The Turk Who Loved Apples Read Online Free PDF

That’s how you go broke.
    No, if you want to go to, say, Tokyo, first you come up with an angle: some subset of activities or specific thematic bent. For example, ramen. Hugely popular in America, both the inexpensive, dried, college-food form and the fresh, high-end New York restaurant style, ramen is, in Japan, a full-blown cultural phenomenon. There are ramen magazines, ramen TV shows, ramen bloggers, a ramen museum, and five thousand ramen shops in Tokyo alone. So: seeing and understanding Tokyo by trying to make sense of its ramen shops and ramen aficionados—Tokyo through a noodly lens—that’s the angle.
    Then you figure out what the story will cost to report—or really, how you can do it as cheaply as possible, since magazine and newspaper budgets are always tight—and when you can do it, and the editor has to see if it conflicts with any other stories in the pipeline, and then, finally, the editor says yes, and you sign a contract that specifies how much you can spend and how little you’ll be paid—and then off you go to Tokyo!
    More or less, that’s how I got myself there in December 2009, and—after scouring Web postings and corralling Tokyo’s ramen bloggers—I spent a week eating four bowls of ramen a day: pork bone ramen, miso ramen, cheese ramen. That was a pretty damn delicious trip. And I couldn’t have done it, either the on-the-ground reporting or the actual writing of the story, without intense preparation.
    But the hell with intense preparation! Maybe I was just getting old, but I seemed to remember a time, long before I became a travel writer, when I not only didn’t prepare but couldn’t prepare, when I didn’t have the tools to plan ahead because those tools hadn’t been invented yet. And yet those adventures seemed more real to me, more all-encompassing, more life-changing, more objectively important. I looked back on them nostalgically, knowing they’d made me the traveler I am today even though they seemed to have happened to an entirely different person. In short, I found myself facing questions that all travelers face, but now on a deeper, more existential level: How did I get from where I started to here? And how do I get back there again?
    M y first memory of travel is a simple one: I am four years old, or maybe five or six, sitting in the backseat of the family station wagon, looking out the window. It is raining, and fairly hard, too. Hard enough that the raindrops defy gravity, streaking up and rolling across the window just slowly enough that I can follow theirprogress—trace their wobbly trails—until they dead-end in the slat of vertical rubber. Then I drag my gaze back to find a new droplet.
    Where are we Grosses going? In my memory, it’s always to my paternal grandparents’ house, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, about a two-hour trip from our home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Two hours is a long time for a little kid, made longer by the abstractedness of the journey. What are Amherst and Bridgeport? How are they connected geographically? The fact is, I don’t know, and I don’t know enough to even ask the questions. There are steps I remember are necessary to take. We will cross the Connecticut River via the Coolidge Bridge. At some point, we will drive down something called the Merritt Parkway. Finally, we will turn onto Dixon Street, whose Waspy name always seems so proper and stately that it’s almost a joke that people called Gross live there.
    And that’s it: the road, the rain, the minor details that drizzled into my consciousness, the sense that we would begin one place and end at another, and that if I were relatively patient, I would be rewarded with hugs and gifts from my grandmother. Beyond that, I knew—and expected—nothing. This was how journeys went. You started out at one place, and ended in another, and spent most of the time in between in a state of semi-boredom