Tag Archives: travel

The New Thanksgiving Travel

Posted on November 23, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Thanksgiving Travel You used to see the Bay; now on the way to SFOa bevy of clashing billboards, all blood-bright graphics and codes incomprehensible to the AI-dumb among us.Dumb and dumber.   Look at the airline staff: all yawns, blank, demoted to … Continue reading →

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Be Here Now, California (gaps included)

Posted on November 16, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Imagine, at this age, to have brought beginner’s mind to California.  Where have I been?  In the land of the skeptic, in France.  But what luck to have had California before me.  Full-on sensory discovery. Enthusiasm has a way of being boundless. (Forgive me … Continue reading →

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The Blue Door in our Dreams

Posted on July 28, 2025 by jillbpearlman

There’s always a blue door in our dreams,in our former lives. A cerulean blue door, with wooden slats held by a small hook in the white plastered wall.   It opens, closes and opens, screeching like a sickowl, such are the vagaries … Continue reading →

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Half Empty, Half Full

Posted on July 14, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Café life, the terrace seats and tiny spoonsand lovers’ faces in the sun. A trampy man demands to buy a bottle of water; the garçon says we don’t sell bottles; the bum grumbles into his half-shaven jaw: Je veux une bouteille d’eau.  They are … Continue reading →

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Salt Water & Suffering

Posted on April 13, 2025 by jillbpearlman

Saying shema in the oldest synagoguein Fès part of a run-on sentence said before and after me,  as the long-gone rabbi still brays among lanterns and blue walls and sheep graze on the hillsides belowamong soul-white stones of the Jewish dead. As … Continue reading →

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Strait Up

Posted on April 6, 2025 by jillbpearlman

How narrow the narrow straits.  That divide us.  The width of a new moon.  The crescent of a fingernail clipping.  The narrows of sea washing between land fringed and scalloped – one side Africa, one side Europe.  A shudder of civilizations in that two-lidded eye … Continue reading →

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Lunching in Morocco during Ramadan

Posted on April 2, 2025 by jillbpearlman

To peer through the window, being Jewish, while the dominant culture celebrates its religious holiday; Christmas is the familiar scenario, but Ramadan a whole different thing. Three Ramadan weeks in Morocco, lunching in front of people who had woken at … Continue reading →

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Black Pork Cheeks, Fries, Political Football

Posted on July 21, 2024 by jillbpearlman

We were winding around the margins of a small village in the margins of Portugal, looking for a late Sunday night dinner.  Earlier there had been sun-drenchedempty alleys…now a traditional room, wooden sideboards with wine glass on crocheted lace. White tablecloths layered … Continue reading →

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Lightness Lost and Found

Posted on December 10, 2023 by jillbpearlman

Lightness of spirit! I had been chasing my joie de vivre, wondering where it could be hiding. I had been on the front lines of culture wars, in the trenches, laboring to talk to all sides. I was looking for … Continue reading →

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The Guest

Posted on March 19, 2023 by jillbpearlman

For three weeks, I was a guest: to different showersAnd toilet flushes in the West, to coffee houses, to apps,to rosemary as box shrub.  A guest to my suitcase.  To hot tubs and skin in the garden of my tiny cottage. Guest to … Continue reading →

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