The morning sounds of the Sportivnaya station’s rush hour rained through my concentration. They were Russian sounds—no music, no chatter, no shouting. The clanging of change and murmur of voices as people bought metro cards. I missed the plastic green tokens they used to use. The escalator’s muffled rattle and rhythmic squeak. The trip-trip, trip-trip as the people on the left side of the escalator jogged down the steps. Those on the right stood silent. The trains rumbled into the station with an almost underwater echo.

The escalator rattled away beneath me. It descended through a tunnel lit by wan lights. The globe-like bulbs marched downwards, reflecting off the tops of heads as people vanished through the bottom.

The train’s doors slid open with a slippery bang. The crowd crushed back and forth as the train emptied, then filled, and tight-lipped, mostly unwashed Muscovites pushed one another to fight for just one more space on the train. This time of day, there was never enough room. But there was a train every thirty seconds. I’d catch the next one.

I straightened the sheepskin coat that my father’s wife had given me. Dark brown, with a fashionable suede look, it was my most useful piece of clothing in my efforts to appear Russian. I removed my old black fleece hat and stuffed it into my pocket. The metro was so much warmer than the knife-edge cold outside that I started sweating as I descended on the escalator. I wiggled my still-frozen toes inside my boots.

I slid into the metro car, just another tired-faced woman trying to look pretty and pulled-together. I slipped through to the back and squeezed into a space near the door separating the cars. I stood sideways and loosened my knees, ready to sway with the jerky movements of the train. With no bar within reaching distance, I was held up by the men and women pressed against me. A little of their dandruff shook onto my shoulders. The electronic female voice said, “Be careful, the doors are closing. Next stop, Verobyovi Gori.” I suppressed a shiver of happiness. That voice reached back into my memory, fifteen years of loving this place.

Every one of us probably has a foreign city we’ve learned to call home: Moscow, Berlin, Bangkok, Santiago, San Francisco, Fez. It’s a tramping ground we return to again and again, plumbing the depths of what it means to have a home away from home.

There is no tourist attraction, no museum, no scenic overlook that can give the traveler the same experience as feeling part of a place. To slip into the daily rhythm of residents and commuters—there’s nothing better.

Me, I have a love affair with the Moscow metro that some of my up-and-coming Muscovite friends deplore. My earliest Russian impressions always include the rush and tumble of the underground trains. And when I get tired of looking at its award-winning architecture and Soviet-era art, I take the train out to the home of Russian Orthodoxy in Sergiev Posod, or a bus to the sprawling former estate and toy churches of Arkhangelskoe.

Like most major cities, Moscow is packed with sights. You must see Red Square. It’s shiny and absurd and windswept and cold and unnervingly more like Disney than any place with such a bloody history has any right to be. But if you see it, I’ve learned the hard way, try to be a local. Dress to blend in. Walk confidently out of the metro station. Attach eyes to all sides of your head. Keep your camera out of sight. Why? Because you want to be on the lookout not for pickpockets, but for the police, who constantly scour the influx of photo-snapping tourists in order to charge fines (that is, bribes) for improper paperwork. Come to think of it, not so unlike pickpockets after all. In the Russia I know, theft happens out in the open. My father was once stopped pointlessly by a traffic cop, who matter-of-factly requested a bribe. When my exasperated father refused, the policeman said, waving my father’s driving license and residency documents, “Think about it this way. This is a product. How much are you willing to pay for it?”

With every step, every visit, I hook in to the internal compass that Russia has become for me. And each time I return, I try to share the wealth of that decades-long relationship. As writers, bloggers, photographers, or enthusiastic neighbors sharing vacation snaps, we try hard to impart this feeling to those around us. We want to share the beauty and complexity of the places we feel we know, and the places we feel we can never truly know.

At some point in the not-to-be-finely-pinpointed past, I was in Paris with a small group of writers, and we took a tour of the Printemps department store. It’s a lot like any department store in the U.S., with the exception of its 6th floor Brasserie, which is beneath an incredible Art Nouveau cupola of 3,185 pieces of stained glass. As I ate steak tartare and frites with the store’s representatives, I learned that the dome was taken apart, tile by tile, during World War II, and then reinstalled afterwards, by the same company.

Anyway, one of our group was a true fashion maven, and earlier that day, she’d disparaged Printemps, vigorously. It was, it seemed, not a place that she thought that anyone with an ounce of fashion sense would shop. But during the tour, those sentiments had not only vanished , but were entirely replaced. “I think you’re doing a deeper buy of the fashion lines than all the other stores,” she said, as we toured the second floor, packed with hyper-expensive apparel by international designers.  And of the hotel we were staying out, the InterContinental Le Grand, she said “I was thrill-ed to be staying there, not because it was near the Louvre, or not far from views of the Eiffel Tower, no no, it’s because it was so near to Printemps!”  She had an appointment and left the tour early,  but she vowed she’d be back before they closed to do some shopping on her own. As she dashed out the door, I knew she’d not be setting foot in there again on our trip, and she didn’t.

Whatever you want to call it — hypocrisy, a social fib, a white lie — for better or worse, they’re a part of travel.  We’re guests, by definition, when we’re in another city, state, country, if not in someone’s home.  (True, we’re often paying guests, which gives us a little more latitude,  but paying a bill doesn’t relieve you of the obligation to be polite.) So what’s the right thing for a traveler to do when when you really don’t like something?  Most etiquette books that I’ve seen over the years counsel against being untruthful, but I’m not sure I have the savoir faire to tell an unpleasant truth without seriously derailing the social dynamic.  Once, when I was in Nome, Alaska, I was served a delicacy called mukduk, which is hunks of whale skin and blubber tinged pink with blood,  frozen, and then hacked into small pieces with an ulu. To me, it tasted like a cold, chewy piece of a frozen dirty aquarium. I didn’t say that, though. I said  “mmmm”.

So yes, I’ll lie and say I like something when I don’t. I tend to keep it brief — one of my regular travel companions has said that he can tell when I haven’t enjoyed something if I say “it was lovely”, and no more. “It’s lovely” is actually my standard, and sincere, compliment, and I didn’t really think about it until he pointed out, but when I’ve actually enjoyed something I want to say more and more and more about it. When I haven’t, I want to say very little, if that.* I think that’s why my Parisian colleagues’s lies stood out to me — they were so detailed.

Still, I can understand the damage that’s done even with the small social lies I tend to tell. Someone you’re with probably knows what you’re up to, and it can’t help but damage your credibility in their eyes. “I guess it’s a dance we all do,” I wrote in my notes about Madame Printemps.  “But when [she] left to go to the airport and said, “it was like traveling with friends, really,” I had to wonder.”

And when she hugged me goodbye, we clunked heads.

_{*You’ll earn my (sincere) admiration if you can identify the movie that I’m quoting.}

It’s been four years since editor Tim Leffel, believing that armchair travellers and travel writers deserved more the repetitive destination articles, top-10 lists, and advertorials that was stock in trade for print magazines, launched the Perceptive Travel online magazine.

Tim’s goal was to provide a place for travel writers to publish authentic travel tales about interesting places. And he succeeded. All you have to do is wander through the archives to discover that Perceptive Travel magazine has travelled to all corners of the world, providing interesting, entertaining, and engaging travel stories that keeps even the most jaded armchair traveller glued to the screen.

Fans will want to check out the latest edition featuring these three stories…

In Syria: Never Judge a Country by its State Department Warning, regular contributor Bruce Northam recounts his travels to Syria where, instead of expected  hardcore anti-American loathing (as indicated by state department travel warnings), he finds only smiles and nods. Turns out that Syria, a UNESCO World Heritage Site playground, “bleeds history, not American tourists.”

Joel Carillet uses signs to illustrate the entertainment value of Singapore’s nanny state. While many travellers see Singapore as  “too safe, too boring, too expensive”, Joel finds his pulses racing as he sets out and explores the fascinating world of Singapore’s signs that remind everyone how to keep Singapore clean, green, and crime free. It appears that nothing is sign-free in Singapore – not even the coconuts!

Marie Javins gets attention in unlikely places with her intuitive and entertaining piece on small group touring in Bolivia. Along the way, she discovers that being an older traveler brings not only new insights but also new needs.

Laurence Mitchell provides a great rundown on music from Africa, Eastern Europe, South America, and the clubs of Cairo.

Happy Birthday Perceptive Travel

Like snow and rain, winds have developed their own vocabularies. Their personalities evolve in the geography that nurtures them: the damp Chinook that signals the end of a Rocky Mountain winter, the soft zephyrs that cool a hot beach, the bone-gnawing barbers of a Saskatchewan January, and the Harmattan desert breezes that scrape sand over every particle of exposed skin.

And then there is the wind that lingers after a New England Nor’easter, the kind of wind that rips your hair right out of your head, the nameless wind that feels like a beating, and all you want to do is curl up in a corner and wait for it to pass.

This wind attached itself to the three-hour whale-watching catamaran out of Boston Harbor when my in-laws were visiting from England. It bore down upon us with the force of an iron door being slammed until Liz, my mother-in-law, shrank to about half her size. But I couldn’t shrink, much less curl up in a corner. I was crouched on the bucking deck, pissed off and terrified, trying to hang onto a leaking sick bag that flapped over the side of the boat.

“Don’t litter,” they’d told us as the boat moved out of the dock near the New England Aquarium. Don’t throw anything over the side; don’t leave things on the deck to be picked up by the breeze. “It’ll be a little rough today,” they added as an afterthought. I fiddled nervously with a thumb. My earliest memory is of a canoeing accident when I was two that nearly drowned my family. I ignored Liz’s mention of her tendency to seasickness, and thought instead about the water phobia that grabs my ankles on occasion. Before I could suggest sitting inside—where the water couldn’t threaten me—the crew powered up the jet cat and smashed their way to the whales, plunging up and down the leftover waves of yesterday’s storm.

That was when Liz went very, very silent. “Don’t talk to me,” she said to our husbands, her clipped British accent still unfailingly polite, her uncreased linen clothes rippling in the wind. She turned pale and gripped an empty Starbucks bag whose contents were soon returned to it. Boston Harbor whizzed by.

I eyed each wave as if it held the grinding teeth of a sea monster. I think I whimpered. Above us, someone narrated the passing of islands and lighthouses. Liz did not turn to look at them, but kept her eyes fixed on a horizon that the bow, most unfortunately, interrupted every few seconds. I tried to ask my husband Ian why on earth he’d sat up front, but the wind forced the words right back down my throat.

The little paper Starbucks bag was insufficient. Ian staggered inside for a stock of plastic-lined sick bags. We huddled in our seats as Liz, and then her husband Tony, filled one, two, three, four of them. I pressed my fingers around the tops to keep the bags from being whipped to sea. Didn’t want to mess up lunch for the fish.

Some time later, Ian lifted his head, sniffing, then mouthed something at me as his mother retched into a fresh bag. I shook my head, wanting only for the boat to stop, not caring about the prospect of seeing whales, definitely not caring to hear a witty comment from him about the healthfulness of fresh air. He brought his mouth to my ear and bellowed into it.

“The bags. Are leaking.” A forefinger pointed to the trail of puke glistening its way across the deck.

Well, damn. I thought about racing at a crawl back to the trash bags inside. I thought many unkind things about the teenaged crew members who’d sold Liz the acupressure motion sickness bracelets when we boarded. “Yes, they really work,” the girl had told me. A wave lifted me from my seat, scattering more drops of vomit around, and I thought nastily about bringing the bracelets back inside, dripping bags in tow, to ask for a refund.

There was no way to make it to a trash can without leaving evidence of that morning’s breakfast all over the boat. I couldn’t even stand up without falling over, and the wind, egalitarian in its direction, made sure anything in remotely liquid form got everywhere.

I slunk from the seat to the starboard rail, where I hung on, petrified, as the bags leaked their contents into the sea. I hung on tighter, gulping back tears of anger at the weather and the stench, and at uncontrollable terror of the dark water. My fingers grew numb around the bags. The wind fingered the holes (all along the seams—who makes these things?), widened them, and gleefully ripped the bags to shreds.

At times like this, exposed to Mother Nature and helpless before her, some people like to think that they are getting back to their roots as human beings, planting themselves in the earth from which cities and air conditioning so often separate us. Full engagement of life, rather than fear of death, becomes their focus. It’s a nice thought, one I’ve indulged in on occasion. But this time, faced with a deep-water phobia and the demon wind drilling into my eardrums, I found myself commiserating more with merchant sailors and fishermen who have fought with nature over the millennia: dropping my litter into the sea, I cursed the nameless wind.

After two hours the invisible navigator enthusiastically announced that whales had been spotted and we raced to the site. When the boat halted a young woman came up from the back of the boat to view the three humpbacks. Her flat, bright green shoes reflected sunlight off their suede and gold embroidery.

“You might want,” I coughed, waggling my fingers at her feet, “you might want to move back. The sick bags leaked.” She looked down at her jeans dragging above the film of sludge, and jumped.

“Oh!” She ran back to the cabin, pausing only to flick a glare at us.

Even the most brutal wind cannot erase the reek of bile. My in-laws’ misery ensured we had the entire front deck to ourselves. Liz and Tony trembled their way to the railing. Three humpback whales cavorted in the sea.

“Oh,” whispered Liz in an entirely different tone of voice from the young woman, “oh, it’s wonderful. Fantastic!” she said a little louder as two whales exposed their tails in a dive. Inhaling stench along with the fierce fresh air, I looked at her, standing there in her now-creased linen, her face pale, thinking what a wimp I was compared to my determined, delighted mother-in-law. She wiped her watering eyes to peer through the sparkling waves at the whales, and laughed as another tail splashed down.

“Worth it, mum?” Ian asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said, blinking. “Look at ‘im!” A flipper flapped the water. The boat rocked gently. Liz handed her camera to Tony. “I think I’ll sit down now, luv.” Tony handed the camera to Ian.

“I think I’ll sit down, too.” They shuddered against each other on a bench in the sunshine. Ian took pictures and I double-bagged several sick bags for the trip back. The wind, in one last slap, stole one out of my pocket and littered it into the sea.

Some days later, while researching ancient mythologies, I decided on a name for this malicious wind: I call it the Tiamat, named for a Babylonian goddess whose province included war, despair, and destruction. It couldn’t be coincidence that she was also the goddess of salt water.