The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  The question of how we ought to comport ourselves in the public sphere has preoccupied philosophers for millennia. Confucius’s teachings address etiquette, as, arguably, do Plato’s, in The Laws, when he catalogs how various types of guests from abroad should be treated. And if Jesus walks through our world in disguise, rudeness is un-Christian. “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares,” the New Testament warns. Various theories of etiquette’s purpose have been posited over the centuries. Erasmus had a magnanimous conception when he wrote, in 1530, of the rustic’s duty to “compensate for the malignity of fate with the elegance of good manners,” whereas the Victorians saw the role of etiquette as something closer to a behavioral amulet capable of protecting one from the polluting forces of vulgarity and vice. The social anthropologist, classicist, and etiquette historian Margaret Visser wrote, in her canonical 1991 book, The Rituals of Dinner, that manners “do not constitute virtue, but they do set out to imitate virtue’s outward appearance.”

  Etiquette can be understood as a codified but unspoken system of culturally specific rules, used across time and continents to contend with our most primal aversions: violence and disease and confusion. That Switzerland, a nation famous for a dearth of all three, would be a place where etiquette is taught makes a certain amount of symbolic sense. “What makes Switzerland special is that we are fairly neutral,” Neri has said. “Other countries would try to push culture down their throats, such as France. Here we don’t have that kind of cultural imperialism.”

  One afternoon in an upstairs classroom, Neri told me, “My mother never liked the term ‘finishing school.’ It just means so many things to so many different people. The British, for example, think it’s a place for women too stupid to go to university.” Neri’s mother, Dorette Faillettaz, who never attended a finishing school, founded what became IVP in 1954 with a loan from her parents, as no Swiss bank at the time would lend to a woman. A translator of the Brothers Grimm and, according to Neri, “one of the first women to dare to ask for a divorce in Zurich,” Faillettaz established a school that was, for its time, a kind of protofeminist alternative to the tea-party training occurring elsewhere around the canton. Vegetarian cooking was taught, as was family planning, psychology, and car maintenance. Faillettaz devised her pedagogy in response to her own profound hatred of housework. Domestic efficiency, she believed, created more time for higher-order pursuits: reading, playing music, learning languages. Her school’s aim, according to a 1965 brochure, was to teach its charges how to “have a lively and well-run home where there exists a real interest in all that is going on in the world.”

  In the early years, the school’s students were mostly from West Germany and the Netherlands. “The French did not come to Switzerland,” Neri said. “They would maybe go to England, because it’s a kingdom, but not to a peasant country.” Every so often, the school received what Neri referred to as “an exotic student”—once, she said, the school hosted a cousin of the emperor of Japan. “My mother wanted her students to be knowledgeable about other countries and other cultures, which was rather revolutionary at that time. She felt we were too ethnocentric in Europe.” Neri continued, “Everyone looked up to France and Britain, but there are other cultures that are far older, and they also have refinement and beautiful art, and we should not look down on them.”

  Neri grew up in Zurich, attended school in England, moved to Montreux after her mother’s divorce, and then to California, where she majored in Latin American studies at UCLA. She returned to Switzerland after graduation and married the director of a textile-machine company. “I always said that I would never take over a school and I would never marry a Swiss German, but that’s exactly what I did,” she said, laughing. In 1971, women in Switzerland gained the right to vote, and the following year Neri’s mother retired and Neri assumed leadership of IVP. “It was 1972!” she exclaimed. “We really got the brunt of the student revolution. Class size plummeted. Those who did attend didn’t tell their friends. They just said they were going to a language school.” In America, too, many finishing schools closed, and the few that remained open, such as Miss Porter’s, in Connecticut, and the now defunct Finch College, in Manhattan, elected to emphasize rigorous academics.

  IVP’s increasingly international clientele makes it tempting to think of the school as a vehicle for cultural assimilation or class mobility, but in practice the school’s exorbitant tuition renders it inaccessible to most. Now, of course, those people have YouTube, with its instructional videos on table setting and the pronunciation of the word “Gstaad.” With the exception of a peculiar lecture on the importance of protecting one’s metadata, IVP’s curriculum does not include online etiquette, arguably the most preoccupying sort, on which a well-researched class might actually be useful.

  Over the week, I observed many multiple-course lunches, each one set, hosted, served, and attended by students, all of whom were assigned various parts, as in a play, and graded on their performance. The “servants” wore white gloves and frilly aprons and, when they were not pouring water, stood near a sideboard with their hands folded neatly. The “guests” cocked their heads solicitously and inquired after one another’s make-believe families. Occasionally, the charade would grow too burdensome, and the women would slip up, becoming, for a moment, themselves. Once, between salad and fish, a college-aged girl pretending to be a guest employed as an attorney tired of discussing her invented career and began talking instead about The Handmaid’s Tale, which she was watching and enjoying immensely. Toward the end of my stay, the students’ general chatter, previously about final exams, turned to weekend plans. A few were going to Geneva; others thought they might like to dine at a nearby restaurant known for a dish called “carrier pigeon,” in which the bird is cooked sous vide and served in an airmail envelope. Soon they would be alone in a world of gala events attended, if the IVP’s instructors were to be believed, not by friends but by suspicious acquaintances, fault-finding diplomats, and Nigerians eager to talk Benin bronzes.

  One afternoon, Andreea, a 30-year-old Romanian woman, arranged a perfectly symmetrical bouquet under the tutelage of the Austrian florist, and then went out onto the chalet’s flagstone terrace. Unlike most of the other women at IVP, many of whom have never made a bed, Andreea, who has amber eyes and a doll-like mouth, does not come from family money. Originally from Târgovis, te—“the town where Ceaus, escu was killed”—she now lives in Dubai. She moved there not knowing anyone, five weeks after winning a bet with a co-worker that she could get a job as an Emirates flight attendant. She has worked in private aviation—often for royal families in the Middle East—for almost seven years.

  The daughter of an Orthodox priest and a nurse, Andreea paid her IVP tuition with the earnings she made working on private jets during Ramadan. She appreciates etiquette the way a hostess does a successful Saturday-night dinner service—as a choreography worthy of both aesthetic and moral attention. For this, she credits her royal employers, who looked her in the eye and thanked her genuinely for the smallest services. In her years working in aviation, Andreea said, she had tried to learn, in advance of each flight, at least a few words—hello, please, thank you—in the languages of her passengers. “You cannot believe how people’s faces light up when you greet them as they’re accustomed to at home,” she said. When she first moved to Dubai, Andreea realized that she suddenly represented not only herself, but also Romania. “You’re not just you,” she told me. “We’re all so cosmopolitan now, but we’re separated by ignorance, not diversity.” Andreea recounted the apocryphal story of Queen Victoria, who, upon noticing her foreign guests drinking from their finger bowls, drank from hers as well. “It’s a question of empathy,” Andreea said. “You can’t have etiquette if you can’t open your heart and mind and listen to other people—and truly listen, truly want to know who they are and who they come from, and want to make them feel comfortable.”

  As we spoke, a blue b
utterfly fluttered between us and landed on Andreea’s arm. She admired it quietly and explained that she would like to start her own finishing school, perhaps in Ethiopia. Andreea maintains an Instagram account on which she occasionally posts photographs of political figures: Barack Obama offering Michelle his umbrella, President Trump hoarding his, Vladimir Putin not helping Queen Elizabeth down a flight of stairs. Seeing that I was no longer in the shade, Andreea urged me to reposition myself, and, as I did, I noticed that her eyes were wet with tears. “Etiquette is not something you learn for yourself,” she continued. “It’s something you do for others, and I think that’s beautiful.”

  When Andreea finally excused herself, it was to study. With the exception of some of the older and wealthier students, who elect to stay down the hill at an opulent and airless family-run hotel, most of the women at IVP stay on the grounds of the chalet. Andreea’s roommate was from China; their suite, like all the others, was named after a flower. There is a summer-camp-like camaraderie among the students, who repeatedly expressed surprise that they felt so intimate with one another after only a few weeks. But why shouldn’t they have bonded? Attending the school at all was a kind of radical act of admission, of social ambition and insecurity, of having identified one’s current station and found it wanting.

  By Friday, after having spent six hours every day at IVP, smiling and nodding and sitting always very upright, I was exhausted and bored, although by what, exactly, I couldn’t say. I hadn’t had occasion to play truant in close to a decade, and ditching class elicited a familiar thrill. I made my way down a winding road, past apple trees and timber-framed houses, to the funicular. When I arrived, the station was deserted, and a display screen said the waiting tram would depart in five minutes. Sitting inside the car, which was about the size of a Manhattan restaurant’s bathroom, was a man in grass-covered work boots. It was a conspicuously small space to share. I felt my heart rate quicken, and with it the tedious compulsion to pretend otherwise.

  The man looked up and smiled. “Bonjour,” I said. “Bonjour,” he replied, before retracting eye contact. I got in and sat down. He adjusted his body away from mine, crossing his legs in the opposite direction. He did so subtly, in a way he must have hoped I would sense but perhaps not consciously notice. The slight pivot of his torso was meant to increase the distance between us; the crossing of his legs was to make himself small. It was for me that he was doing these things, and I was grateful.

  MATT GROSS

  How the Chile Pepper Took Over the World

  from Airbnb Magazine

  This is what happens when you bite into a chile pepper: A full load of the chemical capsaicin—the compound that makes peppers hot—floods your tongue and throat, binding to pain receptors and shooting an insistent SOS message to the brain that, essentially, your mouth is on fire. Then there’s sweating. Panting. Maybe some crying. And then, finally, the glorious endorphin rush, which instantly transforms all that pain into the kind of ecstasy that forges lifelong addicts: chileheads.

  At least, that’s how I became one, ever since I chomped a farmers’ market cherry pepper at the age of 10. But chiles aren’t just hot. They’re head-spinningly versatile. They can be sweet, smoky, lemony, cherryish. The heat can be dry or juicy; it can sidle in, strafe, or scorch; it can strike the tip of your tongue, the insides of your cheeks, the back of your throat, or everywhere all at once.

  What chiles do, and how they do it, depends on where in the world you’re eating. And you can eat them just about anywhere. Chiles are arguably the hottest fruits in the world—both from a popularity and a heat standpoint. And if sriracha mania and Hot Ones are any indication, their world domination hasn’t come anywhere close to an apex.

  Here’s what’s astounding: chiles are native only to Central and South America. That means that until Christopher Columbus sailed for the New World in 1492, there were no chiles anywhere else. Not in India. Not in Thailand. Not in China or Korea. Those cuisines we now consider spiciest had many other spices, including black pepper, long pepper, and Sichuan pepper. But the most powerful, pungent, polarizing pepper of all?

  Nope!

  For the past few years, I’ve been studying the route(s) chiles took around the globe, with an eye to understanding not just when they arrived in different lands but what happened afterward: How did chiles get so deeply integrated into these cuisines? How did that ferocious shift in food alter their cultures? And what do chiles mean to chile eaters today? This summer, I headed to three countries that were remade by chiles over the past half millennium—Jamaica, Hungary, and Thailand—to find out.

  Jamaica

  Where our heat seeker begins his journey, on the isle where the almighty Scotch bonnet reigns supreme

  Soldier—né Neville Anthony Swire—was 51, fit, and beaming as he darted across the rocky hilltop in San San, on Jamaica’s northeast coast. Here, he showed me, were young avocado trees, there young soursop. Gargantuan okra pointed skyward from bushes; cacao pods would soon dangle from other branches. A neat gravel pathway arced around Soldier’s farm, passing two broad platform swings where we lazed awhile, watching the Caribbean roll in 250 feet below.

  Of all Soldier’s crops, the most important—for him and for me—were the pepper plants. Dozens dotted the farm, some cayenne, others “devil” peppers, but the vast majority were Scotch bonnets,1 the fruity, fragrant, fiery symbol of Jamaican cuisine—the essential ingredient in everything from rice and peas to escovitch fish to jerk chicken. Soldier plucked a Scotchie from a bush. Deep green, it was shaped like a wrinkly Scottish tam-o’-shanter. He bragged that if he didn’t turn it into pepper sauce, he could get 10 Jamaican dollars for it at market.

  “And how many ten dollars I got here?” he crowed, waving his arms at his four-acre pot of gold.

  All around us in the foothills of the John Crow Mountains were the estates of Jamaican multimillionaires—modernist villas, money launderers’ castles, rickety midcentury follies—but at that moment Soldier seemed like the richest man on the island, and independently wealthy to boot.

  That type of independence—hard-won, pepper-powered—has a history that goes back centuries in Jamaica. There were some things I already knew: that peppers were essentially native here, carried throughout the Caribbean long ago, partly by birds (immune to capsaicin, they spread seeds in their droppings) but also by the Taínos (Arawak Indians) who once populated these islands. And I knew that Christopher Columbus, who’d set sail in search of black pepper (genus Piper), had first encountered chile peppers (genus Capsicum) not far away, on the neighboring island of Hispaniola, kick-starting not only the fruits’ world-conquering voyage but also the era of colonialism and slavery.

  But that’s history; I could read it. I wanted to taste it.

  A few days earlier, at the start of my journey, I’d found myself at an unexceptional industrial park in the middle-class streets of the capital, Kingston, where I’d navigated my little rented Suzuki to meet Winston Stona, a man who’s been eating peppers longer and more thoughtfully than just about anyone. Now 76, a rambling storyteller with a neat white beard, Uncle Winnie—as his family calls him—is a legend: not only a former deputy director of tourism but an actor who was in the movies The Harder They Come and Cool Runnings, and a hot-sauce entrepreneur to boot. His life today is cosmopolitan (cocktails at the club, holidays in France), but he grew up on a farm (albeit his family’s estate) and still considers himself “an agrarian.”

  “My father always sat at the table in the morning, and his Scotch bonnet was right here,” Uncle Winnie said, placing an imaginary pepper before him in his Kingston office. “And he would just have it on a saucer and bite it while he had his food.”

  Again and again I would hear stories like this, from Jamaicans of all stripes—dads and grandpas who carried Scotch bonnets in jacket pockets, pulling them out at meals to nibble or to slice directly, often with a specially designated knife, onto their food. It’s this kind of eating that Uncle Winnie pref
ers to all else: a poached egg on brown toast, accompanied by spinach-like callaloo and “little slivers” of Scotch bonnet.

  “There are few things that warm the heart more,” he told me dreamily.

  While some people eat Scotchies straight, I was craving a hit of them in jerk, the slow-grilled meats that are a cornerstone of island culture. Jerk is everywhere, sold at shacks, street-side drums, and cushy restaurants in the touristy parts of Montego Bay. And it has deep connections to resistance and liberation, having been invented, according to legend, by the Maroons, escaped slaves hiding in the Jamaican mountains, who used the flavors available to them—spicy cinnamon, allspice, pimento wood, hot peppers—to transform the game they hunted into flavorful, healthful, long-lasting sustenance.2

  I whipped my Suzuki up and around mountain passes to the rough, hurricane-battered northeast coast that once attracted luminaries like Errol Flynn and Ian Fleming. When I arrived at the Boston Jerk Center, a famous cluster of jerk joints and bars on the island, smoke was curling from the broad jerk pits, where whole chickens and pig parts lay on pimento-wood poles. (The oil they secrete adds a sweetly aromatic spice, like allspice, with a subtle bitterness that lands at the back of your throat.) Enthusiastic touts from the joint closest to the main road clamored for the tourist trade, but farther in there were no sales pitches, just cooks tending fires and customers gathering to watch the World Cup.