Title Image: Food Truck Rodeo, Farmer’s Market, Central Park, Durham NC. Even food truck food in foodie town Durham, NC is delicious. Fifteen years ago Durham did not have a restaurant culture, and the downtown was dead. There was only the now-closed Magnolia Grill, which had opened in 1986 on Ninth Street that could be […]
Toward the end of September Charlotte, North Carolina captured negative national attention for being the latest city rocked by protests in the wake of the shooting death of an African-American man at the hands of the police. Two days after the incidents I went to Charlotte to visit family, and I thought that while Charlotte, […]
Title Photo: Duke University West Campus, seen from the dorm quads In April, when I left Durham, North Carolina for my around-the-world trip, I was not expecting to return to Duke University in September and find it one of the more surprising places I’ve been in the past few months. And I can say this […]
Linguist Johanna Nichols has identified two types of geographic zones relevant for comparative work in linguistics: the linguistic residual zone and the linguistic spread zone. Linguistic Residual Zones A linguistic residual zone tends to be a relatively small, often geographically enclosed area. A higher number of languages from different language families are spoken here than in the areas surrounding […]
I’m in the Bay Area around San Francisco, the second leg of my trip around the world. My niece, Julia, and her family live in Mill Valley, just north of San Francisco. My sister, Carol, and her husband, Phil, live in Carmel Valley. It’s about two and a half hours south of the city, around […]
This week I’m beginning my around-the-world adventure, which will last five months. I’m leaving Orlando Florida to go to Durham NC, my first stop. As a world traveler I have come to appreciate home in a way I used to take for granted. At the moment my home is Florida. In my bedroom I have […]