Traveling around cyberspace this week, I came across two articles that reminded me that there’s a lot of weird out there worth exploring.

The first article, 7 Bizarre Tours You’d Actually Sign Up for … Maybe highlighted some truly interesting tours that you never would have thought existed. For example, how about the Illegal Border Crossing Tour in Mexico, a ‘night-time guided hike and you’ll be chased in the dark, shot at by (fake) police and you may or may not make it under the fence’. Sounds like something the PC police might have a problem with but I’ve just added it to my list of things to do on my road trip next year. (note to self: make sure I pack some old clothes). Other intriguing tours include the Karaoke Ghost Tour of Sydney and the Scandal Tour of Washington DC.

The second article, Top 10 weird attractions around the globe, offers a list of ‘one of a kind’ events and places. From the Cockroach Race in Brisbane, Australia to the Hakone Kowakien Yunessun Wine Spa in Hakone, Japan, there’s enough weird here for everyone. If I had to choose one, I’d definitely be heading for the wine spa.

And if that’s not enough weird, just yesterday I was reading a short article in the recent Wanderlust magazine that listed ’sewer tours worth a visit’ ranging from the sewers to Paris to New Dehli.

It sure is a weird, weird world.

Welcome to Rome’s most interesting sight. No, it’s not the Colosseum, nor the Pantheon, nor the completely overrun and overcrowded Spanish Steps. These ruins are crowded by low-impact residents and humans are only allowed in once a day.

The Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary has got to be one of the coolest ideas I’ve ever heard of. Excavation in the early 1900s uncovered ruins of a sacred temple or two (who needs to be exact in Rome, the city that has pretty much stopped building anything because projects so frequently unearth ruins in need of protecting?), structures dating back to about 200 BC. These are the Sacred Ruins, supposedly the temple where Brutus stabbed Caesar.

Now they host an even older sacred being: the Cat Sanctuary is home to about 250 abandoned or ill cats who are fed, fixed, healed, and often sent out for adoption by two pretty visionary women. After all, it takes a lot to stand up to Rome’s stubborn government and demand that ruins be cut off from tourists and made to do something useful.

You can troop down the steps to visit the actual underground sanctuary any time during working hours, but you can only have a guided tour of the ruins once a day. The rest of the time, you can only look on enviously as some pretty happy cats enjoy sleeping on Caesar’s glories.

(Photos copyright Antonia Malchik 2008)

I’ve just come back from nearly three weeks in Rome, Vienna, and a couple places in between (thanks to Sheila and Liz for holding the fort!), where I expected my 8-month-old, plus stroller and diaper bag, to hamper the routine. Instead, being a mother suddenly became my primary travel experience. It drew interactions that a loner introvert like me would usually have had to work at.

It’s no secret that the Italians love kids. Groups of Italian teenage girls dropped their boyfriends’ arms and turned their backs on the Colosseum to take pictures of my little boy, who smiled away and took it all in stride. I left his legs bare much of the time and once a woman ran out of her shop as I was passing, not to lecture me about covering him up, but to kiss his bare little feet while he was slumped over asleep in his stroller. Elderly people made a point to play with him in restaurants when he got fussy during dinner time. It all made me want to move there immediately, because, frankly, the US doesn’t do a good job of making you feel like the coolest person in the world for being a mother.

What really struck me was the middle-aged woman I met in passing, or simply passed on the street. They melted when they looked at him, of course, maybe thinking of their own grown-up children or grandchildren to come, but there was something else, a kind of pathos and patience in their expressions that gave me the odd feeling I was constantly passing retired goddesses who spend a lot of time doing dishes.

There was wisdom in those faces, adoration of this new human and knowledge of everything I am to experience over the next decades of my life: the joys my son will give me, but also the heartbreaks. Their expressions of pleasure and sadness said everything anyone needs to know about life. It’s simply here to be lived, every little part of it.

For almost as long as civilization has been around, literature, history, and current affairs has focused on the meetings and clashes of great minds and overblown egos. It has focused on the activities of men, ignoring the activities of women who were simply at home making life happen. The trials of bringing up children and making food and creating a home-space have been ignored as trivial.

But last week, while George Bush took his ego on a trip to Jerusalem and Gordon Brown frantically tried to save his political career, I was standing in various places talking with other women about teething, and I knew, suddenly, that there was nothing more important in the entire world than two women from different cultures, neither of them speaking the other’s language, waving their hands around to talk. We gestured to demonstrate methods of alleviating teething pain; we rolled our eyes and laughed ruefully to show how exhausting and frustrating it was to have a baby at all, and how wonderful. We didn’t need words or trade deals or peace treaties or conferences.

Even elderly women in Vienna, a city not known for its love of children, smiled at him. “Hold onto it,” said one 80-something-year-old on the U-bahn as she was getting off. “Hold onto every minute.”

I could, I realized, go anywhere in the world and have something essential to talk about with knowing anything about local politics. Motherhood is universal. And if you think discussing teething and sleeping habits and pooping is trivial, consider this: how many despots, dictators, and paranoid egomaniacs are running the world right now because their mothers were too harassed, tired, uninformed, or incompetent to hold their babies when they were crying? If you believe that a butterfly flapping its wings in China affects the weather of the whole world, then how do you think the world is affected by how one single mother deals with her teething baby when he’s screaming?

On the road and looking for something a little different this summer ? Well, if you don’t mind a little ’shock and gore’, head to the nearest medical museums.

From stomach sized hairballs (National Museum of Health and Medicine) to a giant hamster wheel for energetic patients (Glore Psychiatric Museum), medical museums offer the chance to explore the medicines colorful history and discover the bizzare, the offbeat, and the extreme treatments of days gone by.

You’ll be amazed (and relieved) by how far the practice of medicine has come.

1. The Glore Psychiatric Museum is housed in the former ‘State Lunatic Asylum No. 2′ building in St Joseph, Missouri. From medical artifacts such as a tranquilizing chair and a dousing tank to exhibits featuring the ‘1,446 Objects Swallowed by a Patient’ and the ‘television diary’, this museum will leave you speechless, spellbound, and mighty relieved that the days of such barbaric medical treatment is well and truly over.

2. The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia was orginally established as a place where trainee doctors could go to learn about anatomy and human medical anomalies. It’s those anomalies - such as the preserved body of the ‘Soap Lady’ and a cancerous growth removed from President Grover Cleveland - that now draw the public to it’s doors.

3. National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington DC is a goldmine for American history buffs. Here you can see not only the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln but also the probe used to locate the bullet and the blood stained shirt cuff of the surgeon who attended Lincoln’s autopsy. Other permanent displays include ‘Medicine During the Civil War’ and ‘Battlefied Surgery 101′.

4. International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago offers a diverse collection of surgical memoriabilia and artefacts from around the world. Spread out over four floors, the exhibits include early 20th century X-ray machines, trephining (skull drilling) instruments, and an iron lung. The museums newest exhibit, Beyond Broken Bones, looks at the history of orthopedics and prothestics from the Ancient Egyptians to modern day.

There are medical museums all over the USA open to the public. So next time you are on the road and looking for something different, find out if the city you’re in has one.

Pico Iyer’s commentary about Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American (see previous post) left me curious about something. And since my husband and I are in a mild state of panic about taking our 8-month-old on his first transatlantic flight tomorrow, I’d much rather babble about my curiosity on a blog post than, say, pack. (My worry: Baby John is teething again and will keep everyone up all night crying. Husband’s worry: We’ll have so much luggage and be so distracted by baby John that we’ll be sitting ducks as mugger-targets in Rome’s train station and have all our bags swiped.)

The combination of trying to figure out the minimum necessary to pack for a baby and Iyer’s comment that that he never travels without Greene’s novel got me thinking: what are the things that you, as a traveler, thinker, human being, never travel without? Iyer says The Quiet American is a kind of “personal bible” that he always has tucked into the outside of his carry-on when he travels.

I don’t have any personal bibles, but I do have things I can’t imagine leaving home without. As a writer, I obviously never travel without pen and paper. Pencils I do not love, so it’s gotta be a pen — preferably more than one, just in case. I’m also addicted to those little Moleskine journals — unlined and blank, with the pocket in the back — but to be honest I find a small pile of index cards to be one of the most useful tools ever.

And a book. Of course. I can’t imagine breathing without a book. Mostly I try to read something related to the place I’m going to. A novel, preferably, unless I come up with a travel classic like Thubron or Chatwin or Morris. Most modern travel books I find, frankly, too shallow. That is, they’re less about the place than they are about the bumbling adventures of the writer. I’m just not interested. But for a trip like this, that’s a bit spur of the moment and where I’ll be revisiting old haunts, I’m just as likely to scrounge among the 38 books in my to-be-read pile and take anything that looks interesting.

The ideas we take that could be cliches but that they’re real: curiosity, a sense of adventure, an open mind, a willingness to learn and be taught. The memorization of please, thank you, where is the bathroom, etc., in any language. A map.

But there’s one thing that I no longer carry and it still rankles, every time. The exciting prospects of travel dip a little with the removal of my pocket knife from my handbag. Now this is a stickler. Honestly, among anyone reading this, who used to travel without a pocket knife? I never did. I’d be just as likely to leave a finger behind as one of my knives. I’ve got a selection of them: the old multi-use and heavy Swiss Army knife that used to be my grandfather’s and really needs a cleaning, the tiny Victorinox flat knife set that almost as slim as a credit card and holds all sort of random tools (like an LED light and, yay, a pen the size of a toothpick), the lightweight knife with a jagged edge that my mountain-man stepfather gave me, and my favorite, the slightly heavy but small and simple knife with a smooth wooden handle that my sister and her Texas-native husband sent from Houston.

I really, really miss traveling without a knife. At home I’ve always got one in my handbag, ready to open packages, slice an apple, or pop out a tightly wedged battery. I’ve used it to whittle willow sticks for roasting marshmallows and for jiggling open the back of my computer keyboard. I never dreamed of leaving behind this simple little tool when I traveled until — well, you know. We’re just not allowed anymore.

It’s always one of the last things I do before leaving for the airport. Got passport, check. Got credit or debit card just in case, check. Got water bottle, yup. Got a book to read, always. Got knife? Whoops. I slide it out of the pocket where it usually jostles around with my lip balm and a few index cards, and leave it on the kitchen counter. Always with regret and not a little annoyance.