Millionaires, they're just like us.
16.09.2024 - 05:22 / insider.com
I was chest-deep in bathwater, listening to the sound of soapy foam popping. I'd timed the moment so that when the clock struck midnight — and I turned 40 — I'd be soaking in a bubble bath on the coast of Algeria. I needed an elegant backdrop as I stared my future in the face.
I'd splurged on a single night in a sprawling hilltop estate with arches and colorful tiles.
Palms rustled outside my window, and lights twinkled over the Bay of Algiers. The hotel had been constructed in a Moorish revival style at the end of the 19th century. I was used to more spartan sleeping arrangements, having spent much of my 30s as a freelance journalist.
For the past several years, I'd been working a desk job and on autopilot. It started at some point during those mushy, airless pandemic years. A therapist would pinpoint my numbness to when my dad's heart suddenly stopped, in 2020.
In those Covid-averse days, nobody wanted to gather in groups, least of all to embrace tearful, snotty mourners. So, we never had a funeral.
Related stories
I flew to California, where my dad spent his final years, and gathered with my brothers, hoping to do something symbolic, like stack stones at the beach or scream into the surf. But a Trump rally was whooping through town that day, and the sky glimmered apocalyptic-orange from wildfires. We renounced our imagined grieving rituals. Eating fish tacos in a socially distanced circle would have to suffice.
But malaise had already crept in before that staggering loss. Life had grown predictable and soft, thickening around the middle like an aging waistline.
Overwork had something to do with it. I'd spent carefree years bouncing around Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon, Sri Lanka and Mexico, India and Armenia. Then in my mid-30s, I wandered into a full-time desk job.
"Living death," that's how my philosopher-slash-guitarist father had nicknamed office work. No surprises. Every day felt the same. The role itself — designing photo exhibits and documenting peace initiatives — was often fascinating, and I welcomed the reprieve from financial precarity.
But sitting under fluorescent lights all day made me feel like a caged panther. Or maybe a cyborg. I wasn't prepared for corporate culture.
Months in, a colleague's mother died. "Condolences," I wrote as the subject line of an Outlook email, though I wanted to shatter our cubicle decorum and howl in vicarious despair.
Then, my own dad died, and the colleague simply hit reply and added her own message of sympathy. How bleak our bloodless exchange felt. Was this how I'd spend the rest of my life, marking traumatic milestones with Microsoft Office notifications?
Grief was overwhelming, but productivity required putting on a happy face at work. I
Millionaires, they're just like us.
Disneyland Resort just rolled out discounts for kids and hotel stays next year.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jennison Grigsby, an American mom and yoga teacher who lives in Valencia, Spain. It's been edited for length and clarity.
In the mid-70s, my then-boyfriend Barry and I tested our commitment to each other by exploring Britain's national parks and villages in a used campervan for three months.
Global Entry is a Truster Traveler Program that grants expedited customs clearance for preapproved, low-risk travelers entering the U.S. through dedicated security lanes at more than 75 airports.
This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Anu Verma, a trauma recovery coach , podcast host, and author of the book "Victim 2 Victor."
The Ray-Ban Meta AI-powered glasses are getting a feature for live voice translation.
Ankara, the Turkish capital, has been wilting under days of intense heat. Our taxi driver lets us out at the station with a gift of a cool apple. The forecourt is a mess of commuters competing for taxis and minivans. Through its automatic doors, though, is a gleaming air-conditioned cathedral to Turkey’s high-speed rail. The relief is short-lived—a uniformed attendant at the information window soon informs us our train, the Doğu Ekspresi (translation: Eastern Express) actually departs from the old station next door.
The Dominican Republic is already an incredible vacation destination, full of pristine beaches, picture-perfect palm trees and a long list of incredible resorts, including some of our favorite all-inclusive resorts in the world.
As Apple and Google respectively expand their digital ID technologies to house state mobile driver's licenses in Apple and Google Wallet, Google has added an international travel feature to its wallet.
While there are countless ways to cook eggs, chefs currently seem fixated on the most hedonistic option: hard boiling and then coating them in a layer of ground meat before breading and frying them. Known as Scotch eggs, the treats are said to have been pioneered by the London epicurean shop Fortnum & Mason in 1738, after which they quickly became a fixture of British pub cuisine. The chef Ed Szymanski, 31, of Lord’s in New York recalls the Scotch eggs he encountered growing up in London as both ubiquitous and “quite bad.” His version features Madras-style spiced lamb in place of the usual pork sausage. “It’s like a supercharged croquette with an egg in the middle,” he says. In Seattle, the chef Sean Arakaki, 30, is also seeking to elevate the flavors of his childhood. Born and raised in Hawaii, he grew up eating loco moco: a hamburger patty served over gravy-drenched white rice with a sunny-side-up egg. At Itsumono, his restaurant in Seattle’s Japantown, his loco moco Scotch egg arrives atop rice and gravy with a side of macaroni salad. “You cut through the crumb to get to a runny yolk,” he says. For his Portland, Ore., food cart Tokyo Sando, the owner Taiki Nakajima, 36, makes a rendition with ajitama — soy-marinated boiled eggs — enveloped in a gyoza-inspired mix of ground pork and chicken with ginger and soy. Encrusted with panko and deep-fried, the eggs are sandwiched between slices of Japanese bread with mayo, roasted black garlic and cabbage. And in Mumbai, India, the chef Hussain Shahzad, 37, of O Pedro wraps his version in chile- and vinegar-laced ground lamb, drizzling on vindaloo sauce when the egg comes out of the fryer. “It’s not a monotonous dish,” he says. “You get crisp crust, juiciness from the meat and the runny yolk … playing on the palate at the same time. There are so many layers to it.” —
Travelers heading to the United Kingdom next year will have to pay a fee to enter as the country prepares to implement its long-anticipated electronic travel authorization (ETA) fee.