I visited The National Civil Rights Museum a few years ago, and one artifact that I saw on display has been lodged in my mind ever since: a guidebook for African Americans who were traveling through the segregated south.

I don’t remember the name of the guidebook, and I could only see its cover — it was, as I recall, a black and white photo of an attractive African American woman in a trim early 1960s dress, posed in front of a car. I really wanted to get a look inside. I was never able to track that guidebook down, but I found a similar one: The Negro Motorist Green Book. It was published annually, starting in 1936.  The 1949 edition cost 75 cents, and although it contained only 80 pages, had an international scope, covering the USA, Alaska, Canada, Mexico and Bermuda. The cover has a photo of cars on a road, huddled tight together, bringing to mind a funeral procession, an invasion – although it’s actually of New York City’s West Side Highway.

Travel’s “Difficulties and Embarrassments”

The Green Book was the project of Victor H. Green, himself an African American from New York. This wasn’t the first book of its kind (nor the last), but apparently the competition had gone out of print. The painful story of the trip (or trips) that inspired Mr. Green to put this book together isn’t told directly, although it is hinted at. “It has been our idea to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties and embarrassments, and to make his trips more enjoyable.” Difficulties and embarrassments that could be encountered in hotels and in restaurants, at barber shops and drug stores, in night clubs and in taxis.

Similar clues are also encoded in the introduction by Wendell P. Alston, a special representative of the Esso Standard Oil company, who, he says, spends about half the year traveling on behalf of his employer. “For most travelers, whether they travel in modern high-speed motor cars, streamlined Diesel-powered trains, luxurious ocean liners or globe encircling planes, there are hotels of all size and classes, awaiting and competing for their patronage. Pleasure resorts in the mountains and at the sea shore beckon him. Roadside inns and cabins spot the highway and all are available if he has the price. For some travelers, however, the facilities of many of these places are not available, even though they may have the price…the Negro traveler’s inconveniences are many and they are increasing because today so many more are traveling…”

Alston lists several reasons why African Americans were traveling in such numbers: they were members of orchestras, attendees of concerts, touring clubs, students, teachers, and business men like himself, who were working for white-owned companies to expand their penetration into the African American market. In other words, The Green Book was directly aimed at a traveler who was trying simply to get on with whatever it was that had motivated their journey, and who did not wish to make a political point with their very presence.

At the same time, a guide like this does play a role in propping up the segregated status quo – it’s easy for me to imagine that certain sponsors like Esso or Ford were willing to sponsor this guidebook not out of any great sense of enlightenment but because it would keep African Americans from wandering into white institutions by accident.

The publisher seemed to wrestle with the political implications of providing practical information to help people navigate a diseased system: the cover features the inspiring Mark Twain quotation “Travel is Fatal to Prejudice”, but only in smaller letters beneath a veiled warning about the dangers of being near prejudice when it is attacked: “Carry Your Green Book with You –- You Might Need It”. And the final paragraph of the introduction addresses the quandary squarely: “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges within the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.”

That day, sadly, was not very close at hand: I also found the twentieth anniversary issue of Green Book published in 1956, now renamed The Negro Traveler’s Green Book, to account for the popularity of air transportation. Its cover had shed both its inspiration and its warning, but gained a sketch of a traveling family that looks curiously white. The introduction again expresses hopes that the book will become obsolete eventually, but then concludes: “In looking ahead…a trip to the moon? Who knows? It may not be as improbable as it sounds. A New York scientist is already offering for sale pieces of real estate on the moon. When travel of this kind becomes available, you can be sure that your Green Book will have the recommended listings!”

It was meant as a light-hearted comment, but what a sadness at its heart: nearly 100  years after the Civil War had ended, it was hard to imagine that segregation would fail to penetrate every frontier, even the earth’s atmosphere, and wrap its tentacles around the moon.

Have you had a chance to check out the winning photographs from the third annual Remarkable Photo Contest yet? 

While the contest attracted over 300 entries from perceptive travelers around the world, it appears that the top photographic hotspot is Calcutta, with photographers from this location coming in first and second.

First prize went to Sudip Roychoudhury, a  34-year-old award winning freelancer who started shooting photos in high school. 

Woman praying at the ghat of Varanasi, India 

Sudipto Das, who works for the daily The Times of India, won second prize with this photographer of intergenerational interaction.

Old and Young in Rural West Bengal

Third prize was awarded to Bill Norman,  a contract writer/photographer from Tucson, AZ, for his colorful portrayal of a wedding in Trinidad.

Cuba Wedding

To find out more about the annual Remarkable Photo Contest and see more of the winning photographers, click here.

As you pay an inflated prices for long-stemmed roses for your sweetheart this weekend, it may make you feel a little better knowing how far those fragile flowers have come. There’s a good chance they were on a truck, then a plane, then another truck or two, all the way from the Equator. Or as they say in Spanish, Ecuador.

Roses aren’t the leading export from Ecuador since they don’t pull in as much money as other crops like bananas, coffee, or cocoa. The country actually makes more from petroleum and shrimp too. But if you tour through the High Valley near Otavalo, you’ll see greenhouse after greenhouse that is filled with roses of every color. Some estimates peg Ecuador as the largest rose producer in the world (with Colombia vying for the top spot) and it certainly has some of the world’s largest plantations. They export some varieties that are six feet high.

I got to tour through one of them when I was there a few months ago, while taking the obligatory trip out to the Otavalo weekend market. I wasn’ t really expecting much, but then I got there and was flabbergasted. Rows and rows of roses of white, then go one building over and it’s rows and rows of pink. Then black, red, striped combinations. A whole army of workers buzzed around spraying, cutting, cleaning, transporting, and packaging. Carts are pushed around an elaborate system of overhead tracks to move the flowers from building to building.

All of this needs to happen fast. The whole journey from cutting the flower to it appearing on some lucky girl’s desk needs to happen in just a few days. The packing and storage happen in refrigerated rooms and the flowers move to the Quito airport on refrigerated trucks. They are whisked off in a plane to the U.S. or Europe, then loaded into more refrigerated trucks on the other end to get to distribution points. Finally, the florist’s shop.

The whole process requires plenty of coordination and project management and naturally there’s plenty of inherent risk. What if a landslide keeps the trucks from getting to Quito? What happens if a snowstorm hits in February and flights can’t land in the cities? In a sense, when you buy those roses you are paying for much more than flowers. You are paying for lots of risk and lots of fuel. Oh, and pesticides of course. (There are some organic rose growers like this one, but not many.)

So no, this is nothing close to being a “green gift” for Valentine’s Day. Since cocoa has to be shipped from far away, the green party poopers will probably rule chocolates out too. Maybe a nice dinner instead, at a restaurant that serves locally sourced food? To follow, there’s that other Valentine’s Day tradition that’s free, but it requires a very warm bedroom, so maybe let’s just forget being eco-friendly for a day and enjoy the moment.

You might think that San Antonio brunch offerings would mostly consist of plates of steaming migas or huevos rancheros given the region’s Hispanic heritage, but there are many other options in this diverse city.

One of my new favorites is located in the stately King William historic residential district – here’s a walking tour of the area – and it’s all about the flour.

The Guenther House was built in 1859 as the home of German immigrant Carl Hilmar Guenther, the founder of San Antonio’s Pioneer Flour Mills (still in business today.)  The company restored the home and it’s now a restaurant serving breakfast and lunch seven days a week.

Sunday brunch is available 10 am to 3 pm, and the menu is loaded with bakery goods, pancakes and waffles and their famous buttermilk biscuits and gravy.

Sure, you can get the usual sandwich/soup/salad offerings (like Champagne Chicken Enchiladas wrapped in Pioneer White Wings tortillas) but really, I’m all about the waffles.  With strawberries on ‘em.

Then, you run upstairs to the in-house River Mill Store and buy the Southern Sweet Cream Waffle Mix so you can make them at home.

The downstairs restaurant is built in Art Nouveau style, with a light, airy feeling from the ceramic tile floor, elaborate light fixtures and lots of windows looking out onto the lawn and the nearby San Antonio River.  It was very busy on the Sunday of our visit, but the staff is cheery and efficient at keeping everyone moving.

I spoke briefly to Assistant Restaurant Manager Nelson Arcila, who took the time to point out many architectural details of the building (and encouraged us to stop by the To Go bakery section on the way out. Resistance was futile.)

The open lawn and river overlook makes this a good family destination, too, because the kids can run around a bit if you have to wait for a table.  If you can, get there early; the parking and restaurant fill up fast.

I’d say that attending the San Fernando Cathedral mariachi Mass at 5:30 pm on Saturday afternoon, some River Walk fun Saturday night (maybe jazz at the Landing?) and then a Guenther House Sunday brunch would give you a pretty perfect San Antonio weekend.

It seems that we’re not having a cultural conversation about shoes at the moment.

Shoes get the most attention during good times, boom times, the bull market of the 1980s gave us Imelda Marcos; the 1990s begat Carrie in Sex and the City. Oh sure, we’re still buying shoes, and more to the point in economic downturns, people have trouble affording shoes.  This is not as much fun as people who have unreasonable number of shoes, or insanely expensive shoes, and so the chatter about shoes has subsided.

When I was in college, in central New York State, I worked at a discount shoe store at the mall. At that time, there was a very liberal return policy, you could return shoes for any reason, without limitation of any kind.   And so, several times a week, a customer would approach me at my post behind the register, with an empty shoebox in hand.  They’d lean on the counter while they took their shoes off, plopping them one at a time into the waiting box.  Stocking footed, they’d say things like,  “these shoes didn’t fit,” or “I didn’t like them”. And I would need to reach into the shoe, still warm and redolent,  in order to slightly bend out the side to find the SKU number printed on the inside, by some means apparently impervious to wear. I would enter it into the register, which would spit out the  shoe’s current price– usually $5, the lowest price at which we sold adult shoes. They could use this as store credit, and they’d pad over to the bottom racks to find a pair that fit — we almost always had a few pairs in every size. I’d enter the transaction in the register as a matter of bookkeeping, no money would change hands.It was really something of a shoe investment scheme, a way of flipping their shoe purchase so that they retained five dollars worth of permanent shoe equity.

I don’t begrudge them this now — the poverty in that part of New York state was extreme at the time and probably is worse today. But I have to admit that I didn’t like it much at all back then.  These customers never looked in any way distressed or ashamed or concerned by their outright lies to me, or by their flouting the spirit of the system, if not the letter.  Now, I’m not sure that I cared about the system much either, in the way of hourly employees everywhere, I felt vaguely screwed over by my employer. Mostly I didn’t like reaching into someone’s dirty warm shoes. Before I graduated from college, the policy had changed, imposing a time limit on returns and the need for a receipt and I presume the shoe-flipping came to an end.

Anyway, as soon as I heard about the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, I wanted to go. Besides my quasi-professional experience, I like shoes a lot –  which being female is something of a cliché, the gender exlusivity of which I shall soon question.  I also like smaller, single-topic museums, they strike me as the physical manifestation of an essay, in which you can unravel a single topic to gain insight onto many other subjects, if not everything in the world.

The Bata Shoe Museum did not disappoint. Its permanent collection includes footwear from many different cultures and over 4,500 years of history.  You learn a lot about adaptation to circumstances – the shoes that most of us wear today are designed for contact with even floors and pavement, but some of the weirder looking shoes  speak to other terrains and purposes: the dangerous, spiked clogs worn for chestnut-crushing in France in circa 1800-1900; the jikatabi, a boot that looks like a mitten with two fingers worn by Japanese electricians, the nalin or kabkab worn in Turkey in public bathhouses to avoid contact with hot and wet floors.  (See pictures here.)

And, I’d argue, you could learn a little something about men, too, particularly those that tend to bluster about men not caring about shoes, because men never have and never will — a sentiment to which Bata cleanly puts the lie.  For instance, the museum maintains a collection of shoes made by Native Americans, and while shoemaking and embellishing in these communities is almost always a women’s art,  Zuni wedding boots, are traditionally made for the bridegroom for his bride, out of a bleached deerskin. It’s  a tradition that is echoed in the Netherlands, where a man would carve clogs for his betrothed, and in France, where hand-carved clogs were a traditional Christmas Eve gift of love. (See all these shoes here.)

Oh fine, making shoes is different from wearing them.  But if you look back into history, perhaps for a time when men were really men, such men did not find reason to eschew nice shoes. For instance, in the early 19th century Europe, for men and particularly men of means wore intricate and gaze-worthy footwear, some as flamboyant as preening peacocks. By comparison, women’s shoes of the time were boring, covered by all those long skirts, and by further comparison, men’s shoes of today are drab and funereal. (With the exception of Elton John’s shoes, also on display at the museum, although presumably the elaborate shoes from days of yore did not make an obvious point about masculinity, virility, sexuality of their wearer.)

Nearly every piece of literature about the museum flags one piece of its collection as being of particular interest to men: Napoleon’s silk socks. They are interesting enough, but in the end, they’re only socks. And since we now know that somewhere, deeply (and in some cases, I’ll grant, seemingly irretrievably) encoded in the DNA of every man is a secret fascination with shoes, perhaps these socks are a cover for reeling men into the museum.

And, if you’ll allow me to speculate still further, perhaps, when the economy picks up again,  our next cultural conversation about shoes will have a man as its muse.