Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2023 i AFAR

BRAD OGBONNA Photographer Brad Ogbonna is drawn to photographing quiet, intimate moments between people. For Family Ties (p.41), he set up his camera at Tanoreen, a popular Palestinian restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, run by mother and daughter Rawia and Jumana Bishara. Ogbonna, who lives in Brooklyn, wanted to show readers the close relationship—and love—between the two generations: “I work to capture people in their truest form, their truest essence,” he says. See more of his photographs on Instagram @bradogbonna. JENN ACKERMAN Photographer Originally from Virginia Beach, Virginia, photographer Jenn Ackerman is now based in her husband’s home state of Minnesota. During the COVID pandemic, when lockdowns and social distancing were in place, Ackerman found it difficult to deeply engage with the Twin Cities as she once did. But for…

STANDING IN THE British Museum’s Ethiopia and Coptic Egypt gallery in 2013, I wondered if I was doing the right thing: paying money to see items that the country of origin asserted were acquired illegally. It was my birthday, and I was decked out in a navy dress with sequins, proud of the way I looked. But I could only manage an uneasy smile as my mama took a picture of me beside a statue of Pharaoh Senusret III. The critiques that would evolve into a crisis about the state of museums today were well formed and convincing even then. Many objects that filled the halls of the world’s preeminent museums had been pilfered from their home countries—looted and trafficked—as an act of imperialism or in the name of scientific…

THE FACT THAT I wanted to stay at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris because of the French TV show Dix Pour Cent tells you a lot about me as a lesbian. In the penultimate episode of the series, aired as Call My Agent! on Netflix, Sigourney Weaver travels to Paris to meet with producers for a film role and stays at the Hôtel de Crillon—in the best suite with the best view, of course—and proceeds to flounce around the city in gorgeous clothes eating gorgeous food. This is the Paris vacation of my dreams. However, there’s a different main character who really allures me, intrigues me, and makes me want to embrace the various facets of myself, but in more glamorous lighting: the talent agent played by Camille Cottin.…

MONGOLIA GETS COLD. Really, really cold. In the depths of winter, temperatures can drop as low as–40° (which, someone is bound to cheerily inform you, is the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit). It wasn’t nearly that frigid as I walked around the capital city of Ulaanbaatar on a bright October morning, but my fingers and ears were already feeling icy through my thin gloves and ill-fitting hat. In a few days, I’d be heading to the harsh winds of the open steppe and early snows of the mountain valleys—and if I was cold now, I’d be in bad shape then. Mentioning my predicament to my tour guides and a few new local friends I’d made, I kept hearing the same advice: Go to Gobi Cashmere. Founded in 1981 as a government-owned…

Given Mumbai’s sprawling size and huge population (an estimated 21 million), the city’s best experiences can be buried in its hustle and bustle. Visitors may be sent to the Gateway of India (an archway on the banks of the Arabian Sea) or to stroll Marine Drive, which is flanked by art deco buildings and streetlights that form the “Queen’s Necklace.” But these sights only hint at the thrumming creative energy of the Maximum City—which comes alive when you enjoy it the way locals do.—Sarika Bansal WHAT TO DO Cultural offerings abound: Buy tickets for a show at the National Centre for Performing Arts or the Prithvi Theatre, which specializes in Hindi works. Check out contemporary art at Project 88, or visit smaller galleries in the Kala Ghoda area, known for…

ONE AFTERNOON SOME 25 years ago, Rawia Bishara gathered her dearest girlfriends at her home in Brooklyn for a meal that would shift the course of her life. It was like any other Friday: She filled her table with stacks of red snapper she’d fried in vegetable oil, a salad of chopped tomatoes that she’d freckled with jalapeño, fries she’d cut by hand. These dishes appeared often in her Palestinian Arab family’s rotation in her hometown of Nazareth, where they would treat “Fish Fridays,” as she called them, with ritualistic devotion. She continued to observe this practice once a month in Bay Ridge, a neighborhood on the southwestern tip of Brooklyn, where she’d moved as a young bride more than two decades earlier. During that meal, one friend voiced an…

ON THE NEARLY 190-mile train journey from Athens to Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, my partner Barry and I share a compartment with a middle-aged Athenian couple. Soon, they are plying us with homemade spanakopita (spinach and feta pie). After an hour, our new friends point out the window: Mount Parnassus, “home of the muses.” Not long before we reach Thessaloniki, they gesture once more: Mount Olympus—“home of the gods”—Greece’s mightiest peak, looms as we swing past. And then the mythological abode of Olympian deities appears again on our stroll through the city in the afternoon. Mount Olympus is now a snow-streaked vision emerging from the haze across the Thermaic Gulf as Barry and I sit at one of the cafés along the paralia, the city’s three-mile pedestrian promenade, where…

WHERE TO STAY Ace Hotel Brooklyn Boerum Hill The Ace hotel group opened its second New York City outpost directly across from the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station in 2021. Built from the ground up, the 13-story building features a brutalist facade and interiors by designers Roman and Williams. Green leather couches, wood paneling, and fiber art pieces add warmth to raw concrete walls and ceilings throughout the 287-room hotel. For views of the borough, ask for a south-facing Medium Skyline room on the top four floors. 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge DUMBO Part of the sustainability minded 1 Hotels, this 195-room property just south of the Brooklyn Bridge is certified carbon neutral. Floor-to-ceiling windows offer skyline and bridge views in many of the rooms. The hotel also has four types of suites,…

I’M OUT OF BREATH and panting, somewhere near Heidelberg, a historic German city located near the foothills of the Odenwald. My cycling group and I are pedaling toward Schwetzingen Palace, renowned for its Versailles-like gardens, about six miles away from our ship docked along the Rhine. As I pause in the middle of a cornfield, all my groupmates are a glimmer of silver hair in the distance. “Don’t worry,” the wellness instructor says sympathetically. He had stayed behind with me so I wouldn’t get lost. “Some of these older people have been cyclists for years.” “They’re in such better shape than I am!” I say. He gives me a look. “Well, yes.” It’s day five of AmaWaterways’ seven-night “Captivating Rhine” cruise. I’m sailing from Amsterdam to Basel, Switzerland, on the…

IT IS MUMBAI IN NOVEMBER, WHICH IS TO SAY: HOT. I HAVE STOOD WHERE I AM STANDING MANY TIMES BEFORE, IN ALL ERAS OF MY LIFE—AS A BABY WOBBLY ON MY OWN TWO FEET, AS A BESPECTACLED KID WITH SCRAPED KNEES, AS AN AWKWARD TEEN TUGGING DOWN THE SKIRT THAT ATTRACTS TOO MUCH ATTENTION, AS A YOUNG WOMAN BACKPACKING AFTER COLLEGE, AND AS A NEWLYWED, VISITING WITH MY HUSBAND. THIS TIME I am here as a writer, wife, mother. I’m around the corner from the park teeming with morning walkers, in the leafy suburb of Vile Parle, on the street where my grandparents, and then my aunt, used to live in a building called Nav Samaj. I remember every inch of it: the mineral smell of the staircase, the daybed…

By the goodwill of the gods, every now and then I get invited to fashion shows—and get to experience the strange and wonderful slice of New York City they occupy. Before the runway stomping begins, guests can depend on a delightful display: Fashion mavens, ingenues, and hangers-on who frolic from city to city, hungry for The Next Big Thing. On a rainy Brooklyn day, devotees of the U.S. designer Christopher John Rogers convened for a showing of his ebullient 2024 resort collection. I reveled in the joyous peacocking from locals and those who “flew in from London just for this show.”…