For all that lures tourists to Bangkok — orchids, cheap massages, mango and sticky rice — this is not a city that pampers its residents. Proper pavements are a rarity. Tangles of power lines dangle dangerously. A profusion of plastic bags chokes canals and ever-expanding trash heaps.
Much of the fauna that flourishes, like cockroaches, rats the size of cats and the occasional python snaking in through a toilet, is of the alarming variety.
I think I'll go to Dollywood this summer
Hotel gloom, an amorphous melancholy that seems to thrive in the perfectly serviceable hotel rooms of the $200-a-night-and-under variety.
Have pity for poor Al Jackson: You fly first class, you’re blue chip at the rental car counter, you go through the platinum rewards member line at the hotel, but you’re still in that same lonely hotel room.
The town is populated with gin-drinking alcoholics, horny neglected housewives, gimps, crazed professors, lunatic children of professors, and rich snobs with secret weaknesses.
-JA
Just a short trip to any French territory in the Pacific is enough to convince even the most casual observer that the French are among the most self-serving, manipulative, trivial-minded, obnoxious, cynical, and corrupting nations on the face of the earth.
-PT
(page 363)
The only window in my room gave out on a gloomy fetid air shaft, from which a revolting odor arose. The walls, the bed, the table, and the floor were black. Black with cockroaches.
-RK
THE HERMIT KINGDOM:
DOWN IN THE HOLLER:
I may move.
If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.
-VSN
If I were a king, the worst punishment I could inflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons.
-JL
Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.
-S
The houses seem to have been decorated with rust, blood, tears, bile, rheum, and elephant dung. Nothing can terrify me more that the thought of being doomed to spend the rest of my days in such a place.
-HM
New York City's vast Port Authority Terminal is a terrifying place in which to find oneself coping on one's own. It is important to resist the temptation to sit down and weep.
-EM
L.A. is such a big city, and there's so much going on. I mean, you know you're in L.A. when you can just hear sirens all the time.
-CS
I was born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Madrid, Spain. Then I moved to New Jersey.
-DF
New Jersey is very big. There are different areas of New Jersey. There is North New Jersey. There is like the center. There are a lot of actors from New Jersey that don't speak with a New Jersey accent.
-JM
What does our Concord culture amount to? Our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.
-HDT
Imagine seven million people all wanting to live together. Yeah, New York must be the friendliest place on earth.
-MD
Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.
-EH
I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.
-EM
I adore water, so it would be a real adventure to visit the Amazon before they chop down all the trees.
-MR
Q: I've got some vacation time coming up. How's that Ulaanbaatar? Nice?
MM: Dusty and run-down.
Q: You don't say. What about the accomodations?
MM: Half the population live in outlying yurt slums.
Q: Sounds rough.
MM: Mongolia is one of the toughest countries - with the toughest people - on earth.
Q: Remember, I'm from Bayonne.
MM: Beat-downs, in fact, are not at all uncommon in Ulaanbaatar.
Q: Son of a gun! And how's the night life?
MM: Ulaanbaatar is a place with a Nazi bar, where the only chain restaurant is a Kenny Rogers Roasters, a town where you risk a beating just by stepping out of your front door.
Q: Maybe I'll just head on down to Ocean City.
I'm dying to go to India... because the culture seems so vastly different from what I'm used to in the States. I would love to do some yoga there. And be amongst people who are so different than myself. There's so much you can learn from people who grew up in a different environment.
-CBA
I think that the Japanese culture is one of the very few cultures left that is its own entity. They're just so traditional and so specific in their ways. It's kind of untouched, it's not Americanized.
-TC
Space excites me. My dream is to go to space.
-KG
MATT DAMON:
GERMAN GUY:
The thing that I like about Germany is that Germans are so much like us. It's not like going to some other countries, where the differences are overwhelming and you walk around in a fog. Germans are so similar to Americans.
-MD
In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.
-BM
I love Philadelphia. I was shocked at what a great city this is. For me, it is the cat's pajamas. I love everything about it. I love where I live. I love the people. I have been met with such kindness and affection here.
-GD
I hate going to islands. The only island I like is Long Island.
-HS
I grew up in Newport, Rhode Island, which is an uncomfortable combination of tourist trade, fishermen, craftsmen and drunks.
-TD
I wouldn't have fled or anything, but I sure didn't want to go to some country I knew nothing about to fight a war. I was in favor of bombing the enemy into oblivion.
-JR
Europe was a horrible place. There was nothing on TV. The food was terrible. And they don't even have ice. Who doesn't have ice?
-JR
I don't know why people are so down on the Best Western. They have the best sweet potato fries I've ever had.
-CM
I'm not particularly fond of the Hamptons.
-LR
I've been lucky enough to stand on both poles, but the place that seemed the remotest to me was Butugychag, a former gulag in Siberia. It is completely cut off from the rest of the world.
-MP
It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
-WH
I'm South American, and growing up in New York, I had the total stereotypical way of thinking of what Texas was about. I'm like, Texas. Big. Cows. Cowboys. Cowboy hats and cowboy boots. And barbeque.
-PG
Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval.
-KH
Going to Peru is, well, if you ever have an opportunity in your life to go there, you should do it because it is absolutely mind boggling.
-DS
I’ve traveled around the world and I gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down Market St in San Francisco. Why the heart of our city has to be overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash I have no clue.
In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city.
-GC
Britain is a very cold, uninhabitable country with small houses.
-RM
I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa.
-GW
Nothing gives me as much pleasure as travelling. I love getting on trains and boats and planes.
-AR
Q: I heard you just got back from Monrovia, over there in Liberia. Nice place to visit?
Tim B: Monrovia was a zombie city, a living-dead sort of place.
Q: Is it easy to get around? Nice shops?
Tim B: Cars were a rarity and commerce barely functioned so its population was condemned to plod around the damp, dilapidated streets on a treadmill of survival.
Q: How were the accommodations?
Tim B: I was charged 80 pounds a night for a room with unwashed, damp sheets and mosquitoes that droned like Stuka dive-bombers.
Q: Anything else of note?
Tim B: The dominant smell I found when I finally got to Liberia was one of decay. It came from corpses rotting among the spent bullet casings on Bushrod Island.... And it came from raw sewage clogging the streets from broken drains overwhelmed by Liberia's notoriously intense rainy season.
Q: Know anything about the Finger Lakes?
Ritual murder remains common in West Africa, nowhere more so than in Liberia, and among the various risks I had been warned of were trophy-hunting killers known as 'heartmen.' Thet stalk human prey before attacking and removing the heart or another body part....
Heartmen are not imaginary bogeymen whipped up to keep unruly children in check. In rural Liberia they are very real.
-TB
I want to travel. Maybe I'll end up living in Norway, making cakes.
-EG
I'd live in Glasgow if I could. I can't praise it enough; it's the nicest place I have ever worked and I've worked in a lot of nice places.
-RM