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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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?

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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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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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The forecast said fifty degrees and sunny, which in March means something different than it does in October. In October, fifty degrees is a warning. In March, it is a reason to leave the house.

I had been inside for a long time. Not unusually long, just the normal amount of time that accumulates between November and one afternoon when the light comes through the window at a different angle, and you think, I should go outside.

Others had the same thought, apparently, and at roughly the same time.

The benches filled first. Then the grass. Some are prepared and brought blankets. Some sit directly on the ground, which is freshly littered with goose poop. Nearby, a father is attempting to erect a small tent for reasons that are not clear. His children are running circles around him as the rods collapse. Nobody is helping.

I find a bench near the tree line and sit down. I intend to be present in the way you are present on the first nice day, which is different from other days.

A jogger passes on the path, a glowing rectangle held up, mid-conversation, the person on the other end bouncing with every stride. I watch him go and instinctively turn back to the others. The blanket people, the ground people, they are all now clutching their own little glowing rectangles. Nature, it turns out, is less interesting than the people ignoring it.

Near the street, a small kiosk has opened for the first time since October, which everyone treats as a second confirmation that winter is over. There is a line. People are getting ice cream, although it is fifty degrees, which is exactly the kind of defiant optimism that only happens in March. A woman receives her cone, holds it out in front of her, and takes a photo of it before doing anything else. She waited 5 months for this cone. The cone can wait a little longer.

Across the path, a couple sits together on a bench. They arrived together, which I know because I watched them arrive. They have not spoken since sitting down. He is looking at his rectangle with the focused quiet of someone doing important work. She is holding an open book in one hand. She is still on the same page. Her rectangle is in the other hand, which answers that. Every so often, one of them shifts slightly, angling their rectangle away from the sun.

Somewhere to my left, a Bluetooth speaker announces itself with a sound like a small foghorn, and then music starts. Not quietly. The man who owns it settles back with the satisfaction of someone who has improved the situation. The birds, for what it’s worth, were already playing something. Nobody had asked for it, but it was there.

Near the playground, a father is filming his daughter on the slide. She goes down. He films it. She climbs back up the ladder, which is the part that takes the longest, and he films that too. She goes down again. He films it. This has been going on for some time. She looks over often to confirm he is still watching or filming. He gives her a thumbs-up without lowering the rectangle.

On a blanket nearby, a child has been given a larger glowing rectangle in a thick rubber case. The case is the kind designed for a child who might decide at any moment that they are done with it and want to spike it into the ground like a football. The child is sitting completely still, which is not how children sit. Around him, other children are performing physical feats of varying recklessness, and he is aware of none of it. His parents sit nearby with their own rectangles and the expressions of people who have made a decision and would prefer not to revisit it unless they have to. They are not at the playground to play.

My attention is drawn to a woman who is not dressed like the rest of us. Most of us came out dressed similarly to how we have been hibernating. She is dressed like a peacock. She holds her glowing rectangle out, checks it, adjusts her chin, checks it again. She takes several photos, reviews them, and takes several more. I have to give it to her, that patch of sun is very good. She is getting everything she can out of it.

Two teenagers nearby are filming something together, stopping, watching it back, filming it again. One of them says something and they both laugh and film it a third time. Whatever they are making, it requires more takes than they expected. Either way, the nature surrounding us is bound to look excellent through that rectangle.

Humans are not the only ones in the park today; the pigeons are here too and have gathered nearby. The pigeons are fine. The pigeons have always been fine. The pigeons are not interested in glowing rectangles. They are eating from the garbage.

At the far end of the path, an older woman is eating a sandwich and watching people pass. She has been doing this for twenty minutes with the calm focus of someone who finds this sufficient. She seems, actually, better than fine.

I look down and realize I am already holding my rectangle. I don’t remember taking it out, and it’s already glowing.

Someone has posted a video from last night’s concert, vertical, thirty seconds, the audio is some sort of incomprehensible distortion. I watch two seconds of it. Scroll. A child’s school play. Scroll. A meal, photographed from above before anyone ate it, the food already getting cold, so that I could see it for this one second. Scroll.

The light is still good. The park is full. Somewhere behind me, a bird is doing something worth looking up for.

I keep scrolling. 🌷

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Under the bridge below, a street performer is playing the guitar and singing.

Passing Through is a series of fixed, first-person observations made while moving through places. I stop, the camera runs, and then I move on. Subscribe to Nothing to Declare to see how other places move when you’re not there.

I once recommended a dinner spot in Istanbul to a couple planning their honeymoon. I’d had an excellent experience —one I thought would fit a special occasion. I knew them very well, and I was sure both the food and the view would impress them. After they returned, I asked how it was. “It was good,” the husband said, followed by a quick explanation: it had been near the end of the trip, they were exhausted, and one of them wasn’t feeling well.

Nothing about the restaurant had fundamentally changed. What changed was them.

That’s the part most travel advice doesn’t account for. By the time advice is written or shared, the story is already complete. The version of the traveler who experienced it —well-rested or burned out, curious or overwhelmed, early in the trip or near the end— has been flattened into a clean recommendation. It reads as if the outcome is repeatable. It isn’t.

Ash Bhardwaj offers a useful frame in Why We Travel: there are three distinct types, explorers, travelers, and tourists1, each with its own relationship to a place. He notes these are not fixed identities, but positions we move between. But travel advice always comes from inside one of them. The essay, reel, vlog, or listicle was created in a specific mode under a specific set of conditions. Each assumes you’re arriving in the same one. You rarely are.

Those conditions follow a hierarchy, whether acknowledged or not.

First is time. A three-day trip and a three-month stay are not variations of the same experience; they are different systems entirely. Advice built on open-ended time collapses under constraint. What reads as “wander and see what you find” becomes indecision when the clock is visible. The blogger who spent a month getting lost in a city wrote something very different from what you need with four days and a flight on Sunday.

Second is energy. It's one of the least discussed constraints in travel, and one of the most consequential. Travel advice assumes you arrive the way you felt when you were planning. But the first days of a trip have their own tax: jetlag, unfamiliar beds, and the physical reality of moving through a new place on foot for hours when your body might not be used to doing so at home. The version of you the advice was written for may not show up until day three, if at all. That fatigue accumulates quietly, sometimes sickness arises, and by the end of a trip, it has usually become something else entirely. The Istanbul dinner wasn’t wrong. It just missed on the version of the couple who were sitting there that night.

Third is access —and arguably the least discussed of all, because those who have it rarely notice they do. Language, familiarity, and logistical confidence shape what feels possible in ways advice seldom acknowledges. The same neighborhood that feels alive and navigable to someone with even basic language skills can feel closed off to someone without them — not because anything is hidden, but because the city simply wasn't written for them.

Fourth is personality. Some travelers want friction, others want flow. A full day of back-to-back museums reads as richness to one person and overstimulation to another. Advice tends to assume one default mode, usually high-energy and high-curiosity, and quietly excludes the rest.

The order matters. You can have the right personality for an experience, the right access, the right energy — and none of it matters if you don't have the time.

These variables are not side notes. They determine whether a recommendation works at all. And yet most advice arrives stripped of them, presented as if it exists outside the conditions that produced it.

We keep reaching for it anyway. We don’t just consume travel advice for information —we consume it aspirationally. We select voices that reflect the traveler we want to be, someone who moves through a place with confidence and curiosity, and sees exactly what we too would like to. The mismatch is built in at the planning stage, not the destination.

The person who planned the trip is not the one who takes it.

I’ve felt this directly. Halfway through a trip, looking at everything still on my list, I've recognized that the version of me who built that itinerary had been thinking like a traveler. What I actually needed by then was to operate like a tourist: follow the signs, take the obvious route, and let someone else do the thinking. Not as a failure of ambition. Just as an honest read of what I had left to give. The advice was fine. The plan was fine. I just wasn't the person it was written for anymore.

That’s where advice starts to fail —not because it’s incorrect, but because it gets treated as fixed. It was produced under specific conditions: a particular mode, amount of time, and degree of familiarity. You don’t think: the context was misaligned. You think: I recommended the wrong restaurant. You remember it as a disappointment, without ever tracing it back to the right cause.

The restaurant in Istanbul didn’t fail. The recommendation didn’t fail. The conditions changed.

That’s the only constant.

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“Do you know when we will return?” I asked.

The man at the dive shop didn’t look up right away. He finished stacking a few papers, aligned them carefully, then glanced at me.

“Why?” he said. “Do you have other plans?”

“Well, no,” I said.

He nodded once, as if that settled it, and went back to what he was doing. The conversation was over.

“See you tomorrow,” I added, though it felt unnecessary.

I was in Labuan Bajo, on the western edge of Flores, a place that until recently had been little more than a fishing town at the end of the road. When we arrived in 2015, it had a population of around 6,000 people. The airport had just partially opened, a low terminal that felt less like infrastructure and more like a signal that something was about to happen here.

My wife and I had been there long enough to know the man at the shop wasn’t dismissive. The question just didn’t fit the place. Boats left when they were ready; things took as long as they took.

“So how does it feel,” my wife said as we walked back, “to be the Diva of Labuan Bajo?”

I hadn’t meant it that way. I was trying to get a sense of when I might be back, for her sake —she’d be staying in town while I headed out diving in the marine park. But here, the question didn’t land. The nickname stuck.

We had come for Komodo National Park, a stretch of islands and water set between Sumbawa and Flores. Established in 1980, it was created to protect the Komodo dragon. It was later designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its scope expanded to include the surrounding marine environment.

None of that was visible from town. Labuan Bajo faced west, toward open water, its harbor lined with wooden fishing boats, small cargo vessels, and the occasional liveaboard preparing to leave. The islands sat low on the horizon, their outlines fading in and out with the light.

Getting to them required time. Two to four hours by boat, depending on conditions. A few days earlier, we had walked down to the harbor before the heat settled in. The boats were already there, paint worn from the sun and salt. Our driver waved us over as his wife loaded a cooler of homemade food onto the boat.

The ride out took a few hours. The islands appeared slowly, dry and uneven. There was no clear boundary where the park began. Only the absence of fishing boats and a brief comment from the guide marked the change.

When we reached Komodo Island, the largest of the three major islands, the boat idled near a wooden dock. A guide met us there holding a long wooden stick, forked at the end. Only after we stepped onto land, and the boat pulled away, did he say it was for protection.

I hadn’t told my wife what this would be like. I had said we were going to see the Komodo dragons. I think she pictured something contained: a path, a railing, a safe distance.

She looked at me, then at the stick.

I nodded.

This was our protection.

Komodo dragons can grow over ten feet long (3 meters) and weigh more than 150 pounds (70 kg). The guide advised us against getting bitten; their bite delivers venom that prevents blood clotting and can send a victim into shock. It wouldn’t be handled there. It would mean a long boat ride back, then an air evacuation to the nearest hospital that could treat it.

We followed the guide inland, the three of us moving first across bare ground with a scattering of trees.

It didn’t take long to see one.

A dragon lay in the shade, its body stretched along the ground. It was larger than I expected, low to the ground, and heavy. It didn’t move much when we approached. It lumbered forward slightly, tongue flicking, then settled again. We stood there for a moment, close enough to understand its size. The guide squatted down and held his stick in front of him, watching like a golfer lining up a putt. The guide asked my wife if she wanted to turn her back to it so he could take a picture.

We kept walking.

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At one point, the guide mentioned that you always bring the stick even for something as simple as going to the bathroom. Rangers sleep on the island, he said, and they don’t go anywhere without it. Once, he’d opened the outhouse by the docks and found a dragon inside.

As we moved farther inland, the ground gave way to open grassland. My wife stayed between me and the guide and our sticks. At one point, when the guide had drifted a few steps ahead, she looked at me and asked what exactly I thought I was going to do with it if a dragon started to rush.

I told her I wasn’t sure, but holding it, in a landscape like this, made me feel like Gandalf. Perhaps, then, I could plant it in the ground and yell, “You shall not pass!”

She didn’t find that reassuring.

The path narrowed as we continued, cutting through dry grass that brushed against our legs. No other groups, no voices carrying across the hills. Only the sound of our steps and the wind moving through the brush.

The guide stopped once and pointed ahead. We saw Timor deer moving through the grass below us, their heads lifting as they moved. Farther off, a water buffalo stood under a tree. The guide said the dragons take deer most often, but will also hunt wild boar and scavenge when they can.

When we reached higher ground, the view opened out over the island. Dry hills, pale grass, the sea in the distance. When I looked down, all I could see were the boats anchored off the coast—the only sign of where we had come from, and where we would return. The dragons trace back millions of years, long before anything like those boats existed here.

We didn’t see many others. Maybe a few people near the dock, but once we started walking, it was empty again. There was no schedule to the visit, just the hiking route we chose and the hours it took to complete it. You could not stay on the island. There were no accommodations, only liveaboards anchored offshore and smaller boats returning to Labuan Bajo.

By the time we returned to the boat, nothing had happened in the way you expect things to happen. No sudden movement or single moment to isolate, but it didn’t feel like anything was missing.

At the time, fewer than 90,000 people visited each year. It was not untouched, but it was not built for volume. Getting there still required multiple flights, then the boat. The airport in Labuan Bajo had only just opened. Most people passed through on longer liveaboard itineraries rather than cycling in and out on fixed itineraries. The only real constraint was the boat.

Visitor numbers have climbed past 300,000 annually. Labuan Bajo has grown with it, from a fishing town into a staging point, with direct flights from Bali and Jakarta and boats leaving on set routes into the park. In response, Indonesia is moving to limit access. A daily cap of 1,000 visitors is set to take effect in April 2026, with entry booked in advance and divided into time slots.

What we experienced had no visible edges. The newer system, by definition, does.

The next morning, I went down to the harbor and saw the same man from the dive shop. I threw my bag on the boat, and we left without discussing when we would be back.

There were only a handful of us: the man from the shop, a driver, a deckhand acting as spotter, and four guests. Komodo is considered an advanced diving destination. Not because of depth, but because of its strong, shifting currents and fast-moving drift dives. It was exactly why I wanted to be there. Three months earlier, my Master Scuba Diver card had arrived in the mail, and this was the first place I had come where it felt like I might be able to put the advanced skills to use.

We slid back toward the park, my focus shifting from the islands to the water between them. The chain sits at a junction where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, forcing tidal flow through the narrow channels between Komodo, Rinca, and Padar. That exchange pulls nutrients up from depth, feeding the reefs and concentrating marine life. It also means the water beneath the surface is rarely still.

Our first site was near Mawan, where manta rays gather.

We entered along a sloping reef. The current was already running.

You don’t swim against it. You check your depth, your air, and your position relative to the others. Then you let it carry you.

Manta rays moved through in slow arcs, circling back through the same stretch of water. Five passed through while we were there. They held themselves in place against the flow in a way we couldn’t. Cleaner fish worked along their undersides as they passed.

We stayed low and slid by.

The next dive dropped us into a channel off Tatawa Besar, where the current accelerates as it is forced between islands. You felt it immediately. We held close to the reef at the start, then let go at the edge and were flung into the open water as if from a cannon.

Sharks worked the current while schools of fish faced into it and held position. The same forces that shaped the islands above were moving here too, just compressed and faster. Komodo dragons are good swimmers and can swim between these islands, but they don’t hunt in the water, so in that regard, I was happy not to have to worry about carrying a forked stick.

There were more dives after that, all of them shaped by the same conditions.

As we rested on the boat, I looked over at the man from the dive shop, who had become my dive partner for the trip. He gave no indication of when we would be back.

I kept trying to pin down when things would start, when they would end, and how long anything would take.

It never quite worked.

The boats left when they were ready. The hikes on the islands ended when they ended. Underwater, you surfaced where the current took you.

Since then, more people have come, and Labuan Bajo has grown. Flights are easier. A daily cap is coming with bookings and time slots.

Inside, our schedules don’t apply.

The dragons still wait. The current still runs.

On our last evening back in Labuan Bajo, I passed the dive shop again. The same man was there.

He looked up and nodded.

I didn’t ask when anything would happen.

The Diva of Labuan Bajo didn’t need to. 💅

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In May 2025, I found myself standing in line outside Hagia Sophia, reading a board I had not seen eighteen months earlier.

It was large, red, and had a price list on it with different columns. One for locals, one for foreign visitors.

The line moved in short bursts toward the kiosk. I stood in it alone. My aunt and her friend had met me in Istanbul, but I sent them off to wander toward the entrance of Topkapi Palace and around the plaza. There was no reason for all three of us to wait.

I knew what was inside. The scale of it and the dim light. The low-hanging chandeliers. The first time, I just walked in because I could, but now I was standing in this queue, repeatedly getting bumped in the back by the group standing behind me.

I did the math in my head. Then again. I also knew what else we could be doing instead: getting on a ferry, sitting and enjoying a Turkish tea, or walking without a plan.

It wasn’t a question of access. It was whether to spend the time and the money on this, or keep moving.

I stood there longer than I expected to. The last time I was here, I hadn’t paused at all.

In November 2023, I arrived with the windows down.

The car moved along the highway from Sabiha Gökçen Airport, moving in slow, uneven traffic. The air coming through the window carried exhaust and something akin to progress from the factories nearby. It reminded me of taxi rides from Pudong, and with that nostalgia came the same instinct to breathe it in deeply.

The driver had turned around to me and offered me a cigarette, which I declined. He lit it and rested his arm near the window. As we nudged forward, he reached into the console and handed me a clementine. I thanked him and peeled it as we slowly made our way across the bridge from Asia to Europe.

He dropped me off on the European side somewhere near Istiklal Street, where I was told the city would be alive.

My Airbnb was above a bar. Even with earplugs pushed deep, the music and voices came through the floor and didn’t stop. Around 4 a.m., shouting rose from the street. I don’t think I slept more than an hour.

I moved the next day.

After that, the week settled into a rhythm. I walked the city without much of a plan. I moved through neighborhoods, stopped when something caught my attention, and kept going when it didn’t. Cats came and went. I followed them more than once, if I’m honest.

I didn’t think much about cost. Food, transport, whatever came up. If something was open, I went in.

The second time I arrived, I did not sleep above a bar.

I checked into a hotel that overlooked the Bosphorus, near Dolmabahçe Sarayı. The room faced the water with views that stretched. Tankers moved past at a steady pace. The city was there, but distant. There was no music through the floor or voices from the street.

Breakfast was included. It would have been easy to stay inside. But we didn’t.

My aunt and her friend had no problem walking without a plan, which is one of my favorite qualities in a travel partner. We stayed out most of the day, moving without much structure.

We made our way to Galata Tower. It had been under renovation the first time I was in the city, and I thought it would be a nice way to orient them to the center of the city while also seeing something new. There was a new ticket booth that was active, with a short queue forming out front.

Thirty euros.

I looked at the sign again to make sure I hadn’t misread it. I hadn’t. These prices do not emerge in isolation. Visitor numbers have surged, the lira has weakened, and heritage sites have now been repositioned as hard-currency generators.

I stepped out of line.

In a city like Istanbul, there are hundreds of viewpoints that awe. Paying for that, standing in that line, it didn’t make sense to me. I told them the price, and ultimately they decided similarly.

We left and kept walking. Ten thousand steps, then more. They were happy to keep going, which made exploring easy. As we walked, I shared with them things I learned on my first visit.

By the time we reached Hagia Sophia, the pattern was already clear.

Fifty euros total.

I didn’t hesitate this time. I wasn’t going in. I had already seen it —walked in for free eighteen months earlier— and the jump from zero to fifty wasn’t just inflation. It was a paywall that changed the very nature of the building.

I thought about them as I shuffled forward in line. They had flown over twelve hours to get here, and ultimately, it seemed a shame for them to miss it. So, I got the tickets and sent them ahead as I milled about more around the plaza.

When they finally emerged, the awe I expected was missing. They talked about being hustled through the corridors. Between the price and the pressure to keep moving, the majesty had been lost in the transaction. Throughput shapes the visit as much as architecture. When time is rationed to move lines, attention is, too.

After that, we didn’t go on to Topkapi or the other “must-sees”, carrying similar 50 euro price tags. It wasn’t my decision to make. They had seen enough to decide how they wanted to move through the rest of the city.

The next day, we walked down toward the ferry docks, planning to cross to what is called the “Asian side.” Along the way, men stood near the water offering Bosphorus cruises for two hundred euros, sunset included with vague promises of space and views.

We kept walking.

At the terminal, commuters moved through the turnstiles without stopping. We followed them onto one of the ferries that runs the route all day, back and forth.

The shoreline runs in one continuous line. Mosques rise behind apartment blocks. Ferries cross back and forth without pause. You can see the place as a whole, and you do not have to decide anything to be in it.

Kadıköy gave us the same relief. We walked through markets and side streets and went into mosques without paying or queuing. We did not have to translate the city into a list of highlights. We could just keep moving.

On the ferry back, the crossing was still only a crossing. People got on, found space, and looked out at the water as the boat moved. The skyline slid past in silence and kept going. 🎟️

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