It wasn’t until I downloaded the photos from the F1 race that I noticed the tattoo on his arm.

What, exactly, inspired the kind of devotion to racing that would compel a man to tattoo a car on his forearm? I couldn’t imagine.

After watching today’s race, though, I felt like I maybe understood… not enough to get a tattoo, mind you, but enough to have a deep appreciation for this sport. In fact, I felt like I actually understood life itself a little bit better. Racing requires incredible amounts of mental discipline and emotional control, and there were plenty of take-away lessons:

1. A great racer is nothing without the team.
I’ve long been more interested in the people behind the scenes who make things happen than the people who are up on stage, headlining an act, so this characteristic of racing pulled me right in. In racing, the crew is everything. You can have the best driver in the world, but if his crew isn’t tight, then he’ll have a hell of a time pulling to the front of the pack.

One of the Red Bull crews at F1, Valencia

2. Egotism has to be replaced with self-awareness and self-assuredness.
Each racing team spends millions on attracting top talent– not just drivers, but mechanics, engineers, designers, data crunchers, PR people, and peons. But no matter how good each one is, he’s got to keep his ego in check. The limited space and time available for prepping a car before a race create an environment where peacocking isn’t permitted. Each team member keeps his head down, focuses on his job, and realizes that his contribution is just one of many, which together make a safe, successful race possible.

Keeping their heads down.

3. You’ll get out of the pit faster if you can change your tires in 1.5 seconds.
If I had to choose the single element of this entire experience that absolutely blew my mind, it was this: a pit crew can change a set of tires in less than two seconds. Do you understand what kind of coordination and teamwork that requires? (They can also set up and break down entire garages in less than 12 hours).

How fast can you change four tires?

4. Attention to detail is everything.
Racing doesn’t permit a single lazy moment from anyone on the team. If you take a close look at this photo, you’ll see that everyone is either (a) doing something or (b) paying attention to what’s going on in case they need to step in and help out. No one’s staring off into space or playing with their iPhone. When it’s race time, there are zero distractions.

Focus.

5. The greater the investment, the greater the risk.
These cars are expensive. The crews are expensive. The transportation and shipping of vehicles and gear are expensive. Racing is not a hobbyist’s game; it’s a big business. And when the investment is high, so is the risk. The only way to mitigate that in racing is to know your job and do it well.

Seems like a pretty good metaphor for life.

High stakes

One of the Formula 1 cars used by bestlap F1 events

The hardest thing is to quiet my mind.

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to ride in a Formula 1 car on the same practice track that racers use to prepare for the Formula 1 race in Valencia. It’s a top-shelf, peak experience, even for someone like me: someone who knew nothing about racing before I was invited to Valencia to speak at a social media conference and then participate in F1 events, including a behind-the-scenes tour of the Team Lotus garage.

It’s also an expensive experience, and one I’m grateful to have as a guest of the local tourism board.

After signing a waiver (in brief: “You could die doing this. Please sign to acknowledge risk.”) and listening to a briefing by driver Felix Porteiro, I zip up my fireproof jumpsuit, tie the laces on my red, ankle-high loaner sneakers, and pick up a pair of yellow foam earplugs. When it’s my turn for two fast laps around the circuit, an assistant pulls a balaclava over my head and then pushes a tight helmet on top of that, pulling the chin straps.

Suddenly, excited anticipation is tempered by acute anxiety. The helmet is so tight that it pushes my cheeks smack up against my jaws. The rush of heat is immediate; the heavy safety gear and the relentless sun create an oven effect and I feel desperate for air. The laps will go fast, I know, but can I make it through them?

I climb into the car, seated to Felix’s left. I can see his eyes in a side mirror and there’s something about them I trust. But as the assistant tells me to shimmy farther down into the car, almost horizontal, and as he pulls the four point restraint seatbelt harness tight around my waist, I am gripped with fear. No one wants to be inside my mind right now, consumed as it is with the irrational thoughts that plague many of us when we are confronting a situation–no matter how exciting–for which we have no prior experience to serve as a point of reference.

The car is being checked and a camera is being secured to the car body by a video blogger. Just when I think “I can climb out of this car right this second,” we’re ready to go. I look at the assistant and ask him what to do in the event of a total freak out… because, honestly, I feel like it’s entirely possible. My mind is racing with crazy thoughts, like “What if I throw up inside my helmet and suffocate on my own vomit?” and “What if I pass out?”

“Just signal Felix,” the assistant says, as he snaps my visor into place and Felix hits the gas.

At this point, there’s absolutely no turning back. We are screaming down the track and for the first five seconds I think I might spontaneously combust- not because of the experience itself, but because I can’t control my own thoughts. This is high octane meditation: “Breathe. Breathe. Let go. Breathe,” I keep telling myself.

The Cheste F1 practice circuit, just outside Valencia.

And then, just as we’re coming out of the straightaway and into the first curve, it all just falls away. I feel the blood coursing through my body in a way I have never felt in my life and it is indescribably exhilarating. It’s as if I have gone into my own body, turned inward, and I’m hurtling at light speed through my own blood vessels.

It’s insane and it feels good and the fears of biting my cheeks and drowning in vomit disappear, replaced by the desire to just go faster. Three-quarters of the way through the first lap, Felix looks at me in the mirror and raises his hand: thumbs up? Am I ok?

I raise a thumb and keep it up. How he can even take a hand off the wheel at this speed is beyond me.

The "after" shot.

As we pull into the pit, just three minutes after we went screaming down the track, I stumble out of the car, peel out of the top half of the jump suit, and all I can think is “More.”

*
If you’re in Valencia and want to ride in a Formula 1 car, contact Carlos Molla Bataller of bestlap F1 events at cmolla@bestlap.es or by phone: 96 141 77 28.

Everything I’ve read to date about the Museo Soumaya has left me dissatisfied… not the facts, which are what they are (a museum housing 66,000 or so pieces of art acquired by Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man), but the assessment of the collection (“tragic”); Slim’s style of collecting (“more of a bargain hunter than an aesthete”); the building in which the museum is housed (“like an oversize mushroom thought up by Magritte”); and even the neighborhood itself (“the slick establishments paving the way are just enough to make you forget you’re in Mexico”– as if Mexico can only be slick or poverty-ridden).

Everyone’s entitled to his/her own opinion, of course, and here’s mine: the collection may seem random (Dali, Rodin, Mexican masters), but I prefer to think of it as the reflection of diverse interests. Who but an absolute art snob cares, anyway? There are some incredible pieces in the collection and you don’t have to look hard to find them; check out this intricate piece, made entirely of rice paper (except the frame, obviously) in 1883:

There are pieces in this collection I haven’t seen the likes of anywhere else, and that’s particularly true of the religious art.

I mean, take a look at this version of Eve, literally coming out of Adam’s rib:

The curation is excellent, particularly in the gallery exhibiting 20th century Mexican painting, where thematic preoccupations are grouped together in a way that’s logical and obvious without being redundant and boring.

Bottom line: Who cares about Slim? It’s about the art.

For more photos from the Soumaya, check out this gallery.

Yesterday was International Women’s Day and March is Women’s History Month, so we wanted to honor women we’ve met in our travels by sharing photos and a bit of their stories here.

Aura Trespalacios, the matriarch of the Trespalacios family, helps maintain the tradition of making filigree gold jewelry, a craft they’ve nurtured over generations. Mompox, Colombia

We spent hours talking with this woman in San Sebastian, Puerto Rico, but I realize only now that we never asked her name. She roasts coffee and gives demonstrations at the Hacienda El Jibarito, Puerto Rico’s first agritourism inn.

This woman waits on the Mexican side of the border in Tijuana. Her husband will meet her… on the American side. They’ll talk and touch through the small holes in the fence.

As I looked through our photos from Brazil, I realized that none of the formal meetings we were scheduled to have were with women. Women were a “backdrop” to the agenda.

We spent last week in New England, visiting properties in New Hampshire and Vermont while working on a story about what makes hotels “green,” or environmentally friendly.

It was Francisco’s and Mariel’s first trip to these two states, and my first return years after a childhood family trip.

These states have always struck me as a bit different from the rest of the US. Hugging each other, one is notoriously conservative, the other notoriously liberal. Yet both, in their own ways, seem deeply private, interested in preserving what they view as their own (whether land or ways of living), and marked by a certain nativism.

“It looks like the kind of place where people buy deer burger,” Francisco said as we entered the Franconia Pass in New Hampshire right at dusk. When I wrote that on Twitter, locals replied, “They don’t BUY deer burger; they shoot it.”

*
We forget how diverse our own countries are. Not 300 miles from where we live in New York City, there’s this whole other world, a world where “Moose Crossing” signs replace “Pedestrian Xing,” where people shoot and skin the meat they eat, where people still make their own syrup.

It’s important to step into that world once in a while, to get away from billboards and buzz and the comfort of relatively anonymous urban living and to sit with people who talk about what it’s like to farm land, or make handcrafts out of timber leavings, or who are opposed to windmill farms because they’ll blight the landscape.

It’s important to remember to contest this popular yet fallacious idea that somehow we’ve all become homogenized.

Chew on that when you eat your next hamburger.

We’ve visited many cemeteries while traveling: the Petit Family Cemetery on the land where I grew up in South Carolina, where the graves of slaves are indicated with simple rocks.

Cementerio Colon in Havana, Cuba, where the sister of Francisco’s son is buried.

The local cemetery in Mompox, Colombia, at night, during a ceremony honoring the dead, candles flickering on tombstones and families holding hands, some crying, some talking quietly, some entirely silent and meditative.

The municipal cemetery in Ponce, Puerto Rico, where ostentatious monuments marking the final resting place of former governors and famous families draw attention from the old crypts, cracked open by decay, displaying bones on the back retaining wall of the cemetery.

New Orleans’ St. Louis Cemetery

a cemetery in southern Chile

It’s not that we have a fetish for the dead. But there’s something illustrative about a place, a culture, and its people that can be narrated without words when you visit a cemetery.
*
Perhaps you’ve visited cemeteries on your travels, too, or stopped at the graves of the famous dead to honor them or simply say you’d been there.

But like us, you probably haven’t spent much time at the cemetery in your hometown.

Woodlawn Cemetery, one of New York City’s cemeteries, is located in the north Bronx in an area that was considered rural back in 1863, when the cemetery was founded. More than 300,000 people have been buried at Woodlawn since then, and many of them constitute a Who’s Who list of American public life.

We visited recently:

The tomb of Miles Davis

The mausoleum of Augustus Juilliard, founder of The Juilliard School

The tomb of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an abolitionist and advocate of women’s rights, famous for writing The Declaration of Sentiments

The tomb of Joseph Pulitzer, the so-called father of journalism. Founded Columbia University’s School of Journalism and the Pulitzer Prize.

The modest tomb of Ralph Bunche, who, among many other accomplishments, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, the first African American to receive the honor.

What cemeteries have you visited on your travels and what have they taught you?

January

The first trip of the year was my work-related jaunt to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. I left there like I leave most places: wanting much more time to dig in deep and get to know and understand it. The trip to St. Kitts renewed my passion for Caribbean history and development, which had largely been dormant since leaving Puerto Rico and simultaneously putting my PhD studies on hold at the end of 2007. St. Kitts was also a special way to start 2009 because it was there that I learned I was probably pregnant!

From St. Kitts, Francisco and I headed to Washington, D.C. to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency. We were joined on our road trip by friends Emon Hassan and Kaitlin Foley. I led a group of students on an educational tour that culminated on the national lawn before the crack of dawn on the morning of the inauguration. Though I worried I’d lost my toes to the cold, I couldn’t have been happier to be a witness among hundreds of thousands of others to that historic moment.

February

In February, we said what we hope will be a temporary good-bye to Mexico City, as our residency visas were not renewed.

There was little time to process this huge move before I headed further south–this time to Brazil, to celebrate Carnaval in the cities of Recife, Olinda, and Pelourinho. While I enjoyed being a participant observer in the festivities, I was acutely aware of how the celebration is experienced differently because of race. Between my observations in St. Kitts and my experiences in Brazil, I was well on my way to making the decision to resume my doctoral studies.

March, April, and May

As winter wore off, we immersed ourselves into our city as never before: PEN World Voices Festival, the High Line, Governor’s Island… to name just a few.

June and July

The summer months were spent in Puerto Rico, our former home. In June, Francisco and I both led student tours for EF Smithsonian; in July, we conducted extensive research all over the island for an assignment for Fodor’s Puerto Rico (to be published in September 2010). B

August, September, and October

As the birth of our daughter, Mariel Paloma, approached, we revived our NYC immersion exercise. We visited museums we’d never entered before– the Museum of the American Indian, the NYC Police Museum, and the Museum of Chinese in America–and attended events like the Dragonboat Festival and Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Festival.

November

Boston and South Carolina were on the calendar for November. Boston for meetings and an emotional reunion with one of Francisco’s sons; South Carolina to celebrate Thanksgiving.

December

St. Thomas,

South Carolina, and

Florida:

Somehow, we managed to pack them all into December and touched down at home in NYC on New Year’s Eve, ready to welcome in 2010 at home!

What’s in store for 2010?
We never really know for sure, but Mariel’s first trip to Cuba is one possibility. We’ll be in South Carolina in June for my brother’s wedding. Puerto Rico never seems to be too far from our plans. And 2010 is definitely the year of America! We plan to explore the US like never before!

We’ll also be more faithful in updating this blog– both in content and in design. We have big plans for this year, so keep reading! And keep sharing your own stories with us, too.

**
In June 2008 Francisco and I went to New Orleans to work with the Culinary Corps, a voluntourism organization I profiled in this article.

It was Francisco’s first time in the city and my third, but for both of us, it was our first post-Katrina visit and we were astounded by the amount of recovery work that still needed to be done. The photos below are from that visit.
**

New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, closed after Katrina.

A tattered American flag that hadn’t been replaced, three years after the hurricane.

What do you do when your country hasn’t listened to you?

If even City Hall hasn’t been razed or rehabbed, what can we possibly expect for the rest of the city?

It’s always striking how some fragile items remain intact.

A house “tattooed” with search, rescue, and recovery information.

**
To see the rest of our New Orleans photos, visit our New Orleans album on Flickr.

Other articles we’ve written about New Orleans:

*Top 6 Volunteer Experiences in New Orleans

*Top 10 Reasons to Travel to New Orleans NOW
*5 Tips for a New Orleans Escape

There’s the temptation to see Memorial Day as a sale day. As the day the pool opens for the summer season. As a day for a backyard BBQ.

If you’re not directly affected by the war–and by that, I mean, if you don’t have a loved one or close friend serving in the military or living with the physical or psychological wounds of a past war– it’s easy to see Memorial Day just as a much-needed day off of work.

It’s preferable, perhaps, to avoid thinking about the war, especially if you (like me) are liberal. And it’s easier still not to think about the people serving when you don’t know them personally, easier to think of service members as a group, and not as unique individuals with diverse backgrounds, political opinions, and aspirations.

Today, I’m thinking about the men I met last October when I visited the US naval base and joint task force detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Far from the gaze of Americans, isolated on an island that doesn’t want them and where most of them don’t want to be, beyond the reach of ordinary Americans to know, see, and talk with them, the service members who are at Guantanamo have largely been cast as a group of bad guys and have little–if any–opportunity to contest that characterization publicly.

Yet as I sat with the men at meals and interviewed them at length, what struck me–and humbled me–over and over again, was how unique each person was. This one wanted to visit “Cuba proper.” That one thought the US immigration policy is unfair and inadequate. This one was a poet. That one wanted to be a professor. Few, if any, of the men I met fit any of the stereotypes we like to foist upon service members.

You can read more about the men’s stories on my travel blog. And while you’re BBQ’ing or swimming, or just enjoying the day off, take a second to think about the people who serve in the military. Whether we agree with the war or we don’t (and I don’t), every man and woman fighting is someone with a dream, a political opinion, and a past that might surprise you.

Shot in Manhattan on May 17, 2009.