not on the covered show courts. We were extremely fortunate. Others in line around us who did not get that specific ticket window were likely rained out with their Grounds Passes a few hours after entering. That said, even if that had happened to me, a few hours inside for the price of a Grounds Pass would still have been worth the morning.

At the end of the day, my friend and I exited through the gates and said our goodbyes.

Last year I went back. Again I arrived around 6 am but this time my queue card number was 8,726. I specifically steered clear of July 4, which fell on a Friday and would draw the usual spike of American visitors on holiday in London. I picked a Thursday instead. It was hot and clear and the queue was long before I got there.

I spent the morning reading, talking with people in line, and watching the queue fill up the park. My friend was not in town, so I had come alone. You don’t need others to enjoy the queue. At around 11, without seeing much movement ahead of me, I asked a steward what my number realistically meant. The answer was straightforward based on what he had been hearing from the front: I was unlikely to get in before 3 or 4 pm for Grounds. So I left. I walked back through the park past people still arriving and was on the District Line before noon. Was I disappointed? Sure. Were others in the line bothered by how long it was taking? I am not so sure. People were picnicking, and enjoying company, and taking part in what is arguably a more British tradition than Wimbledon itself: queuing.

Why The Queue Still Exists

The Queue dates back to the open era when the All England Club began holding back a portion of tickets for same-day sale to the general public. The reasoning was (and still is) that the tournament should be accessible to people who could not or did not plan months ahead. Every other major event in professional sports has moved to advance-only sales, dynamic pricing, and secondary markets. I am writing this as FIFA is charging people thousands of dollars to get into a stadium. Wimbledon instead is the outlier. They still hold back around 1,500 show court tickets and several thousand Grounds Passes for same-day sale through The Queue every day of the two-week tournament, at face value to whoever lines up. Over the decades, the AELTC formalized the whole operation with numbered Queue Cards, a code of conduct, 24-hour stewards, and overnight camping rules. They treat The Queue as a feature of the tournament rather than a problem to be solved, and the people who come back year after year seem to agree.

How The Queue Works in 2026

The Championships run from Monday, June 29 through Sunday, July 12. The Queue opens at 2 pm on Sunday, June 28, the day before play begins.

Joining. The Queue forms in Wimbledon Park, a five-minute walk from Southfields station on the District Line. You proceed to the end of the line, receive a numbered and dated Queue Card from the stewards, and that card determines your place until you buy your ticket. Queue Cards are non-transferable and stewards will not issue extras for people who are not physically in line, so arrive with your full group. You need a myWIMBLEDON account set up through the Wimbledon app to scan at the ticket booth, so it’s recommended to do this before you arrive, although you will have a few hours to do it in the queue if you forget.

Overnight vs. morning arrival. A lot of coverage about The Queue focuses on camping overnight, and if you want Centre Court or No. 1 Court tickets on a busy day, overnight is the safe bet. But many people have no desire to sleep in a tent in Wimbledon Park, and for those people the morning is still viable. Arriving before 6 am on a weekday gives you a reasonable shot at show court tickets and a very good shot at a Grounds Pass. The later you arrive and the more popular the day, the less likely you are to get a show court wristband, but Grounds Passes remain available well into the morning on most days.

If you do stay overnight, only two-person tents are permitted. No gazebos, barbecues, or camping stoves. Smoking and vaping are banned. One person must stay with the tent at all times. Stewards wake everyone between 5:30 and 6 am to pack up, and bags go to left luggage (£5 for overnight equipment, £1 for other items, cashless only). Wristbands for show court tickets are distributed starting at 7:30 am, front of the line first.

Know your number. Wimbledon allocates approximately 500 tickets each for Centre Court, No. 1 Court, and No. 2 Court (roughly 1,500 show court tickets) daily through The Queue. If your Queue Card is below 500, you have a very strong chance at Centre Court. Cards in the 500–1,000 range are likely No. 1 Court territory, and 1,000–1,500 puts you in line for No. 2 Court. After 1,500, you are looking at a Grounds Pass. There is some flex in these numbers since people ahead of you may choose a different court depending on the day’s draw, but after about 1,500 show courts are gone. Since 2024, stewards have distributed colored wristbands at 7:30 am that match the exact number of available show court tickets, so by that point you know where you stand.

Buying tickets. The grounds open at 10 am. You keep your Queue Card until you reach the Ticket Sales area, where you buy your ticket with a credit or debit card (no cash). Entry continues until capacity is reached (approximately 42,000), at which point further entry is only possible as people leave. Bags entering the grounds are restricted to 40cm × 30cm × 30cm; anything larger goes to left luggage. For photographers, Wimbledon allows DSLRs and mirrorless cameras with lenses up to 300mm(!), which is very generous for a major sporting event. Between the tennis, the outfits, and the grounds themselves, it is one of the most photogenic days out in sports.

What I Would Tell Someone Going for the First Time

Go on a weekday. This is the single biggest variable. Weekends and holidays draw significantly larger crowds, and your queue number for the same arrival time will be much higher. My Centre Court experience was on a Tuesday, and the line was manageable. My contrasting attempt in this piece was on a weekday too, but with perfect weather, and I was number 8,726. Also worth knowing: July 4 falls during the first week most years, and the US holiday brings a noticeable wave of American visitors to London adding to queue demand around that date.

Understand the week one vs. week two tradeoff. Week one is when every court is in play and the outside courts are packed with main draw singles matches, including seeded players you can watch from a few meters away with a Grounds Pass. But week one also draws the biggest queues for exactly that reason.

Week two has fewer main draw matches on the outside courts as the singles and doubles fields narrow to the show courts, which means the queue is usually shorter and getting in is easier. The outside courts are not empty though, as the wheelchair championships, junior tournaments, and invitation doubles all run during the second week across those same courts, and the wheelchair matches in particular draw real crowds.

Use weather to your advantage, but understand the risk. Overcast skies and rain forecasts thin the queue considerably, because most people (tourists) imagine Wimbledon as a sun-and-strawberries affair and stay home when the forecast looks gray. Fewer people in line means a lower queue number. But there is that risk. The day I got Centre Court, it started to pour a few hours into play, and every match on the uncovered courts was canceled. Anyone with a Grounds Pass had very little tennis to watch. Centre Court and No. 1 Court have retractable roofs and kept playing, which meant I was fine, but it was a reminder that weather works both ways; it helps you get in and it can ruin what you came for.

You do not have to go in the morning. By mid to late afternoon, the main matches are underway or finished, and there is little chance of a show court ticket through The Queue. But if you simply want to experience Wimbledon and catch the tail end of play, joining the queue after 5 pm for late entry is a real option. Grounds Passes may still be available, the queue moves fast because morning visitors are already leaving, and once inside you can try the Ticket Resale virtual queue for returned show court seats at £15. Given that both Centre Court and No. 1 Court have roofs, evening matches can run late, so a £15 resale ticket bought at 5 pm could get you hours of tennis.

Check the queue status before you travel. The Wimbledon app is the primary official source. It is required for ticket purchase anyway and provides live queue updates during the tournament, including your position once you have checked in. The official @Wimbledon accounts on X and Instagram post queue capacity warnings when the grounds are full. Beyond the official channels, the r/wimbledon subreddit runs discussion threads during the tournament where people share queue numbers, wait times, and day-by-day experiences.

The Amex lounge is worth knowing about. If you have any American Express card (not just Platinum or up, but any card), the Cardmember Lounge behind No. 3 Court is free to enter with up to two guests and is a good place to sit down and recharge between matches when the grounds are crowded. The Amex Pavilion on the Hill is open to all ticketed attendees on the ground floor, with the top floor reserved for cardmembers.

Amex cardholders can also buy last-minute Centre Court tickets. A small number of Centre Court tickets are released through the Wimbledon app during the tournament. Tickets are released across three sales windows between June 27 and July 9, and the drop times are posted on the Amex UK Instagram, but they will go very fast.

A Grounds Pass is a good day out. The outside courts at Wimbledon are where you get closest to the players, and in the early rounds, you can watch seeded players from a few feet away on Courts 12 and 18. And the Ticket Resale system from 3 pm gives you a shot at a discounted Centre Court seat (£15), which is the cheapest legitimate way to enjoy a show court at any Grand Slam.

Bring the right stuff. If staying overnight: a two-person tent, sleeping bag, phone charger, snacks, something to read. The park has food vendors and water refill stations, so you do not need to overpack. If arriving in the morning: bring a book, a layer to sit on, or maybe a small blanket, and a portable charger. Some people bring cards or small lawn games that fit in backpacks. Remember the bag restriction for entering the grounds is 40cm × 30cm × 30cm.

I will be back in the queue this year, and if you’re a subscriber who is now interested in going, don’t hesitate to reach out. 🎾

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Draft 1. Saved 5/4/26, 1:48 p.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be out of the office from July 1 through July 7 with limited access to email. I will respond to all messages upon my return. For urgent matters, please direct inquiries to Simone Harris, who leads our accounts team.

Best, Gary

Draft 2. Saved 5/27/26, 3:41 p.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be out of the office from July 1 through July 7 for our annual beach week with my family. This will be our seventh year at the same rental, and my daughter has been marking the days on the kitchen calendar since April. I cannot overstate how much I am looking forward to this week. I will have limited access to email and will respond to all messages upon my return. For urgent matters, please contact Simone Harris.

I hope you can take some time for yourself this summer as well!

Best, Gary

Draft 3. Saved 6/12/26, 8:19 p.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be out of the office from July 1 through July 7 for our annual week at the beach.

We have rented the same house, the Sandpiper, for seven summers now, and my daughter has taken to calling it “our house,” which neither my wife nor I have corrected. There is a frog that lives under the front porch. She named it last summer and expects it to be there this July. I have not told her how long frogs live because I do not actually know, and I am afraid to look it up. I need this week. I will have limited access to email. For urgent matters, please contact Simone Harris.

Best, Gary

Draft 4. Saved 6/24/26, 10:52 p.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be out of the office from July 1 through July 7. Given the price of gas right now, we have decided to skip the boat rental this year, so I will actually be available in the afternoons throughout the week. For anything related to the Hartman account, please call my cell directly. For all other matters, please contact Simone Harris.

Gary

Draft 5. Saved 6/26/26, 9:33 p.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be out of the office from July 1 through July 7, but will be checking email throughout the day and am available for calls. I understand that the Copilot rollout is being expanded while I am away, and I would appreciate being kept in the loop on any changes to my accounts. I have been doing this for eleven years. I know which clients want a phone call and which ones want to be left alone. A chatbot does not know these things. My cell is in the signature.

Gary

Draft 6. Saved 6/29/26, 11:47 p.m.

I WILL BE “OUT OF THE OFFICE” FROM JULY 1 THROUGH JULY 7 IN THE SENSE THAT I WILL BE SITTING IN A RENTAL HOUSE THAT COSTS ELEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS MORE THAN IT DID LAST YEAR WHILE PAYING FIVE DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS A GALLON TO DRIVE NINE HOURS WITH A DOG THAT NEEDS TO GO TO THE BATHROOM EVERY HOUR. I WILL HAVE ACCESS TO EMAIL BECAUSE IT IS 2026 AND THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS LIMITED ACCESS TO EMAIL. YOU CAN REACH ME ANYTIME. I AM ALWAYS REACHABLE. I HAVE BEEN REACHABLE EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR ELEVEN YEARS. THE ALGORITHM CANNOT DO WHAT I DO.

GARY

Draft 7. Saved 6/30/26, 12:04 a.m.

OOO 7/1–7/7.

G

Draft 8. Saved 7/1/26, 6:12 a.m.

Thank you for your email. I will be in the office this week and available at my desk. I am here.

Gary

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On April 29th, a statue appeared overnight in central London. Banksy had installed a man in a suit on a plinth in Waterloo Place, holding a flag that blows back and covers his face so completely that he cannot see where he is going, which is off the edge of his own pedestal.

On the same day, the Swedish parliament voted to change who gets to become Swedish. The new rules raise the wait for citizenship from five years to eight and add language tests, a civics exam, and a minimum income. More than 100,000 people had already applied under the old rules, some of them two or three years ago, and rather than let their applications be judged by the rules in force when they filed, the government will decide them under standards written afterward. Its own expert inquiry and senior judges both recommended protecting those people. The government refused and won the deciding motion by a single vote, 147 to 146, a vote it obtained by cheating.

Here is how. In the Swedish parliament, the parties agree in advance on who will sit out a vote, so that absences cancel each other and no one can swing a result by who happens to show up. The Sweden Democrats, the far-right party that now keeps the coalition government in power, had been shut out of the arrangement for a decade because no one trusted them with it. They needed only half that long, once let in, to prove everyone right: on this vote, two of their MPs were marked absent, then walked in and cast the two deciding ballots that killed the protections. The Swedish press called it a coup, and the party did not bother to deny it. But it only worked because the mainstream parties let it. Three coalition members wanted to vote for the protections and were pressured to stay home instead.

The new law took effect on June 6th, Sweden’s National Day. Of all the days available, the new rules came into force on the one day each year when, by law, every municipality in the country holds a ceremony to welcome its newest citizens with speeches, choirs, coffee, and cake.

I am one of those 100,000 people, or I would have been. I am a foreigner who moved to Sweden five years ago for my wife’s work with a major Swedish company. I started a business here. Every one of my clients is outside Sweden, which means every krona of income tax I have paid, at one of the highest rates in the world, is money the Swedish government would not have otherwise seen. On April 25th, I became eligible to apply for citizenship under the rules I had followed from the day I arrived. Four days later, the rules changed. I could have filed in the weeks before June 6th, and it would have made no difference. The Migration Agency was never going to decide my case before the cutoff, and every application left undecided as of June 6th will now be rejected, and the application fees kept. Countries set their own citizenship standards, and Sweden’s old requirements were among the more lenient in Europe. The rules themselves are not the betrayal, but retroactive application of new rules without transition is a deliberate choice to break faith with people who built their lives around the system as it existed.

The government justified it on security grounds, saying the police needed more time to screen the people in the queue. Everyone in Sweden knows what it is actually about: the refugees who arrived in 2015, most of them from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the families they have built since. Sweden let them in and then never really let them in. The failure to integrate a generation of newcomers was the country's own, and the new law punishes them and everyone else for it. The Swedish way is not to say that out loud.

An expat and an immigrant move to the same country for the same reasons. They want to build a life, contribute to a place, and raise a family somewhere that appears to want them there. The only difference between the two words is where you come from and what you look like. I am an immigrant. So are the 100,000 people in that queue.

People tend to invoke Sweden as proof that high taxes, generous systems, and shared prosperity work. I can confirm that the systems work. I have a pension, public healthcare, and a tax bill to prove it. But if a country can move the goalposts once, retroactively, it can move them again. Every skilled worker in the world considering Sweden should now be asking themselves why they would bet a decade of their life on a country where the rules are written in pencil.

Sweden recorded its fewest births in more than two decades last year. The fertility rate has fallen to 1.43 children per woman, an all-time low, and the government was concerned enough to commission a formal inquiry into why Swedes have stopped having children. Sweden’s own Migration Agency has identified dozens of occupations including healthcare workers and IT professionals, where employers cannot find enough workers domestically. The country’s population growth now depends almost entirely on immigration, which is the one thing its politics has decided to make as painful as possible. The government is simultaneously offering repatriation grants of up to 350,000 kronor (roughly $32,000) to asylum-based residents willing to leave the country. Sweden stepped off the edge of that plinth some time ago. It is now in free fall and has not yet looked down.

I have built a life here and I do not want to leave. But Sweden has shown every foreigner inside its borders that the welcome can be withdrawn, and it is doing it while running out of the very people it is turning away. Where exactly do you think the future comes from?

Thanks to The Local Sweden for its coverage and campaigning on this.

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We left the car in La Línea de la Concepción and walked across the border into Gibraltar. The checkpoint was brief — a few people ahead of us, a quick look at the passports — and then we were through and standing at the edge of an active runway.

Gibraltar’s airport runway cuts directly across the only road into the territory, a strip of tarmac that functions as both landing zone and pedestrian crossing depending on when you arrive. An EasyJet flight was on approach, and the barriers had come down, so we stood with a handful of other people and a few idling cars and watched a commercial aircraft land from a few hundred feet away. When it cleared, the barriers lifted, and everyone walked across the runway and into town.

For decades, crossing into Gibraltar involved more than a runway and a passport check. La Verja, the fence, was the hard border between Spain and the British Overseas Territory, a 1.2-kilometer chain-link barrier that Franco sealed shut in 1969 and that wasn’t fully reopened until 1985. Even after that, it remained a bottleneck, with queues that could stretch for hours, since even when the UK was in the EU, Gibraltar was never part of the Schengen area. A new treaty between the UK and the EU, provisionally effective this July, dismantles it entirely. The land border check we had just walked through will soon cease to exist at all.

The Rock rises over 400 meters above the town, a mass of Jurassic limestone visible from nearly every street, and the tunnels bored into it during the Great Siege and both World Wars extend for over 50 kilometers inside the stone. I walked Main Street and the alleys that branch off it, through Casemates Square, where people sat eating in the sun, and continued on toward the cable car at the base. You can hike the upper ridge, take the cable car, or pay one of the taxi drivers who were working the queue with real enthusiasm. I joined the line for the cable car, which turned out to be a very British queue — orderly, patient, and after thirty minutes showed no signs of becoming anything else. It was a beautiful day, and everyone on the peninsula had the same idea. I figured I would come back and went to explore the lower levels on foot instead.

In the Alameda Gardens, I strolled under dragon trees older than the gardens themselves and past beds of cacti and South African aloes before coming upon a red telephone box. The phone box may or may not have been functional, but it was doing its job regardless, which was to remind you that this sliver of Mediterranean coastline belongs to the British Crown. Gibraltar has voted twice, overwhelmingly, to remain a British Overseas Territory, and the evidence is everywhere — pubs advertising fish and chips and full English breakfasts, street names that belong in Kent, and Union Jacks whipping in the wind.

Walking back toward the border later that day, I realized the Britishness of the place had been more striking than I had expected, and that I was more drawn to it for exactly that reason. We crossed back into Spain the way we had come, on foot and across the runway, and drove south. An hour along the coast, at the point where mainland Europe runs out of road, something entirely different was waiting.

I saw the kites before I saw the town.

They appeared above the waterline as I came around a bend on the coastal road, bright shapes pulling tight against the wind, too many to count. By the time we reached Tarifa and parked, there were seemingly hundreds of them strung across the strait, riders cutting back and forth through the chop while their sails carved arcs overhead. I dropped my bag in the room and went straight to the beach.

Tarifa is the southernmost point in mainland Spain, and people have been crossing the strait from here for over a thousand years. In 710 AD, a Berber commander named Tarif ibn Malik sailed from North Africa with four hundred soldiers and made landfall on this coast. The town still carries his name, and the castle he would have recognized still stands by the port. Two winds, the Levante from the east and the Poniente from the west, funnel through the strait and have turned the beaches into one of the best kitesurfing destinations in the world. On the sand, a man was trying to come in from the water, which I learned requires someone onshore to help harness the sail. I was useless at first, standing there with my camera, until I watched a few others do it and got the idea.

The town is small enough to cover on foot in an afternoon, with narrow streets and small plazas where people eat well and without hurry. We found a place for dinner and arrived at what we considered a reasonable hour for bed, which in Spain meant the restaurant was not yet open. I loitered outside with enough transparency that the waiter eventually took pity on us, patted me on the back, and ushered us to a table before the kitchen was officially running. The seafood tapas that followed were excellent, unfussy, and light enough to offset the full English if you visited both places in a day.

From most points along the coast, you can see the Rif Mountains of Morocco rising from the opposite shore. Africa is right there, sitting across a channel of water narrow enough to make you reconsider what you thought you knew about the distance between continents.

Fourteen kilometers, at the narrowest point.

The next morning, we boarded the ferry. Spanish immigration processed us at the terminal in Tarifa before departure. Moroccan immigration started as soon as we were onboard. The officer had set up in a small curtained cubby on the upper deck with a portable computer that looked like a suitcase from a Bond film — the kind of setup you’d expect to see someone use to decrypt something, not verify the validity of a document. He was efficient and friendly, considerably more so than any arrival I have experienced at other Moroccan entry points, and by the time the boat docked in Tangier we were already cleared to enter. We walked off the gangway and onto the African continent without stopping. The crossing took exactly one hour.

Tangier has been absorbing people who arrive unsettled by the speed of that transition for a very long time. Paul Bowles came in 1931 and returned so many times he eventually stopped leaving, spending the last 52 years of his life in the city. William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a room in the medina. Allen Ginsberg passed through and kept passing through. They were drawn to a place that sat at the entrance to the Mediterranean and operated under its own logic —a city that had been an international zone governed by eight foreign powers simultaneously and then an independent one that still carries the residue of all that overlap. The writers came because Tangier didn’t require them to be one thing, and because the crossing from Europe was short enough to be easy and long enough to feel like an escape.

The medina was far more pleasant than Marrakech. We wandered for a long time without a plan, which is the only way to move through streets that are narrow and layer on top of each other, which rewards a slower stride. We found a rooftop, ordered lunch, and sat in the sun looking out over the medina.

The ferry back was the same crossing in reverse, an hour over the same water, except this time a kid in the row behind us was playing one of those rhythm games on his phone, the kind where you tap along to the music, and he was stuck on “Dance Monkey” by Tones and I. He kept failing and restarting, which meant we heard the same thirty seconds of that song on a loop for roughly twenty minutes, which is not something I would wish on my worst enemy. By about the fortieth repetition, it occurred to me that this was the most difficult part of the entire trip.

We had left our car in Tarifa, so before the drive back, I ducked into the lobby of the place we had stayed the night before to use the bathroom. Two Swedish tourists were at the front desk, and they had questions. A lot of them. How easy is it to get to Tangier? Where do you park? Can you do it in a day? Is the ferry reliable? How does immigration work? What if they drove to Gibraltar instead, how easy was that? They were very talkative Swedes. They were still going when I came out.

I thought about saying something. That we had just done exactly what they were asking about, and that it could not have been easier. That you can stand in three countries on two continents in as little as two days and enjoy them all, and the crossings are the simplest part. That the fences are coming down, the ferries run on time, and this rewarding cultural triangle is only 14 kilometers on its shortest side.

I picked up my bag and walked out to the car. They would figure it out. The continents drift, slowly and always, but right now they are close. 🧭

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This week’s piece is by Mandy Sham, a journalist and photographer whose work has appeared in Suitcase, GQ, National Geographic, and Travel + Leisure (@peach.punk). I gave her free rein to write about whatever she wanted for you all, and she chose the thing that tells you the most about a place — where and how its people eat. It also makes me incredibly hungry. All words and photographs are hers.

This taco is a symphony, even before it arrives.

A resounding “Pásele, pásele!” cuts through the urgency of foot traffic; through the crack and spit of hot oil. I’m at the counter—thinking of the recipes, like culinary sheet music, that travelled through a chain of people I’ll never meet. Then comes the taquero’s movement, where that legacy is not only expressed but embodied. Wielding his knife, he slices meat from the trompo and catches it in one swift arc—followed by a near-instantaneous flourish of onion and cilantro.

Chef’s kiss? Yes indeed—the most fiery, passionate kind. Even without a single bite taken, the tightly choreographed rhythms of this stall are enough to know this will be a memorable meal. The plastic-wrapped plate moves from the taquero’s hands to mine. All of it took ten seconds. But the ten seconds took a lifetime.

Mexico City, a city of twenty-two million people, is sustained every day by this roadside moment. Street food, in its countless iterations, feeds workers in construction and cubicles alike. It’s the engine that keeps North America’s largest metropolitan area running. There’s a circadian rhythm to it, too—tethering the city’s inhabitants to the ebb and flow of any given day. The hearty morning’s chilaquiles-stuffed tortas and tamales transition, by nightfall, to the fire and staccato of tacos de suadero and al pastor.

When I last visited CDMX in March, I was hit by the near-ubiquitous aroma of corn tortillas on the comal—warm, toasty, earthy—a scent that instantly transported me back to my very first trip in 2018. Studies in neuroscience have shown smells evoke more emotionally intense memories than any other sensory cue. The Proust effect, as it’s called, gets triggered for me every time I return.

But this exact smell of maíz is also a sensory time machine—the thing that unites modern Mexico to its pre-Hispanic ancestry. It’s arguable that this olfactory legacy is one of the things that hasn’t changed since the days of Tenochtitlán, the historic capital of the Aztec Empire.

Mexican street food culture begins there, too. For millennia, tianguis (derived from the Nahuatl tianquiztli) were itinerant open-air markets, organized into different types of commodities. They perfectly distilled the social and economic heart of Mesoamerica into a transient gathering space: part-business hub, part-town square, part-communal kitchen. A prepared foods section would feature earlier versions of mole, flavored with chilies and honey, and tortillas. Markets like Tlatelolco were the way both goods and news travelled. Word of mouth, as they say—except these mouths salivated a lot.

While Spanish colonization attempted to do away with these spaces or regulate them, the sprawling weekly markets continued to evolve. A modern-day puesto, or street stall, might look like something added to an existing sidewalk—a metallic micro-kitchen built to conform to Mexico City’s social rhythms and density. But it’s conceptually been around for far longer, and the cultural weight of them is undeniable.

Puestos shape the physical identities of streets just like signs and lampposts do; one might even argue that they change the makeup of them entirely. While they certainly don’t have walls as sit-down restaurants do, they effectively transform sidewalk corners into rooms: a kind of sanctuary to stop, eat, and talk in the midst of a busy transit corridor. The ticket to entry is a few pesos, elbows tucked in, and the delicate choreography ensuring none of the salsa or meat juices drip out.

Among all the places I’ve travelled to, Mexico is still one of the most sensory-charged places to eat—because taking part in that everyday ritual involves digging in, in every sense. Puesto culture is quick and economical for a relentless working force, but it also offers a temporary truce with Mexico City’s unrelenting thrum. It isn’t just a physical third space; it’s psychological, too. For fifteen minutes, your time is yours. And whether consciously or not, it’s a bridge connecting you right to the people who sustain you.

Somewhere under the shade of a hot pink tarpaulin, lined up in single file with a gordita de bistec in both hands, I found the key to uncovering the pulse of a neighborhood’s beating heart. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say it found me—because the places most representative of its people’s tastes will reveal that in the crowds milling next to it. It was lunch hour at a busy intersection, and I lined up with my full wallet and empty stomach. When I asked an older man waiting in front of me to recommend something, he was ecstatic, giving me a rundown of his favorites and a short history of the owners working behind the plancha.

That’s when I realized: scoop up enough nopales and pickled red onions, and you’re bound to scoop up a few stories along the way. Vendors know their repeat customers and vice versa. Sometimes the orders go unspoken. It’s a slow simmer of a relationship, built with familiarity and loyalty to the business. These dishes may be plated with little ceremony, but they are handed to you with the utmost care.

Food as a driver of connection, of course, isn’t isolated to the sidewalk. It feels like the connective tissue of a city where community and sustenance are in fact indistinguishable. The fondas, small eateries known for their pocketbook-friendly lunches, hold up this social contract in one simple exchange: “Provecho”, said even to strangers as diners pay up and leave. This is evidenced as well in the mercados. In the deepest corners of vast, almost labyrinthine markets, you’ll find stalls bursting with the hum of their regulars. Over the years, I’ve made no small number of friends and acquaintances over a spontaneous plate of quesadillas. All it took was limited counter space and a shared hunger.

When night falls, street food isn’t so much of an intermission from the day; it increasingly feels like a destination in itself. The scent of rendered fat and seared meat spikes the air with a renewed aliveness. To me, this sharper, more chaotic energy feels more intimate. I think of the time my friends and I drifted out of a bar, several fancy cocktails deep, and found ourselves face-to-face with a birria stand: the fluorescent lights unabating, the wafting aromas too good to refuse.

The three of us stood there, huddled over our orders of quesabirria and cups of rich consomé—liquid velvet to cut through the late-night haze, and punctuate conversations that felt both generous and easy. I still think of the sanctity of that moment. Suddenly, the scale of millions of people didn’t feel daunting. Instead, it felt familiar: a city held together by that primordial need to be fed and seen.

Any time I’m asked if I want everything with my taco—cilantro, onion, and a dash of the base salsa—I know my answer. I want the toppings, the ritual, the history, and the connection. I want it all: “Sí, con todo.” 🌮

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There is a saying that if you are not the expert, find the expert, and I think the best version of that is when you find someone who is not only good but willing to share how they do it.

Hong Kong is one of the best cities in the world for photography. I have been there many times over the years, and I never run out of things to shoot, which is partly because the city is so dense that the visual material just stacks up in front of you — people, trams, signage, laundry, all compressed into the same frame with residential towers rising behind them. The light in Hong Kong matters more than it does in most places because the same street can look completely different depending on the hour, and some of the best conditions come when you would not expect them. Mong Kok in the rain, for instance, is better than Mong Kok on a clear night. Every neighborhood has its own feel, and because the MTR and the tram network connect everything, you can cover an enormous amount of ground in a day on foot.

Manson is a Hong Kong-based photographer I have been following for a while, and he is that expert. I asked him to pick eight of his favorite locations and tell you how to photograph them, and he came back with the kind of detail you only get from someone who has spent years shooting the same streets. You could hit all eight in a long weekend, if you wanted. And even if you are not carrying a camera (or a professional one), these are just great vantage points of the city.

Daytime

Aberdeen Street Steps – Central

Best Time to Visit: Afternoon on a sunny day, around 12–2:00 PM. During this window, the sun is high enough to spill into the narrow alley, creating dramatic highlights on the stone steps and the people walking down, while keeping the old shop stalls in moody shadow.

How to Photograph the Spot: Position yourself at the bottom of the steps looking up. This angle emphasizes the steepness of the street and allows you to frame your subjects against the vertical backdrop of the city’s dense architecture.

Technique: Use a wide-to-medium aperture, around f/4 or f/5.6, to maintain sharp detail throughout the scene. Wait for a lone subject to enter the shaft of light on the stairs to create a strong focal point and a sense of story.

Fa Yuen Street Market – Mong Kok

Best Time to Visit: Mid-afternoon, around 3:00–5:00 PM, is ideal for capturing the peak energy of the market. Overcast or rainy days are actually better for creating a moody and cinematic look.

How to Photograph the Spot: Head to the Mong Kok Road Footbridge that crosses over Fa Yuen Street. Shoot from the center of the bridge to get a perfectly symmetrical view of the market stalls stretching into the distance.

Technique: Use a medium telephoto lens, like an 85mm, to compress the perspective. This makes the tall buildings feel like they are leaning in, emphasizing the urban canyon effect.

Southern Building – North Point

Best Time to Visit: Afternoon, when the low sun hits the yellow and red facade of the Southern Building, making the colors pop while casting long, cinematic shadows across the tram tracks.

How to Photograph the Spot: Shoot from the pedestrian footbridge overlooking King’s Road. This elevated position gives you a clear, unobstructed view of the oncoming trams and the sheer scale of the residential blocks behind them.

Technique: Use a zoom lens, around 50–100mm, to compress the scene, making the building appear even more massive over the traffic. Wait for a white or brightly colored tram to enter the patch of sunlight for a high-contrast focal point.

Hill Road Flyover – Shek Tong Tsui

Best Time to Visit: Anytime in the afternoon, or at night when the streetlights create a moody, cinematic feel.

How to Photograph the Spot: To get the full snake-like effect of the flyover curving above you, use an ultra-wide-angle lens, below 18mm, and shoot from a low vantage point looking up.

Technique: Use a ‘leading lines composition’ by aligning the curves of the flyover with the road below to create a sense of depth. If shooting at night, a shutter speed between 5 and 20 seconds can capture light trails from passing cars.

Golden Hour

Lion Rock – Shek Kip Mei

Best Time to Visit: Late afternoon on a sunny day, approximately one hour before sunset. The golden hour light hits the face of the mountain, highlighting its rugged texture and making the lion stand out.

How to Photograph the Spot: Shoot from the pedestrian footbridge on Nam Cheong Street. This vantage point allows you to use the long, straight road as a leading line that draws the eye directly toward the mountain peak.

Technique: Use a telephoto lens, 85mm or longer, to create a compression effect. This makes the mountain appear much larger and closer to the foreground buildings and traffic, emphasizing the proximity of Hong Kong’s urban life to its nature.

Blue Hour and Night

Garden Hill – Sham Shui Po

Best Time to Visit: Arrive around 6:00 PM to catch the sunset, but the blue hour — the period just after sunset — is the real window here, as the city lights begin to come on against the fading sky. This is a popular spot for local photographers, so try to go mid-week to avoid the weekend rush.

How to Photograph the Spot: Use a telephoto lens, like a 70–200mm, to compress the scene and emphasize the stacked look of the buildings.

Technique: Use a tripod for long-exposure shots to capture sharp details of the buildings and light trails from the traffic below. HDR photography helps balance the bright city lights with the darker areas of the hillside.

Jardine’s Lookout – Night View

Best Time to Visit: The blue hour, roughly 20–30 minutes after sunset, is the sweet spot for this location. It provides the perfect balance where the sky retains a deep blue hue while the city lights are fully illuminated.

How to Photograph the Spot: A tripod is critical here for the long exposures needed to capture the city lights clearly. Use a telephoto lens, 70–200mm, to isolate specific buildings like the IFC, or a mid-range lens, 24–105mm, to capture the entire skyline.

Technique: Keep your ISO low, between 100 and 200, to minimize grain. Use a mid-range aperture around f/8 to f/11 to ensure the entire cityscape is sharp from front to back.

Portland Street Neon – Mong Kok

Best Time to Visit: Visit on a rainy night. The wet asphalt creates a mirror-like surface that reflects the neon signs, doubling the color and light in your frame.

How to Photograph the Spot: Shoot from a low angle — getting your camera close to the ground will maximize those reflections on the wet pavement. Use the iconic red taxis as a focal point to add a sense of motion and local character.

Technique: Use a fast prime lens, like a 35mm or 50mm f/1.8, to handle the low light without a tripod. To capture the falling rain, use a faster shutter speed around 1/250s or higher and push your ISO slightly. 📷

You can find more of Manson’s work on Instagram at @mansonyms.

All photographs © Mansonyms. Used with permission.

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When I first moved to Sweden, I only had a vague sense of what Eurovision was. I knew it was some kind of European talent show that had been going on for a long time, and that it was almost certainly not for me. As a new resident trying to learn as much as I could about Swedish culture, I gave it a shot. Sweden has won Eurovision seven times, tied with Ireland for the most in the contest’s history, and Swedes take the contest very seriously. I was hooked within twenty minutes.1

Here is what I did not understand about Eurovision from the outside: it is the single largest live music event in the world. Close to forty countries each send one act to perform a single song —three minutes, no longer— on one stage, and nearly two hundred million people watch it live. Every televised singing competition Americans have ever cared about —American Idol, The Voice, X Factor— descends from this thing. But none of them come close to its scale or its stakes, because none of them are asking entire nations to compete against each other. ABBA came out of Eurovision, and Celine Dion won it representing Switzerland. In more recent years, acts like t.A.T.u, Loreen, Duncan Laurence, and Måneskin have all been notable after the competition. It is campy and overproduced and emotionally manipulative, and I mean all of that as a compliment. The whole thing is built on the idea that pop music can bring forty countries together, and the insane part is that it works.

The EBU has always maintained that Eurovision is non-political. The rules explicitly say so: No political content in songs, no political messaging on stage, and no political gestures from performers are allowed. This has never been entirely true. The voting blocs alone make that clear — Cyprus has awarded Greece twelve points in twenty-six out of thirty-one possible years.2 Ukraine’s Jamala won in 2016 with “1944,” a song about the Soviet deportation of Crimean Tatars that the EBU approved by classifying it as historical rather than political, a distinction that requires a certain flexibility of mind.

Then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The EBU initially said both countries could still compete, citing the contest's non-political nature. However, within forty-eight hours, after multiple broadcasters threatened to pull out, Russia was banned. The statement said their inclusion would bring the competition into disrepute. Ukraine went on to win that year in Turin, carried by the highest televote in Eurovision history. The viewing public across the continent voted in what felt less like a song contest and more like a referendum on solidarity. That said, the song was excellent, the deserved winner by any measure, even if its music video — filmed in Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka, and Hostomel, cities near Kyiv destroyed during the Russian occupation — was itself not exactly apolitical.

I watched from my couch in Malmö and thought: well, that settles that. Politics had arrived at Eurovision, but it had arrived in a way that felt clean and possibly even righteous. Russia has remained banned ever since.3 Nobody objected.

The way Eurovision works, the winning country hosts the following year. Ukraine won in 2022 but could not host as the country was still at war, so the United Kingdom stepped in as the runners-up and held the 2023 contest in Liverpool. Sweden’s Loreen won in Liverpool, which meant the 2024 contest was coming to Sweden.

In July 2023, Sweden announced that their host city would be Malmö, which is my city. From everything I had experienced watching from the couch, it was going to be absolutely joyous — the costumes, the visitors flooding in from dozens of countries, the entire city given over to it. I did not even need to travel. I was elated.

Then everything changed. On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched its attack on Israel. Israel’s military response in Gaza followed, and by the time the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest arrived in Malmö, the death toll in Gaza had passed thirty-five thousand. Malmö is one of the most diverse cities in Sweden. Roughly a third of its residents were born outside the country, and a significant share of them are from the Middle East, including a large Palestinian community. These were people whose families were under bombardment. I watched my barber, who is Palestinian, seemingly age years between monthly haircuts, worrying about relatives who had nothing to do with any of it. Protests became regular. The city I loved for its openness was now hosting the most contentious Eurovision in the contest’s history, and the tension was everywhere.

Calls to ban Israel from the contest began almost immediately. Nine countries signed a declaration demanding exclusion. The EBU refused, invoking the same non-political stance it had abandoned for Russia two years earlier. Israel’s original entry, “October Rain,” was rejected by the EBU for appearing to reference the October 7 attacks. A revised version, “Hurricane,” was cleared to compete.

I had tickets to the jury show, the Friday evening dress rehearsal, where professional juries for each country cast their votes. It is essentially the full production, identical staging and performances, before a packed arena. We had been told in advance that Palestinian flags would be confiscated at the door. This did not prevent the sentiment from getting in.

The booing began before Israel’s entry took the stage and swelled as Eden Golan appeared. It was loud and sustained and accompanied by chants of “free Palestine” that rolled across the arena. There were cheers too, and people around us trying to tell the ones yelling that it was not her fault — though whether a twenty-year-old singer sent to represent a country conducting a military campaign in Gaza is a performer or propaganda is not a question with a comfortable answer. Two dads in front of me with their young child tried to get security to remove the Dutch fans behind us, who were screaming obscenities about the contest, about Israel, about all of it. Security never left their post.

The contest was also unraveling for reasons beyond Israel's participation. That morning, the Netherlands' entrant, Joost Klein, one of the front-runners, had been pulled from rehearsals after being accused of having an altercation with a camera operator. His fate was still unknown. When his slot came later in the running order, his song played through the speakers, and his staging lit up the screens, but the stage was empty. The Dutch fans behind us, already not in a forgiving mood, only got louder.

The next night, we had friends over to watch the live final on television. Eden Golan performed again, and the audio felt completely different from what we had heard in the arena. The boos sounded almost non-existent, replaced with cheers and applause. The EBU denied any manipulation, saying the Swedish host broadcaster SVT had simply adjusted levels to even things out for TV viewers. An audio analysis published by The Intercept a year later confirmed what everyone in the arena already knew: the booing had been suppressed in the broadcast.

But there was one moment they could not suppress. Late in the show, the broadcast cut live to Martin Österdahl, the EBU’s executive supervisor, for a tradition he had performed since taking the role in 2020: appearing on camera from inside the arena to certify that the votes had been verified and deliver his catchphrase, “you’re good to go.” It was the one live, un-isolated microphone of the entire broadcast. When Österdahl appeared, the arena erupted. The boos were deafening, directed at him, at the organization he represented, and at its refusal to act. He was booed again minutes later when he delivered the Dutch jury votes himself, after the Dutch spokesperson withdrew following Joost Klein’s disqualification earlier that day. Swedish prosecutors would later find no case to answer.

Then came the voting results, and with them a different kind of problem. To understand why, you need to understand how Eurovision voting works. Viewers across Europe and beyond can vote by phone, text, or online — but you cannot vote for your own country. In 2024, each viewer was allowed up to twenty votes. Half the final result comes from this public televote; the other half comes from professional juries in each country.

Israel’s “Hurricane” received 323 televote points, the second-highest of the night, and finished fifth overall. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs later confirmed it had coordinated an international campaign to boost the public vote, reaching out to pro-Israel communities in countries across Europe and beyond. A billboard went up in Times Square promoting Eden Golan. At the time, nothing in the rules prohibited a government from running an organized cross-border voting campaign on behalf of its entry. The EBU took no action, because technically no rule had been broken. The spirit of the contest — nations competing through music, audiences voting on songs — was a different matter.

In 2025, it happened again, at a scale that made the previous year look like a trial run. The contest moved to Basel, and Israel’s entry was Yuval Raphael, a survivor of the Nova music festival attack on October 7. The Israeli Government Advertising Agency ran targeted YouTube ads across thirty-five countries, instructing viewers to cast all twenty of their allowed votes for Israel. Israeli diplomatic missions were instructed to mobilize support. The campaign received over sixty-eight million impressions, a figure the EBU’s own fact-checking outlet later confirmed. Raphael won the televote and finished second overall behind Austria’s JJ.

And in Basel, the EBU made sure the Malmö mic problem would not repeat itself. Österdahl’s live on-camera role was eliminated. The presenters delivered his “good to go” line themselves. A graphic appeared on screen confirming the votes were verified, and Österdahl gave a silent thumbs-up. It was changed because a microphone in a room full of angry people had transmitted something the EBU did not want two hundred million viewers to hear. Not everyone cooperated with the silence, however. Spain’s public broadcaster RTVE aired a message during the Basel broadcast: “When human rights are at stake, silence is not an option. Peace and Justice for Palestine.”

Multiple broadcasters demanded audits of the 2025 vote. Spain, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, and Slovenia all called for full transparency on the voting data. Twelve Members of the European Parliament wrote to the EBU demanding an independent audit. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said publicly that Israel should be excluded and that the contest could not apply double standards. Three weeks after Basel, Österdahl resigned. The man who had made “United by Music” the contest’s permanent slogan, who had been its public face for five years, was gone.

The EBU’s response arrived in November 2025: a voting overhaul that halved the maximum votes per viewer, restored professional juries to the semi-finals, and added new rules discouraging “disproportionate promotion campaigns” by governments. The reforms did not mention Israel by name. Eurovision director Martin Green insisted the 2025 results were “valid and robust,” changing the rules while simultaneously declaring that nothing had been wrong with the results that prompted the changes.

At the General Assembly in Geneva, the organization framed its vote carefully. Members were asked whether the new rules were sufficient —not whether Israel should be allowed to participate. Eight countries requested a separate ballot on Israel’s participation. The EBU presidency denied it. Israel was cleared to compete in 2026.

Five countries decided that was enough.

Ireland withdrew first, calling Israel’s participation “unconscionable given the appalling loss of lives in Gaza.” The Netherlands followed, with broadcaster AVROTROS saying the decision would stand even if a ceasefire were reached. Spain, one of the contest’s founding Big Five4, pulled out next — RTVE’s chair said the genocide in Gaza made it impossible to look the other way. Slovenia and Iceland followed, with Slovenia instead airing a Palestinian documentary and film series called Voices of Palestine in its place this week.

It is the largest boycott since 1970. Thirty-five countries will compete in Vienna, the fewest since 2003, before the semi-final format existed. Nemo, the Swiss artist who won the 2024 contest in Malmö, returned their trophy in protest. Seventy-two former contestants have signed an open letter calling for Israel’s exclusion. Over a thousand artists, among them Massive Attack, Sigur Rós, Brian Eno, Kneecap, and Macklemore, signed a separate boycott letter. Germany, meanwhile, threatened to withdraw if Israel were banned, a reminder that the pressure runs in both directions. Since the 2024 contest in Malmö, Israel has continued its military operations in Gaza, launched strikes on Iran, and expanded its offensive into Lebanon. The death toll in Gaza has surpassed seventy thousand.

In years past, we would start getting excited about it here in Sweden months in advance, watching the music videos as they were released, rewatching Will Ferrell’s Eurovision movie for the tenth time. This year, we haven’t.

Tomorrow (May 12), the first semi-final of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest opens in Vienna at the Wiener Stadthalle. It is the EBU’s seventieth anniversary edition, and it arrives in the worst institutional crisis the organization has faced.

The question is not whether politics belong at Eurovision. It is whether the EBU can keep pretending they don’t. The apolitical framing worked for decades. It does not work now, and insisting on it has cost the contest five countries, its executive supervisor, and the trust of its own membership.

I still love Eurovision. I listen to past songs from Ukraine, Czechia, Germany, Croatia, and many others in rotation, and I will watch it again. The tagline has not changed. The contest has. 🎤

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Japan is one of those countries where the writing is so good that you can spend years reading about it before you even set foot in the country. The culture comes through on the page in a way that few places manage — the attention to craft, the formality layered over deep strangeness, and a tension between what is said and what is meant. The things that go unspoken in daily life, the debts, the shame, the loneliness inside all that collective order, end up on the page instead, and the writers who get it right will take you closer to the country than any trip you plan yourself.

I have been to Japan many times, and I am not sure I understand the country any more than I did after the first trip. That is not a complaint. It may be the highest thing you can say about a place — that it does not flatten under scrutiny. I once walked into a neighborhood festival in Tokyo that I had no idea existed and learned more in twenty minutes than I had in the previous week of trying.

These twenty-five books are written by Japanese writers and by outsiders who spent long enough in the country to earn the right to an opinion. Some are old, some are new. I hope you find something here you have not read yet, and if you have a favorite I missed, leave it in the comments — these lists are always better when they are not just mine.

Non-Fiction

Lost Japan — Alex Kerr Kerr first came to Japan as a child, bought a thatched farmhouse in the Iya Valley, and spent decades watching the country modernize in ways that thrilled and horrified him in equal measure. Opinionated, unsparing, and occasionally romantic, it will change how you see Kyoto.

Embracing Defeat — John Dower The definitive account of Japan from 1945 to 1952, when the country was occupied, broken, and reinventing itself under American supervision. Dower won the Pulitzer for this, and it earned it.

Hiroshima — John Hersey Six survivors, one morning, and the aftermath in decades. The prose is precise and restrained in a way that makes it almost unbearable.

Bending Adversity — David Pilling If you want one book that explains how modern Japan works and why it often doesn’t, this is it. Pilling was the Financial Times bureau chief in Tokyo, and he makes the lost decades, the demographic crisis, and the long national argument about identity manageable to outsiders.

Tokyo Vice — Adelstein was the first American reporter hired by one of Japan’s major daily newspapers, and what he found on the crime beat was a world that operated according to rules nobody outside it was supposed to understand.

The Lady and the Monk — Pico Iyer Iyer went to Kyoto to live in a monastery and found himself in a love affair instead. He uses the relationship as a lens for everything the culture keeps partially hidden from foreigners: the rituals of indirection, the weight of seasons, the distance between what is said and what is meant.

The Road to Sata — Alan Booth Booth walked the entire length of Japan, from Cape Soya to Cape Sata, and wrote about it with a combination of exhaustion, affection, and booze that makes the book feel more honest than most travel writing has any right to be. He spoke fluent Japanese and died young —this is his monument.

People Who Eat Darkness — Richard Lloyd Parry The disappearance of a young British hostess in Tokyo, the investigation that followed, and the world of Roppongi nightlife and institutional failure that the case exposed. A true crime book whose real subject is the machinery of Japanese society when it encounters something it would rather not look at.

Rice, Noodle, Fish — Matt Goulding Goulding eats his way through Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Hokkaido, and what he is really doing is mapping the country through its obsessions. It makes you (very) hungry, and it makes you want to book a flight.

In Praise of Shadows — Junichiro Tanizaki Published in 1933, Tanizaki argues that Japanese culture once understood beauty as something that lived in the space between what you could see and what you couldn’t. You can finish it in an afternoon, and it's the kind of book you can reread many times.

Confessions of a Yakuza — Dr. Junichi Saga A country doctor records the deathbed confessions of an aging gangster, and the result is one of the strangest and most compelling oral histories you will ever read. Pairs well with Tokyo Vice as a before-and-after portrait of organized crime in Japan.

The Abundance of Less — Andy Couturier Ten people who walked away from mainstream Japanese life and built something else: a farmer, a woodworker, a poet, a woman who makes paper by hand. As much about what Japan looks like when you leave Tokyo as it is about any philosophy of simplicity.

The Bells of Old Tokyo — Anna Sherman Sherman went looking for the bells that once marked time across Edo-period Tokyo, most of them gone, and built a book about memory, architecture, and the way a city overwrites itself.

Fiction

Snow Country — Yasunari Kawabata A wealthy Tokyo dilettante takes the train into the mountains to visit a geisha he does not love in a way that will do either of them any good. Kawabata won the Nobel Prize, and this short novel is the best argument for why.

No Longer Human — Osamu Dazai A man who cannot figure out how to be a person. Dazai wrote it in 1948, a year before he killed himself. It is one of the most widely read novels in Japanese history.

The Sound of Waves — Yukio Mishima A young fisherman on a remote island falls in love. Mishima wrote it as a deliberate exercise in simplicity. It is a short but beautiful book.

Shogun — James Clavell An English navigator shipwrecked in feudal Japan, a civilization he cannot decode, and the political intrigue of warlords, samurai, and Jesuit priests who all want something from him. Twelve hundred pages and now notably to some an FX show.

1Q84 — Haruki Murakami Two storylines, two moons, and a Tokyo that is almost (but not quite) the one that exists. Murakami’s longest novel is also his most ambitious, and my personal favorite. A copy he signed for me is one of my prized possessions.

Memoirs of a Geisha — Arthur Golden The most famous Western novel set in Japan, and the one most likely to start an argument in the comments. Golden’s portrait of geisha culture in prewar Kyoto is vivid and absorbing and has been criticized, with reason, for the liberties it takes. It remains the book that shaped how millions of readers imagined Japan before they ever went.

Kitchen — Banana Yoshimoto A young woman whose grandmother has just died moves in with a friend and his transgender mother and begins putting her life back together, mostly by cooking.

Breasts and Eggs — Mieko Kawakami Two sections, separated by years, about women’s bodies and the choices that get made for them and the ones that don’t. Kawakami writes with a directness that is rare in contemporary Japanese fiction, and the book feels urgent without ever raising its voice.

Convenience Store Woman — Sayaka Murata A woman who has worked at the same convenience store for eighteen years and sees no reason to stop. Everyone around her thinks something is wrong with her. It is very funny, and the longer you sit with it, the less sure you are about who is actually ‘broken.’

Butter — Asako Yuzuki A journalist becomes obsessed with a woman convicted of killing three men, a woman who cooked for all of them first. The novel is about desire, control, and the particular suspicion Japan reserves for women who take pleasure without apology.

Strange Weather in Tokyo — Hiromi Kawakami A woman in her thirties keeps running into her former high school teacher at a bar near the train station, and what develops between them is (possibly) the slowest, most tentative romance in contemporary Japanese fiction.

Tokyo Ueno Station — Yu Miri A ghost haunts the park around Ueno Station, where Tokyo’s homeless population has been periodically cleared out to make the city presentable. Yu Miri tells the story of a man who came from Fukushima to build the infrastructure for the 1964 Olympics and ended up with nothing.

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Enjoyed this? Here are more reading lists by region:

Asia:

Europe:

The Americas:

Global:

No one on this plane is here for the plane.

We have each spent a great deal of money specifically to be somewhere else. But to get there, we must first sit still for thirteen hours in a sealed tube with two hundred strangers.

On the way in, we passed a flight attendant with a tray of champagne, smiling, but making a private guess about which direction we would turn. I turn right. I always turn right. Half of Economy appears to have boarded directly from bed. A woman is wearing what looks like patterned pajamas. A man dressed like Adam Sandler is standing in the aisle trying to figure out which of his ten cords he needs to have with him in his seat.

By the time I reach 40C, my overhead bin space has been taken by someone three rows ahead who brought a bag the exact dimensions of a small refrigerator. There is nothing to be done about this. We are a miniature society now, and the injustices began before takeoff.

The first hour is administrative. We adjust our screens and scroll through the entertainment library with initial contentment, but we will change our minds at least twice before the drink cart arrives. There are three hundred options on this flight today, but I know that ultimately, what I will watch is whatever the person diagonally in front of me chooses.

Someone nearby has already pressed play, which is a bold decision given that their film is about to be interrupted by a safety video in which Kevin Hart screams at two people sitting in safari chairs in ‘Nairobi’ about how to fasten a seatbelt.

When the seatbelt sign goes off, the cabin reshuffles. This is when people reveal what kind of long-haul passenger they are.

There is the man in 38D who reclines his seat the moment it becomes legal to do so with such force that it almost hits the head of the woman sitting behind him. Her options for the flight are now limited. Her screen is twelve inches from her face. She can no longer reach into her seatback pocket or eat without holding a scalding aluminum dish. She will remember this for the duration of the flight and possibly longer.

The meal cart appears two hours in. You can hear it banging into passengers’ knees before you see it, and the sound causes the entire cabin to sit up slightly, like meerkats detecting motion on the savanna. A flight attendant leans in and asks the question that will define the next twenty minutes of your life.

“Chicken or pasta?”

This is not a real choice. The chicken is a portion of protein in a brownish sauce that could be curry, could be gravy, or could be both, seasoned with what feels like an entire day's worth of sodium. The pasta is the other option. Both come with a bread roll that requires enough force to open that you risk elbowing your seatmate. From behind the curtain up front, there is the faint clink of actual silverware.

After the meal, the cabin goes dark, and the window shades come down. This is supposed to be the sleeping portion of the flight, and the airline does everything it can to suggest that sleeping on a plane is a normal thing that normal people do. They dim the lights and lower the temperature to something that feels hostile. They hand out thin blankets that cover either your shoulders or your feet, but never both.

I watch people attempt sleep in ways that would concern a physician. One man is folded over his tray table like a student who has given up during an exam. A child three rows back is fully unconscious, limbs splayed, sleeping better than any of us have slept in years. This is the last time in his life he will find an economy seat comfortable, and he doesn’t know it.

There are four lavatories for roughly two hundred people, and a line forms after the meals. We stand in the galley area, swaying gently, avoiding eye contact, pretending we are not all here for the same reason. A man joins the line in socks. He has made a decision, and it is not one I would have made; it is not one any person should ever make. Each time the door opens, the person leaving holds it for the person waiting with a politeness that suggests they feel guilty about something, though what exactly is left for the next passenger to figure out.

Around hour nine, the cabin enters a strange limbo. The lights are still off, but no one is sleeping anymore. People are staring at their screens in the dark, or at the flight map, watching the small plane icon inch across a blue ocean at a speed that makes you wonder whether the plane is moving at all. Someone three rows ahead has turned on their overhead reading light, illuminating nine seats in every direction. They are reading a paperback. They do not care. Others are walking the length of the aisle with no destination, just movement for its own sake, pacing the cabin slowly, bumping every aisle seat on the way past.

Somewhere around hour eleven, the cabin lights come back on. The second meal arrives shortly after. It is smaller than the first and served in a cardboard box. A man eats his while standing in the aisle, stretching his calves. No one finds this unusual.

The plane begins its descent. One person along the windows does not move. They were asleep before the lights came on and they are asleep now, almost certainly on something pharmaceutical. A flight attendant taps their shoulder and waits while they figure out which continent they are on before asking them to lift their shade.

The wheels touch, and a phone rings somewhere behind me at a volume that suggests the caller has been trying for thirteen hours straight and finally got through. The passenger answers. “Yeah, we just landed,” they say, and then begin to describe the flight before pausing and saying “Chicken.”

We file off the plane and into a terminal that looks exactly like the one we left. For a moment, it is not clear that we have gone anywhere at all. Then the signs are in another language, and we remember why we did this. 💺

Did you notice something else on the flight? Share it in the comments.

(You can also join me at the hotel breakfast buffet or booking a cheap flight)

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The Stage is a viewing platform at the top of a tower on the Bund, and on a clear night in January the wind off the Huangpu will cut through whatever you are wearing. I stood there on my first night back, after six years away, on a building that didn’t exist back then, and looked east across the river at the Pudong skyline I had helped build a part of, back when I was working in the industry that built it, for clients that no longer exist. The light show that now runs across the Pudong facades at scheduled intervals was smaller when I lived here and not the synchronized production it had become. The Bund below me was bathed in its yellow light, the colonial buildings glowing the way they have for as long as I have known them, and behind them, to the west, the city stretched out dark and dense and illegible. I could not see the old neighborhoods from up there. What had happened to them would take a long walk to understand.

I moved to Shanghai in 2011. I came for a job I had not expected to be offered and stayed for five years, working with local governments and developers to turn neighborhoods into construction sites across the country. I kept coming back after I moved away, and then in early 2020, the borders closed and stayed closed for four years. In March of 2022, the Shanghai municipal government imposed a lockdown on the city’s twenty-five million residents that would last more than two months, confining entire districts to their apartments, and leaving a mark on the people who endured it that none of my friends, six years on, seemed eager to discuss. I booked a trip for 2025 and canceled it from a hospital bed. When I boarded a flight to Pudong in January of 2026, I knew that every map I carried in my head was out of date.

The next morning, I headed toward M50, the gallery complex on the north bank of Suzhou Creek, to visit one of my favorite artists. The streets were different before I got there. Electric cars had overtaken gasoline cars by a ratio I stopped trying to estimate, and the new EV plates — a gradient of green into white — had replaced the blue and white gasoline plates that used to be auctioned for amounts greater than a hundred thousand yuan by the time I left. At intersections where I would have heard idling engines and horn blasts, I could now hear birdsong. The mopeds that used to swarm through red lights lined up in designated lanes. The city was quieter than the one I had left, and more orderly, in every direction I looked, than I had thought Shanghai could become.

After M50, I walked along Suzhou Creek. The creek had been an open drain for most of the time I had known it, and the banks had been a maze of material wholesalers and workshops where I used to bike at night past men pushing handcarts and women sorting metal in the cones of streetlamps. I had loved it for the same reasons it was unpleasant. The city had spent the better part of a decade on a master plan1 to convert the banks into continuous public space, and what the creek is now is a promenade connecting small parks and new developments along clean water where more than forty species of fish have returned. I walked past joggers on rubber pathways, past benches facing the water, and did not see anyone collecting cardboard. What I did see, on poles at head height every hundred meters or so, were cameras.2

As I walked through Jing’an, I passed a series of signs mounted on the fences of residential compounds. They were official, and they addressed the pedestrian directly. One urged “considerate tourism.” Another promoted “courteous traffic behavior.” A third instructed residents on “proper waste sorting.” Each came with a cute cartoon illustration, and people were following the suggestions. At crosswalks, people would stand and wait for a light to change while no cars were coming. Nobody was spitting on the pavement. The whole city had become orderly in a way that I registered somewhere between admiration and unease — admiration because the results were real, unease because I could see the cameras on the poles above the signs, and I understood that the suggestions might not be entirely voluntary.

Most of my old haunts were gone, but that was expected. In the five years I had lived here, I had learned not to grow attached to any particular restaurant or bar, because a place could close without warning and reopen as something else within a week. What I had not expected was what had replaced them. When I lived in Shanghai, the foreign concession streets had catered heavily to foreigners and to a local clientele that looked to the West for its references — Yongkang Road, the bar street that exploded the year I arrived and was shut down the year I left, had been ninety percent foreigner-owned, and on summer nights the residents in the apartments above would dump buckets of water onto the crowd to get us to leave.

The places I was walking past now were different. They were Chinese-owned, Chinese-designed, and had a confidence to them that I had not seen before in this city. For as long as I had known Shanghai, the design standard for anything hip had come from somewhere. These places, however, were not running behind anyone. The signage, the interiors, the way they presented themselves felt like they had come from Shanghai and nowhere else, and they were as good as anything I had seen anywhere. Many of them were coffee shops. Shanghai now has more than nine thousand3, more than London or New York or Tokyo, and in 2025 a Shanghai barista won the World Brewers Cup. The city had built an entire coffee culture in the six years I was gone.

I walked south from Jing’an into the former French Concession. Fumin Road was also different — more small shops and eateries than I remembered, a street that had found its next life while I was gone. I stopped in a tea store and spoke to the owner, who had been on this block for twenty-five years. Over a cup of tea, he told me how the street had recently become one of the new destination streets in the city, the way Yongkang Road or Maoming Road had been in their time. He was still selling his teas, but he had expanded his range to include essential oils and other products that catered to the young hip local crowd now coming through. Outside, the London plane trees along the concession streets had been trimmed back for winter, and without their canopy I could see the architecture behind them — the upper stories of the old apartment blocks, the cornices and ironwork. The harsh pruning had bothered me when I first moved here, all those beautiful trees cut to stubs every winter, but over the years I had learned to love the way it worked — how six months of bare branches let you see the buildings, and six months of full canopy hid them again, and the city kept moving between what was visible and what was covered.

Near the corner of Julu Road and Fumin Road, I passed a mural painted across the sealed ground floor of an old building. It depicted a café with a striped awning, an open sign in the window, and a beer menu with prices in American dollars. It was charming. I took a photograph and kept walking.

A few blocks on, I noticed another one. A woman running on a beach with her dog, a cartoon shark in the surf. Then another. I started photographing all of them, because this was the kind of thing I used to send to friends when I lived here — look what they’re doing now — and because I wanted to know who was painting them. There were dozens. They were all different. Some were playful, some were nostalgic, but whoever had done them was seemingly very busy.

I spent most of the morning like this, walking and photographing, not following any route but instead cutting south through on the back streets I used to wander through aimlessly, past my first apartment, through Tianzifang, which was still there but hollowed out in the way that tourist precincts hollow out when the artists leave and the postcards stay. I was not yet paying attention to what was behind the murals. I was walking through a city that had been mine for five years and was not mine anymore, and what I felt was not grief exactly but something closer to the disorientation of seeing someone you once knew well who has become, in the years since, more than you remembered and more than you had become yourself. I did not know what any of it had cost, and I was not sure I was entitled to ask.

Past Xintiandi, still bustling. I walked down toward Dongtai Road, where the old antiques market had been — the lane of stalls where I used to take every guest who visited, the place where you could buy a little red book for ten and a ceramic Mao for fifty. I had known the market was gone before I came back — it had been under construction well before I left — but I wanted to see what had replaced it. The entire block had been rebuilt as the third phase of the Xintiandi development, a commercial project that bore no physical relationship to the neighborhood it had replaced. I stood at the corner and took the same photograph I had taken years ago of the market entrance, aiming the camera at a building I did not recognize.

It was after this that the walk changed.

East of Dongtai Road, I crossed into the area where old shikumen neighborhoods had begun. The Bird and Flower Market used to be here, on South Xizang Road — the place where old men bought songbirds and carried them home under a cloth. The market was gone. The ground-floor entrance on every neighboring building had been bricked shut. Above the sealed doors, brown fabric had been draped over the upper stories, covering the windows and the balconies and whatever remained of the rooms behind them. The murals appeared here, too, in ever-increasing numbers. On Shouning Road, I stopped to photograph a long mural and saw what I had been missing. Every mural I had been photographing since Julu Road, starting with the charming fake cafe hours and miles to the north, was not an announcement of anything about to open. It was a decoration applied to the surface of something that had already closed.

I kept walking. The zone did not end. Block after block, the pattern repeated, and as I moved east, it intensified. Past the sealed shikumen, I came into areas where the next phase was underway. Gray-brick buildings designed to mimic the architecture they had replaced, except without trees, or any of the things that had made the originals worth noticing.

Beyond that, closer to Yuyuan, the buildings stopped altogether. Construction walls lined the roads. The old neighborhood had been demolished entirely, and nothing had gone up in its place. The land was bare. Then, at the edge of this cleared zone, a development backed by the Fosun group — a self-described “modern folklore experience hub” — announced in signage that it would be emblematic of seven hundred years of Shanghai culture. Seven hundred years of culture on land that had been razed within the last five.

Then I came onto Fang Bang Road.

The entire street was white. Both sides, every building, every ground-floor shopfront sealed with roller shutters or cinderblock, every surface painted in the same flat cream, except that here there were no murals. The decoration had run out. What was left was the street itself and a few of us who looked like we had wandered onto a film set after the crew had gone home. On a pole at the corner, surveillance cameras pointed down the empty street.

I had spent a day falling back in love with a city, and I had arrived at this. I walked out of the sealed blocks not entirely sure where I was and came onto the Bund, twenty kilometers from where I had started, and the Pudong skyline was standing there in its late afternoon gold, the way it always has. I had crossed through the center of the city, and the center of the city had seemingly been completely emptied, sealed, and held, and I had no idea what to do with that. I had to meet friends for dinner in an hour.

I took the metro out to meet my oldest friends in the city, a couple I have known since I first moved here. They had moved further out, to a new development, a ground-floor apartment with outdoor space. I was ushered back to a private room, and we sat and ate and caught up on six years. When I asked about the 2022 lockdown, they said they had been thankful to have moved when they did — the ground floor and the room to breathe. They understood how bad it had been for others, they said, but I know they take the long view, and the long view meant not getting stuck on those weeks. What stuck was everything that came after. The lockdown had accelerated the city into full digital life. If you needed a pair of chopsticks, my friend said, they said you could probably have them within the hour. I asked whether the lockdown had changed other things too — the crosswalks, the order I had noticed everywhere. They thought it had, though they could not say exactly how. When I showed them the photographs of the cream-painted buildings in the old city, they did not know what they were looking at. We said goodbye with my promise that I would not let it be anything close to six years again, and I rode the metro back, searching for whatever I could find about what I had walked through earlier that day.

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The next morning, I walked through a different part of the city and found the other version of how the old housing ends. Near the Nanjing West Road metro station, a development had taken a set of shikumen buildings and rebuilt them entirely as a high-end commercial district. This was not the cream-paint limbo but the finished product. The buildings had been lived in until the end, then cleared, then replaced with architecture that looked almost identical to what it had replaced. It was handsome and complete and empty in a way that was different from the emptiness of the sealed lanes to the southeast.

I walked through it. And then, at the southern edge of the development, I turned a corner and found Jing’an Villa.

I had been there before, years ago, and I had taken photographs. The neighborhood was still there. It abutted the new development on one side but had not been consumed by it. People were living in it, and laundry was still hanging on metal poles projecting from the buildings. I stood there for longer than I had stood anywhere else that morning. I thought about the two gregarious Shanghainese grannies I had met here, and I found myself wondering whether ten years on, they were still with us.

This block had survived by what looked to me like an accident of the boundary line or perhaps the strong coordination of the community, and the condition of it suggested the latter. The stonework was clean, and the spaces were swept. Whoever lived here had decided, individually or together, that the place was worth maintaining at a standard that made demolition harder to justify, and they had kept that standard for what appeared to be a long time. And so it continued, in January of 2026, to be a neighborhood, which is a thing that requires no permission to be, and which cannot be reinstated by any amount of money or heritage branding.

The next day, I finally got on a bike. Riding had been one of my favorite things to do in Shanghai. From my first apartment, I used to ride ten miles or more along the Huangpu River in the evenings, breathing air that the pollution index said I should not be breathing, and I did it anyway because the ride was worth it. The northern stretch of the east bank had been my favorite — a waterfront promenade where old shipping cranes stood illuminated against the sky and gravel barges slid past close enough that you could see the captain in the wheelhouse.

I rode south along the river, past the promenade, and full of melancholy. I knew this stretch would have changed, but much of the park was as I remembered it, with new office buildings and apartments now lining the opposite side of the road. Further south, past the park, the roads used to be desolate, and the land flat with gravel and weeds. I used to turn around by a cluster of informal businesses near the Longhua wharf. I did not need to arrive to know it was no longer there.

The West Bund AI district, built on the site of the former Longhua Airport4 — a stretch of riverfront that, when I left, had been coal wharves, a cement factory, fuel tanks, and an old aircraft hangar — was standing and occupied. I rode past a pair of towers that top out at two hundred and two hundred and thirty-five meters, completed at the end of 2021. I rode past the Shanghai Foundation Model Innovation Center, past offices for Microsoft, Huawei, and Alibaba, past other buildings whose tenants I could not identify and whose scale I could not process from the seat of a bike.

At the far end of the district, I passed a new cultural complex, Gate M West Bund Dream Center5, across the street from McDonald’s Hamburger University campus — the company’s management training facility for the Asia-Pacific region — and I stopped, parked my bike, and stood there laughing for about a minute. I had spent five years working inside the system that builds places like this and had sat in the meetings where parcels got assigned their futures. I knew the speed, in fact, the speed was the thing I had understood best about this city. And what was standing on either side of me was not something I had a response for.

This was not the cream-paint city six miles to the north. This was the other one. They were the same government, the same apparatus, the same five-year period. The difference was the money.

I stopped for a coffee at a shop in Gate M and paid with WeChat. From the terrace, I could see gravel barges moving south on the Huangpu, the same kind of barges I used to watch from the promenade, except that across the river from them now stood a Waldorf Astoria, miles from the Bund. The West Bund now has more than seven hundred AI companies in the Xuhui district alone, and is generating close to a hundred billion yuan in annual output6. Xi Jinping had visited the Shanghai Foundation Model Innovation Center here in April of 20257, which, in the context of Chinese politics, meant the district was no longer a local project but a national strategy.

For the years I worked in Shanghai, the line I heard from Western analysts and colleagues was that China’s growth was a real estate story. Property and its downstream industries accounted for more than a quarter of GDP8, and the assumption — stated or not — was that the whole thing was a construction bubble running on land sales and debt. It was partly true. The developers I sat across from were leveraged to the roof, and the land auction system that funded local governments was a machine that needed to keep selling parcels to keep running. But what I was standing in was not real estate. The towers around me housed AI labs and foundation model startups backed by a sixty-billion-yuan national fund and a twenty-two-and-a-half-billion-yuan municipal fund-of-funds.9 The government had not stopped building. It had stopped building one thing and started building another.

The shift was real, but it was not yet large enough to replace what it was meant to succeed. A Rhodium Group analysis published the week after I arrived in Shanghai found that from 2023 to 2025, new industries — AI, robotics, electric vehicles — had added less than one percentage point to China’s economic output, while real estate and other traditional sectors had declined by six10. The old engine had stalled, and the new one was running but was not yet producing comparable power. The sealed lanes to the north were the result of that gap — land cleared under the old model, by developers operating under the old logic, now held by government entities that could not auction the parcels at prices that justified what had been spent to clear them.

In August of 2020, Beijing introduced a set of borrowing constraints on property developers known as the three red lines11 — caps on debt-to-cash, debt-to-equity, and debt-to-asset ratios designed to bleed air out of a bubble the Party had decided was no longer sustainable. By the end of 2021, Evergrande had defaulted on its offshore bonds. It owed more than three hundred billion dollars. It was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in August of 202512. Country Garden followed into default two years later. Over the four years since the three red lines, more than sixty Chinese developers have defaulted on offshore debt or entered restructuring. A recent Caixin Global report found that only fifty-three of the top one hundred developers from 2021 were still in the top one hundred by the end of 2025. The number generating annual sales above a hundred billion yuan had dropped from forty-one to ten13. In August of 2025, the Shanghai municipal government loosened home-buying restrictions for the outer districts14, a move that would have been unthinkable during the years I worked here, when the problem had been keeping people from buying more apartments than they were allowed.

What I had walked through on Fang Bang Road was what was visible of a stall that had multiple causes and no single owner. A February 2026 Atlantic Council analysis found that surviving state-backed developers were being kept afloat with favorable funding and privileged access to undeveloped land in the biggest cities15. But in the old city, the situation was more tangled than that framing suggests. Some parcels had already been sold to developers who could not build profitably — the Fuyu plot near Yuyuan, for instance, had been transferred to a Fosun-backed development company and rebranded as “豫外滩,” but on-site visits as recently as mid-2025 showed no signs of construction. Other parcels were held by government land reserve entities that had not yet auctioned them. The Huangpu district government had designated the Laoximen area as one of Shanghai’s earliest urban renewal units and had approved planning adjustments on paper — including residential towers up to a hundred and fifty meters — but none of it had been built.

The clearances themselves, however, had accelerated during the Zero-COVID period, when compensation settlements with shikumen residents were reportedly easier to reach — the appeal of more space meaning something else entirely to a family that had spent two months locked inside a twelve-square-meter room with a shared kitchen. Between 2020 and mid-2022, Shanghai completed the requisition of 185.7 square kilometers of old housing and relocated 92,000 households in the central districts alone, finishing the thirty-year campaign ahead of schedule16. The residents were moved. And then the property market collapsed, and the developers who were supposed to build the next phase could not make the numbers work, and the government entities holding the unsold parcels could not auction them at prices that justified what had been spent to clear them. So the land sat. The buildings were sealed, and the paint was applied.

A Shanghainese friend in the real estate industry met me for coffee in Jing’an. I asked her what she thought was happening in the old city. She thought about it for a moment. She said she was not sure anyone fully knew — that it was some combination of developers who were stuck and a government that was waiting, and that the waiting could last as long as the market needed it to last, which could be years. All she knew was that a significant part of the city’s fabric was already lost.

Most of the neighborhoods that were sealed and painted are old housing stock — much of it shikumen, though not all. The old city south of Renmin Road is older and denser, a mix of lane housing that predates the shikumen form. Shikumen — the name means "stone gate" — are a building type unique to Shanghai, developed in the 1860s as a hybrid of Western terrace-house construction and Chinese courtyard layout. They became the dominant residential form in the city for the better part of a century. At their peak in the 1930s, shikumen compounds housed roughly sixty percent of Shanghai’s population. More than seventy percent of them have been demolished since the 1990s.17

In the summer of 2019, on my last visit before the gap, I walked through Dongjiadu — a neighborhood just south of Laoximen, down by the river — and watched blocks coming apart. Oceanwide, the developer that held the site, had spent thirteen years completing resident relocations for the first phase alone, and the other phases were still unfinished. But the demolition that was underway was the old kind: loud, chaotic, and porous. Life was still happening around it. Holdouts were holding out, and people were still moving through and still calling it home.

What I walked through in January was not that. The residents were gone. The compensation had been settled during the lockdown years, when the conditions for settling were different from those they had ever been or are likely to be again. What remained was silence, and buildings standing empty above their sealed doors, and no pressure on anyone to say when the next phase would come.

For five years, I helped make these projects possible in cities like Wuhan, Chengdu, and Zhengzhou. The people in those districts were not my neighbors. The lanes we proposed to clear were not lanes I had ever walked down to buy breakfast. I did not think about what happened after the plans were approved, because what happened after was not my department, and because the places were not mine. Walking through the sealed blocks east of Dongtai Road, I understood that it had mattered all along. I had only noticed because this time it was somewhere I loved. And so I started paying attention to the part I had never looked at and what happened to the people who left.

In the early decades of clearance, the government called the process 拆迁 — demolish and relocate — and the term carried the blunt honesty of its two characters. By the 2010s, the official vocabulary had moved to 征收, requisition, a word that reframes the relationship between state and resident: the state is not displacing you, it is collecting what it needs. The compensation formulas changed alongside the language. The old method had calculated payouts partly by counting the number of people in a household — 数人头, “counting heads.” The newer method counted square meters — 数砖头, “counting bricks.” The shift sounds technical, but what it meant in practice was that a family of six in a twelve-square-meter room, who under the old formula might have received compensation reflecting six people’s worth of need, now received compensation reflecting twelve square meters’ worth of value. In a city where shikumen rooms averaged around that size and the families inside them did not, this was a losing proposition.

The families who left those twelve-square-meter rooms were not, in most cases, fighting to stay in twelve-square-meter rooms. The new apartments were larger, and the kitchens were private. The offer of more space was real, and for many of the people who took it, the deal was better than what they had. I knew this. The question I kept returning to was not whether the people were better off. Many of them were. The question was what a city becomes when it clears the only kind of housing it cannot build again, to make way for something it has not yet started, while six miles to the south, the government is building a hundred-billion-yuan AI district. The future has not abandoned Shanghai; it has moved to a different part of the riverbank.

On my last morning, I went out for baozi from the vendor three blocks from my old apartment, the same stall that had been there for all the years I lived in Shanghai and apparently all the years after. I paid with WeChat instead of the coins I used to fish out of my pocket. I took the metro to Hongqiao and boarded a flight.

The city was still itself and was also, in ways that were still being decided, not what it had been. The West Bund was generating its hundred billion yuan. The coffee shops were open and were very good. The creek was clean, and the cameras were on, and the signs in Jing’an were asking, politely, that you engage in courteous traffic behavior.

When I first moved to Shanghai, my apartment was near Fuxing Park, and on mornings when I jogged through it, I would see the bird men arriving. They came with bamboo cages covered in cloth — brown cloth, blue cloth, whatever they had — and they swung the cages like pendulums as they walked, which I later learned forced the birds to grip their perches and kept the feathers tight. The cages stayed covered for the walk and were only uncovered in the park, where the men hung them from the low branches, close enough that the birds could hear one another. The birds started singing. The men sat on stools below and talked or played cards while the birds competed overhead. A bird kept under cloth does not sing.

The Bird and Flower Market on South Xizang Road was where many of those birds were bought. Now, in that area, above the sealed doors, brown fabric has been draped over the upper stories, covering the windows and the balconies and whatever remains of the rooms behind them.

In the weeks after I left, I kept coming back to what I had walked through in Laoximen and Yuyuan. In Fuxing Park, the cloth came off. On South Xizang Road, the cloth is not coming off. The buildings are standing behind it in the same condition they were in when the last families left during the lockdown years, and no one I spoke to could tell me when or whether they would be uncovered. The center of Shanghai is under cloth, and it is not singing. 🌆

If you’ve made it this far, I would love to recommend others whose work on China I greatly enjoy:

Lucy Hornby’s

Tina Kanagaratnam’s

Olivia Plotnick’s

Why Go Looking for Chinese Restaurants?

Wherever Chinese communities have settled, and they have settled nearly everywhere, a restaurant usually follows. This guide is a running attempt to find the best Chinese restaurants in the world and put them in one place.

I’m not Chinese, and I’m not here to referee what counts as authentic. What I can do is point you toward a good meal: the restaurants that serve Chinese food primarily to Chinese communities abroad, sourced through a tangle of reviews, local contacts, and platforms in Chinese or English. I’ve eaten in some of these places myself. Most I’ve tracked down from a desk.

Each restaurant that makes the cut earns a lantern 🏮 and a pin on the map. A lantern means: if you’re in the area, eat here. The selection process is entirely scientific, deeply confidential, and probably accurate. Recommendations are always welcome in the comments.

One rule holds the whole thing together: the menu has to be Chinese at its core. If it’s also serving sushi, bibimbap, or describes itself as ‘fusion’, it’s probably out. The exception is when a place is the only real option for an entire country. In those cases, we grade on a curve.

Some countries can earn dozens of lanterns. Others might just earn one. The overall lantern count doesn’t measure quality as much as it measures depth.

If you want the longer version of why these restaurants matter, I wrote about it in The World’s Most Successful Brand Isn’t a Brand at All.

This guide is organized by continent, with each region published as a separate post and linked through the navigation bar below. One note: China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan are excluded. They’re the roots and already well covered. This list is about everywhere else.

AFRICA | ASIA | EUROPE | OCEANIA | NORTH AMERICA | SOUTH AMERICA

ASIA

Asia is where Chinese food first traveled and put down its deepest roots. From the world’s oldest Chinatown in Manila to hand-pulled noodle shops along the old Silk Road, the continent holds perhaps the widest range of Chinese restaurants outside China itself. In total, 282 restaurants across 44 countries made this guide. Only Yemen and Palestine are not represented. (Again, China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan are excluded)

Top Countries:

🇯🇵 Japan 🏮 x33
Japan’s Chinese food scene operates on two tracks: the historic Chinatowns of Yokohama (est. 1866), Kobe, and Nagasaki, and a newer wave of “gachi chūka,” which are unadapted Chinese restaurants run by and for China’s diaspora. Ikebukuro’s north exit in Tokyo has become a new Chinatown with food courts and an emphasis on Sichuan and Dongbei cuisine, while Nishi-Kawaguchi in Saitama has over 70 Chinese restaurants within walking distance of the station.

Try: 湖南人家 in Yokohama or 滕記鉄鍋炖 in Tokyo

🇮🇩 Indonesia 🏮 x31
Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese community of 8–10 million is the largest in Southeast Asia, and its restaurants are quiet acts of cultural survival —the community endured the 1965 massacre, a 30-year ban on Chinese culture under Suharto, and the 1998 riots. Jakarta’s Glodok neighborhood holds restaurants dating to the 1920s, while Bangka Belitung’s Hakka tin-mining community has been cooking since the 1700s.

Try: Wong Fu Kie or Pantjoran Tea House in Jakarta

🇲🇾 Malaysia 🏮 x24
Chinese Malaysians make up 23% of the population. Penang’s Hokkien hawker scene is globally famous, Ipoh’s bean sprout chicken rivalry between Lou Wong and Ong Kee is a national pastime, and Sarawak holds distinct Foochow, Hakka, and Hainanese food traditions found nowhere else.

Try: Tek Sen in Penang or Little Hainan in Kuching

🇮🇳 India 🏮 x20
India's Chinese community is small and shrinking, but it left an outsized mark. Kolkata holds South Asia's only surviving Chinatown, centered on the Tangra neighborhood, where Hakka families have run restaurants and tanneries side by side for generations. The dawn market at Tiretti Bazaar still sells char siu bao and fish shumai to a dwindling but devoted community. In Mumbai, Ling's Pavilion, run by the Ling family for 75-plus years, is arguably the best Chinese restaurant in the country.

Try: Golden Joy Restaurant in Kolkata or Ling’s Pavilion in Mumbai

🇹🇭 Thailand 🏮 x14
Bangkok's Yaowarat is one of the great Chinatowns of the world, and its oldest kitchens have been cooking over charcoal in the same shophouses for more than a century. Phuket's old town is based on a different story. Hokkien tin miners arrived 500 years ago, married locally, and built a food culture you can't find anywhere else. In Chiang Mai and Hat Yai, the restaurants are smaller and the crowds thinner, but the woks are just as seasoned.

Try: Tang Jai Yoo or Laoteng in Bangkok

🇰🇷 South Korea 🏮 x14
Korea’s Chinese food story begins with Shandong immigrants who arrived after the 1882 opening of Incheon port and invented jajangmyeon, now a national comfort food. Incheon’s Chinatown, the peninsula’s only official one, still has restaurants descended from that founding era. In Seoul, a second layer has emerged: Daerim-dong, where ethnic Korean-Chinese from northeastern China serve lamb skewers, hand-pulled noodles, and malatang in a neighborhood where Mandarin flows as freely as Korean.

Try: Sinseung Banjeom in Incheon

🇻🇳 Vietnam 🏮 x13
Vietnam’s Hoa (ethnic Chinese) community numbers roughly one million, concentrated in Ho Chi Minh City’s Cholon district, a Chinatown founded in 1679 by Ming Dynasty refugees. Cholon’s dim sum parlors and Cantonese roast shops operate at a scale matched by few cities outside China. Hanoi has developed its own Chinese dining scene with Hong Kong–style and northern Chinese restaurants, while Hoi An’s ancient Chinese assembly halls mark centuries of Fujianese and Cantonese trading heritage.

Try: Dim Tu Tac in Ho Chi Minh City or Minh Ky in Hanoi

🇵🇭 Philippines 🏮 x13
The Philippines is home to Binondo, founded in 1594 and widely considered the world’s oldest Chinatown. Nearly all Chinese Filipinos trace their roots to Fujian’s Hokkien community, and their food influence runs deep. Beyond Manila, Davao’s 44-hectare Chinatown with four formal archways and Cebu’s heritage restaurants reflect a Chinese-Filipino community spread across the entire archipelago.

Try: New Toho in Manila

🇸🇬 Singapore 🏮 x10
In a city-state that is 74% ethnically Chinese, the challenge isn't finding Chinese food, it's curating it. Every hawker center, kopitiam, and food court has Chinese dishes worth eating. That abundance is exactly why this is the shortest list relative to the size of the scene: the lanterns here mark restaurants where a specific regional tradition has been preserved with unusual care, not the only places worth visiting.

Try: Chui Huay Lim Teochew Cuisine or Putien

🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates 🏮 x9
Dubai’s International City China Cluster is the Gulf’s largest concentration of Chinese restaurants, built to serve tens of thousands of Chinese traders, construction workers, and entrepreneurs. The scene ranges from hole-in-the-wall Sichuan canteens to Lanzhou hand-pulled noodle shops to high-end hotel restaurants. The UAE’s Chinese community is transient and trade-driven, but the restaurants it supports are as authentic as any in Asia.

Try: Liu Gui Xiang Catering in Dubai

🇰🇭 Cambodia 🏮 x8
Cambodia’s Chinese community has been present since the trading era and survived the Khmer Rouge period, during which ethnic Chinese were disproportionately targeted. Phnom Penh’s Central Market area and riverfront hold Cantonese and Teochew restaurants that serve both the remaining community and a growing number of Chinese investors and tourists arriving through Belt & Road projects.

Try: Emperors of China in Phnom Penh

🇰🇿 Kazakhstan 🏮 x7
Kazakhstan sits on the modern Silk Road, and its Chinese restaurants reflect that geography — Uyghur-influenced noodle houses in Almaty, Dungan (Chinese Muslim) home cooking near the Kyrgyz border, and new mainland Chinese restaurants serving workers on Belt & Road infrastructure projects. Astana and Almaty both have visible Chinese dining scenes shaped by trade, diplomacy, and the ancient routes that first connected these regions.

Try: Lanzhou Noodle in Almaty

The full map. All 282 restaurants, pinned and ready, is below.

Read more

The tire blew on the N2 outside Khayelitsha, and the car pulled hard to the left. I got us onto the shoulder, gravel grinding under what was left of the rubber. My wife and I sat there with the hazards on, both of us knowing exactly where we were.

We had heard the stories before coming to Cape Town. Mitchell’s Plain, Khayelitsha —names that surfaced in every video and article about driving around the Cape. Be careful there and stick to the main roads. Lock your doors. The kind of thing you absorb without questioning and carry with you long before you ever see the place yourself.

I stepped out, told my wife to stay put, and walked around to inspect the damage. The front driver’s-side tire sagged flat against the gravel. I crouched beside it, thinking of my father showing me how to wedge a jack under a frame. I must have been fifteen or sixteen. It was the kind of thing you file away without knowing you’ve kept it. The distance between us had been growing for a long time, and for reasons that don’t belong in this story, except to say that by the time I was crouching on that gravel, the man who taught me to change a tire felt very far away. He didn’t know I was here.

Change it quickly, I told myself. Keep your hands steady and get back on the road.

The gravel shifted under my shoes as I hauled the spare from the trunk, not a full tire, but enough to get us moving again, and rolled it forward. Along the fence that bordered the township, a few people began to gather. I kept my eyes set on the car.

I wedged the flimsy jack under the frame, my father’s old instructions ticking through my head like a checklist. And somewhere underneath that, my mother's voice, telling me to breathe. She had always been the one who steadied a room by being inside it.

That was when a vehicle pulled onto the shoulder behind us. My stomach clenched.

A door opened, and a man stepped out.

He walked toward us quickly, his steps deliberate.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Flat tire,” I managed.

He glanced at the wheel, then at me. “Not the place to get one,” he said evenly.

Without waiting for an answer, he turned back to his car and returned carrying tools that belonged more to a racing pit than a roadside: a heavy jack, a power wrench that rattled like a drill. In a blur, the car was raised, the flat removed, and the spare tightened fast. I barely had time to stow the feeble jack in the trunk before he lowered the car again.

My hands quivered as I thanked him, gripping the rough strength of his palm. From my pocket, I drew the few notes I carried, limp and insufficient, and held them out like an apology.

He shook his head and held up his hands. “Absolutely not.”

Instead, he told us to drive ahead and that he would follow. The next turnoff bent us briefly off the highway before we could double back to the rental car office. My wife checked the rear-view mirror, but his black car held steady behind us, a quiet shadow. Only when we returned to the highway, when he gave a short wave and vanished into traffic, did I notice the words across the back of his car, painted in ribbon-pink script: Guardian Angel.

We drove on in silence. My hands stayed clamped to the wheel.

My wife exhaled, long and deep, as if she had been holding her breath the entire time.

Only the pink script remained, etched sharper than the memory of his face.

My mother had died of breast cancer years before. I still feel her sometimes in ways I can’t explain and don’t need to. Guardian Angel is a South African roadside assistance service for women. I know that now. The man who stopped was not on a call. He saw us on the shoulder and he pulled over. The pink script on the back of his car was a company name and nothing more.

But my mother was dead, and the words were pink, and I am telling you I felt something.

Maybe that is all a story like this can honestly say. I knew the reputation of those areas long before we ever drove through them, and none of it prepared me for what actually happened, which was that a stranger changed my tire, refused my money, followed us until we felt safe, and drove away. 🚙

A different version of this story was recently published in the Kindness of Strangers by Bradt Guides.

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Nepal’s climbing season is underway. Thousands of trekkers are arriving or finalizing plans to walk the Annapurna Circuit, reach Everest Base Camp, or attempt one of the dozens of high-altitude routes that make Nepal one of the best adventure tourism destinations on Earth.

On March 12, Nepali authorities filed organized crime and fraud charges against 32 individuals in Kathmandu District Court. The accused include owners of trekking agencies, helicopter operators, hospital executives, and medical staff. Nine have been arrested. Twenty-three are still at large. The investigation, documented in detail by the Kathmandu Post, describes a fraud network that siphoned at least $19.7 million from international travel insurers between 2022 and 2025 (and that is only the period they were able to trace).

The mechanics of the scam exploit the infrastructure that is used to keep trekkers alive. At high altitude, mild symptoms of altitude sickness are common. Blood oxygen drops, and headaches and tingling develop. In most cases, rest or a gradual descent is all that is needed. But according to the Kathmandu Post’s reporting, guides and hotel staff had been trained to terrify trekkers at precisely this moment, telling them they were at risk of dying, that only immediate helicopter evacuation could save them. In some cases, investigators found that medication was deliberately administered to induce the very symptoms that would justify a rescue call. In at least one documented case, baking powder was mixed into food to make tourists physically ill.

Once a trekker was panicked or incapacitated, the money side kicked in. Single helicopters carried multiple passengers, but separate full-price invoices were submitted to each passenger’s insurer as if each had a dedicated flight. Hospitals created fake admission records using the digital signatures of doctors who had no knowledge that their credentials were being used. According to CCTV footage obtained by investigators, some tourists listed as receiving treatment were filmed drinking beer in the hospital cafeteria. The whole operation ran on a commission structure in which hospitals, helicopter companies, trekking agencies, and guides each took a cut of the insurance payout.

None of this is, sadly, new. The Kathmandu Post first reported on the fake rescue industry in 2018. The government produced a 700-page report documenting the fraud. It recommended oversight, accountability, and enforcement. None of it happened. The companies named in that report faced no consequences, and the scam, according to the CIB, grew.

The investigation was reported in detail by Nepali media last week. It is now hitting international outlets on the front end of peak trekking season. The timing could not be worse. Permits are sold, flights are booked, and the headlines landing in front of those travelers are: the people who were supposed to keep you safe were poisoning you for insurance money.

That is devastating for Nepal. Not for the 32 people charged (they will face whatever the courts decide). It is devastating for the thousands of trekking operators, guides, pilots, and mountain professionals who had nothing to do with any of this and now operate under the same cloud. Nepal’s adventure tourism industry employs hundreds of thousands of people. The vast majority of them do difficult, dangerous, legitimate work in terrain where things go wrong fast and the margin for error is small.

What the fraud network did was exploit that system, using its urgency, remoteness, and the near-impossibility of a London or Sydney-based insurer verifying what happened at 5,000 meters in a Himalayan valley. This has huge ripple effects. Several major international insurers have already stopped selling coverage for tourists trekking in Nepal entirely. That decision did not distinguish between the operators running the scam and the ones who never touched it. And if you cannot get insurance for a trek in Nepal, you do not go to Nepal.

The charges filed this month are the first real legal consequence the fraud has faced. A new government was sworn in last week. Whether any of it produces change depends on whether Nepal decides that protecting its trekking industry is worth more than protecting the people who were strip-mining it. 🏔️

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Somewhere on Substack right now, someone is publishing chapter twenty of a serialized novel. Someone else is on recipe number fifty. There are travel writers sharing photo essays and guides from interesting places around the world (hi). There are personal essayists with two years of writing that reads just as well today as the day they published it. The range of what's being built here is hard to overstate, and most of it is happening one person at a time. But once you've built that archive, how do you easily show it off?

The only tool built for this costs $999 a month (really), and it still has to be updated manually. Fine if you’re a major publication with a social media staff. The rest of us get a link-in-bio page, an ugly stack of text links that all look the same and say nothing about what you actually do. I wanted something better. So I built it.

It's called stack.pub — your publication, in a visual stack. Point it at your newsletter, and it builds a clean photo grid of everything you've published there. The design is intentional, setup takes under two minutes, and once it’s live, it just works. Publish a new story and your grid updates automatically. That’s it.

Turns out a clean visual grid of your writing is useful everywhere: social media bio link, portfolio, media kit, email signature —and every click goes straight back to your publication.

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Here’s mine: stack.pub/scottmonaco

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London rewards the people who show up without an agenda.

The sights are fine. I could spend a whole day at the Tate Modern. I love Wimbledon (especially the queue). The Indian food alone is worth the flight. However, when I think about London or when I read about London, I think about walking. Not to anywhere specific. And when I’m not walking, I’m in a bookshop, Daunt Books, Foyles, Hatchards, and the many small indie stores scattered through neighborhoods that don't make it onto most itineraries. You could build an entire trip around them.

What both reading about and walking around London give you is a deeper understanding of how layered the city really is. Roman, medieval, imperial, some bombed or burned out, most rebuilt. The Windrush arrivals, who came when the city needed them and were never properly thanked. Two thousand years of people arriving, staying, and changing what London means. The skyline that still doesn’t know what it wants to be.

These ten books won’t give you a tidy London. But they're a good place to start digging.

Non-Fiction

London: The Biography – Peter Ackroyd The definitive portrait of the city told not as history but as an organism. Ackroyd treats London like a character with its own obsessions and appetites. It’s enormous book.

Down and Out in Paris and London – George Orwell Broke, hungry, and working dishwasher jobs in the East End, the book is more furious, funny, and more relevant than it should be. The London half of this book is one of the sharpest pieces of social observation written about the city.

Londoners – Craig Taylor An oral history built entirely from voices (cab drivers, shop owners, migrants, city workers, and night-shift nurses). Taylor disappears and lets the city speak for itself. The result is possibly the most human book on this list, and probably the most London.

London and the 17th Century – Margarette Lincoln The century that remade the city: plague, fire, revolution, and the slow emergence of modern London from the wreckage. Lincoln is a rigorous historian who never lets the drama get away from her. Excellent context for everything else on this list.

Empireland – Not strictly a London book, but essential for understanding what London actually is. Sanghera traces the empire’s long shadow on British identity with a precision that is difficult to argue with and difficult to put down.

Fiction

NW – Zadie Smith Two women who grew up together on a council estate in Willesden. One gets out, one doesn’t, and Smith is ruthless about what that costs both of them. The most contemporary London book on this list.

The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon Selvon’s Windrush-era novel follows Caribbean migrants navigating a city that wanted their labor and not much else. The prose, a creolized English that shouldn’t work and absolutely does, captures longing, humor, and displacement in equal measure.

Small Island – Andrea Levy Four voices, two continents, one city pulling them all toward each other. Set across wartime Jamaica and postwar London, Levy’s novel is about who belongs and who gets to decide. One of the great British novels of the past twenty-five years.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle Baker Street and fog rolling off the Thames. This is the London that everybody knows, and you’ll find pieces of it still intact if you know where to look.

Incendiary – Chris Cleave A letter from a London woman to Osama bin Laden, written in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. Cleave turns grief into something almost unbearable, and the city is every bit as much the subject as the narrator.

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Enjoyed this? Here are more reading lists by region:

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Global:

It’s tough keeping an automatic hand dryer running with your head. There I was in the bathroom of the Rønne ferry terminal, bent under the Dan Dryer, its little Viking mascot looking like it was standing on my shoulder. As the bathroom door opened, I turned to see who was coming in and caught my head on the underside. The man appeared unbothered by the soaking wet figure crouched at waist height, offered only a frown, and turned toward the urinals. I returned my focus and continued to tousle my hair.

Earlier that morning, at dawn, I had left my apartment, taken an hour-long train to Ystad on the Southern coast of Sweden, and caught the ferry to Bornholm. The crossing takes around an hour and a half. I drank a coffee and watched the sun reflect on the Baltic Sea.

Bornholm took its time to appear on the horizon. The island is Danish but sits closer to Sweden, Poland, and Germany than to Copenhagen, which has historically made it either strategically important or inconveniently exposed, depending on the century. The Soviets briefly occupied it at the end of the Second World War after the German garrison surrendered, shelling Rønne before withdrawing and handing it back. Since then, Bornholm has settled into a more agreeable role — the Danes call it the Sunshine Island as it gets more sun than anywhere else in the country, and generations of Danish families have been making the crossing every summer to cycle its coastline, eat smoked herring, and buy ceramics. It is not an island that does anything quickly.

I had not planned to take it slowly.

Upon disembarking, I walked into town and found a bicycle rental shop. The man behind the counter looked up when I came in.

“Bike or e-bike?”

I had never ridden an e-bike before. The island was roughly 80 miles around, and I was planning to ride the whole thing in a day. I had completed the annual Seattle to Portland ride of 206 miles in 11.5 hours, so the distance or time didn’t concern me. My ego was, admittedly, in excellent shape. I was carrying a backpack with a camera, and parts of the coastal route reportedly turned to gravel. The choice of an e-bike seemed, if anything, like a way to make it more enjoyable.

He pointed at a row of them along the wall and handed me a lock and a 15-foot charging cable for the battery, which took up the remaining space in my backpack. No helmet was offered. This is Denmark.

I told him I was planning to circle the island.

He looked at me for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “It’s possible.” The shop closed at six, he added, but if I was back later, I could just lock the bike outside, and he’d sort it in the morning.

I noted the time. I had a ferry to catch. Six it was.

I set off north through the forest, the smell of pine cutting through the morning air — the kind of fresh, quiet morning that makes you feel lighter. The trees were dense on both sides of the path. I tried out the bell with some enthusiasm, passing an elderly couple, who did not appear to share it.

Then the forest opened, and the sea was there on my left, running along the western coast as far as I could see. Other cyclists passed me going the other direction, panniers strapped to their rear wheels, clearly on a different, more leisurely schedule than mine.

Before long, I was met by several low whitewashed buildings set close to the water, each with a pair of distinctive chimneys that flared wide at the base. I stopped to look. A sign confirmed what the smell had already suggested: smokehouses. Bornholm has been smoking herring over alder wood for centuries, and these buildings, with their odd twin chimneys designed to draw the smoke slowly through the fish, are scattered along the coast. I noted one for lunch and kept moving.

The e-bike seemed heavier than anything I’d ridden before, but on the flat coastal path the ‘light assist’ setting made up for it. I was moving fast along a stretch of coast so unreasonably pleasant that I briefly considered whether property on Bornholm was within my budget. It was not a serious thought. Then the hills arrived, earlier than the map had suggested, and more of them. A few additional clicks of the assist and I was over them. At the top of one, I was met by Hammershus, the largest medieval fortification in Northern Europe by footprint, its towers and walls sitting on a promontory above the sea. The Danes dismantled much of it in the 1700s and probably spent the following two centuries regretting it. I left the bike at the base, walked up, took in the view, and got back on. I was making good time.

The northern coast ran through Sandvig, Tejn, and a string of villages that seemed to be doing fine without much outside attention. Mini golf courses appeared with surprising regularity — modest setups near the water, with a mix of young and old playing them, everyone taking their shot with complete seriousness.

As I rode, I kept myself busy taking in all the textures of the place — the sheep grazing, the Danish flags adorning every pole, and the ceramics studios. The most common and the most visually interesting were the gårdbutikker. This translates to farm shop in English, though these were simpler than that: wooden boxes or small shelves set at the roadside outside homes with jars of honey, jam, eggs, vegetables, a handwritten price list, and a cash box for the money. No attendant or camera, just the assumption that you would pay. I watched cars and bikes stop regularly. This appeared to be completely normal.

Gudhjem was the last town on the coast before I had wanted to turn inland. I stopped at a bakery and ordered a pastry. The plan from here was to head to Østerlars — the most intact of Bornholm’s four round churches, built in the twelfth century. Østerlars is the largest and the one everyone comes to see.

The battery indicator was lower than it should have been for where I was on the route – a heavy bike over surprisingly hilly terrain adds up. I was roughly halfway around and told myself I could ration it.

I looked at my phone. The 20% chance of rain I had checked that morning was now 100%, the radar showing a solid mass of green and yellow moving in from the west, forecast to run until evening.

It was still sunny, however, the vimpels were snapping in a wind that hadn’t been there an hour ago. I finished the pastry and got moving.

The road up to Østerlars was steep enough into a headwind that I abandoned any thought of rationing and put the assist on full. By the time I had arrived, the battery was dead. I stopped at the café across the road, wielding the 15-foot extension cord and a battery the size of a cinderblock, and asked if I could charge somewhere. The staff plugged it in by the refrigerator.

When I came back from the church thirty minutes later, the battery indicator had not moved. Outside, through the café window, a wall of dark clouds was coming in off the Baltic.

I revised my plan. Instead of finishing the coast, I would cut directly through the interior — 14 miles back to Rønne, as straight as possible with minimal exposure. Perhaps I could make it back while it was still drizzling. This was optimistic.

An e-bike with a dead battery is not a regular bike. It is a regular bike that is significantly heavier than a regular bike, and about five minutes into the first climb I was hit by wind and a torrential downpour that did not let up. The interior was mostly farmland, flat and open, no shelter from anything. There was nothing to look at and nothing to stop for. I put my head down and rode. The temperature kept dropping. The most direct route ran along the shoulder of the main road, and as cars passed, I thought about the occupants, warm and dry inside. Perhaps eating smoked fish on a smørrebrød.

I made it back to Rønne with time to spare. The man at the rental shop looked up as I came through the door, dripping onto his floor. He had been closing up early –the rain had seen to that.

“You’re back.”

When asked, I told him I’d enjoyed it until Østerlars before the battery died and the rain came. He seemed mildly impressed that I’d gotten that far. I handed back the extension cord, and he locked up the remaining bikes.

The ferry terminal was a ten-minute walk in the driving rain. I found the bathroom, located the Dan Dryer, and got to work. By the time the man walked in and offered his frown, I had made meaningful progress. The ferry back to Ystad was on time. The train from Ystad ran without incident. I got home, stood under a hot shower for longer than necessary, and collapsed on the sofa.

Outside, right on schedule, the rain stopped. 🚴‍♂️

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The top-selling trip of 2026 for EF Ultimate Break —a company that designs travel for 18 to 35-year-olds— is a cruise through Croatia where nobody drinks. The travel industry, it turns out, has just discovered something I have been doing since November 2018, and that many people have been doing far longer, for reasons that have nothing to do with wellness trends.

The first time I traveled sober was to Japan. I had been before, multiple times, and I knew what I was walking into, although I am not sure that made it less difficult. Anthony Bourdain had made a generation of travelers believe that the izakaya at midnight or connecting over the local libations was the whole point. That wasn’t just how Bourdain traveled. It was how I traveled. Late nights in low-lit places, cold Asahi and karaoke with people I had just met, and drinking plum wine in hostels. I wasn’t sure what Japan looked like without that, or whether it would still feel like Japan at all.

It was, despite being less than a month in and fighting the urge to just do it all again because I was on vacation, one of the better trips I'd taken there. What I thought I was losing turned out to be a much smaller part of the experience than I had given it credit for. Instead, I was up before the city, running the Imperial Palace gardens in the November cold, and found myself alone at a nearby temple in my running clothes because no one else was around. That version of Japan had always existed. I had just never been awake for it.

In the years following, I began noticing a broader shift around the world, with the 0.0% section at supermarkets expanding and non-alcoholic options appearing on restaurant menus of various price points. It felt anecdotal at the time, just the kind of thing you notice more once it applies to you.

It turned out not to be anecdotal. By 2025, just 54% of U.S. adults reported drinking alcohol —the lowest figure in nearly 90 years of Gallup polling.

Among Gen Z adults, only 50% say they drink, down nine points in two years, and 83% of Gen Z travelers now say they prefer to stay sober while traveling. But the trend runs wider than one generation, with 57% of Millennials and 49% of Gen X also planning to drink less this year in a 2025 survey.

The shift is not limited to the United States. Hilton’s 2025 Trends report found that one in four travelers globally reduced or eliminated alcohol in 2024, with notable declines in China (33%), Mexico (32%), and Australia (29%). The travel industry has only recently looked up and noticed, and what it saw was not a youth trend but a revenue opportunity it had been walking past for years. I had seen this firsthand, just a few months earlier.

When I checked into a hotel in Greece, a luxury stay, not the kind of trip I can usually afford to take, I was called after arriving at my room and asked if they could bring me a complimentary bottle of chilled wine. I thanked them but told them I didn’t drink. They didn’t miss a beat. Did I want the non-alcoholic version instead? They had one ready and from another local winery. Seven years earlier, that question would not have existed. The hotel had anticipated it, stocked for it, and trained its staff to offer it without making it into something. That is not a small thing.

The industry has since then seemingly only doubled down. Hotels are redesigning their bars as communal spaces rather than alcohol-forward venues, cruise lines are launching alcohol-free packages, and hospitality executives are giving interviews about how they are reimagining leisure without alcohol at the center of it. An $18 mocktail gives me pause, but the direction is right.

Until recently, the only sober traveler the industry had ever built anything for was the wellness guest who was looking for a spa retreat, juice cleanse, or the kind of stay that involves herbal tea and guided meditation before breakfast.

That’s one version of it, sure.

Here is mine: I am not hungover. I was not hungover yesterday. I will not be hungover tomorrow. This has been true for over seven years, on solo trips and press trips, trips with my wife, and raucous dinners with friends new and old, where I was sometimes the only person at the table not drinking. It is not a wellness trip. It didn’t start as one either. It is just how I live now, and I enjoy travel more because of it.

If you watch any of Bourdain’s shows, he was selling presence the whole time. All of it was about letting a place in, about not holding yourself apart from it. The alcohol was just always in the frame; in fact, it was so omnipresent that it started to look like an essential element of the experience. What I didn’t understand until I stopped drinking was how little it had to do with any of it. For Bourdain, it was clearly more complicated than that. I understand that more than I probably let on here. But the presence was always the thing, with or without a drink in your hand.

What the industry has started to figure out —slowly at first, and now in a rush— is that a meaningful share of travelers were always moving through the world this way, or wanted to. When I mentioned the Croatia cruise to people, the most common response was: why aren’t there more of those?

The demand was never really new. Operators built and pushed the same product for decades because the margins made sense, and nobody pushed back loudly enough. Now they’re finding that the margins still work, and a meaningful share of their guests will have a better trip because of it.

A while back, wandering through London, I walked past a refrigerated case and stopped. Asahi 0.0. My izakaya beer of choice. I grabbed a four-pack. It was going to be a wild night. 🍻

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