Author: Ben Starr
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Weird Christmases
Christmas seems to get more and more distant the older I get. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have children. Or perhaps Christmas in America IS, indeed, changing. More frantic. Less time to prepare, but a stronger, unspoken obligation to prepare, and a heavy guilt trip if you don’t. There’s a distinct voice in my head…
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From Cairo, part 4
Wow. So much has happened today that if I had started to write it all down in my journal, I would have been writing nonstop and nothing else would have happened. The unfortunate side to this is that I have lost many little details to oblivion. The wonderful side of this is that if I…
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Australia, part 1
Greetings from Sydney, Australia! I’m sending this on Friday morning at 10:00am, but for most of you it’s 5:00pm on Thursday. J-P and I flew here yesterday after just barely escaping a big ice storm that practically shut down the DFW airport just a few hours after our plane departed. Our flight from Los Angeles…
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Australia, part 2
So we just spent a lovely day in Sydney, doing all the quintessential Sydney things… I stripped naked in front of the opera house and got a fantastic Butt and Scarf photo. We strolled through The Rocks, a collection of the oldest buildings in Australia. We took the ferry to Manley, Sydney’s beach town, and…
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Australia, part 3
I’m sorry I haven’t written in three days. It’s not because I haven’t had access, a connected computer has been sitting next to my bed the entire time. It’s simply because these Aussies live a RIDICULOUSLY hedonistic lifestyle, and we’ve just been caught up in it all. After our long day in Sydney, we wanted…
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Australia, part 4
This one will be short, but I figured I’d better bash off another before we head off to New Zealand, where our time will be short and we probably won’t have time to write… This morning we had coffee at the house of a man named Killer. He’s an automechanic, and I was a bit…
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Australia, part 5
Greetings, all! J-P and I are safely back in Dallas, about a week earlier than expected. Due to a number of reasons, we decided to cut out the New Zealand portion of our trip, and headed straight from Perth to Hong Kong. On the way we flew right over the interior of Borneo/Sarawak, one of…
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Belize, part 1
Hola from beautiful Flores, Guatemala! Many of you knew that I was going to Costa Rica after the fall dinner party with my college friends Nate and Sandy and Christian. As it turns out, the flights were full to Miami, so we had to rethink our trip entirely. Flying by the seat of our pants,…
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Belize, part 2
I am sitting in an internet cafe in San Ignacio, Belize, eating an ice cream cone filled with homemade sweet corn ice cream. That’s what the locals eat here! It’s really quite good. First, to ease any fears you may have about Hurricane Wilma, we are perfectly safe. The hurricane has passed Belize safely by,…
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Belize, part 3
While Hurricane Wilma is several hundred miles to our north tearing into Cancun (hopefully Justin and Katie, and their other friends who are there, are safe and sound), we are relaxing after another incredible day in Belize. I forgot to mention a detail in yesterday’s email. On our hike to the sacred Mayan cave of…