Latest news with #LaleArikoglu
.jpg&w=3840&q=100)
Condé Nast Traveler
3 days ago
- General
- Condé Nast Traveler
Women Who Travel Podcast: How to Choose a National Park
You can listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify each week. Follow this link if you're listening on Apple News. There are over 60 national parks in the United States—and they're never more popular than at the peak of summer. This year, however, might look a little bit different as a result of sweeping budget cuts that impact everything from how the trails are maintained to the park rangers who guide you. To help us understand what to expect—and plan our next trip—associate articles director and podcast regular, Megan Spurrell, joins host Lale Arikoglu to parse the nuances of the national parks, like which ones are lesser-trafficked and why, to how to be a thoughtful visitor, and shares the best things to do at some of her favorites. Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and with me in the Women Who Travel studio today is Traveler's associate articles director, Megan Spurrell. Megan Spurrell: Hi. LA: My travel partner, my hiking partner. My surfing partner. MS: It's true. LA: Oh, and desk partner, I'm going to say. MS: We sit a foot away from each other every day. LA: We never part, we never part. Megan, we kicked off the year talking about our best places to go in 2025. I know listeners loved it. And this time we're focusing on all things summer, more specifically how to get the most out of US national parks this summer and how to choose them and where to go. Planning a parks trip, as we know, can be overwhelming at the best of times, thanks to so many choices, but this year is unique due to the funding cuts that have resulted in staff reductions that are impacting everyone from workers at visitor centers to those who are maintaining the trails and even the park rangers. You've been overseeing a ton of our national parks coverage and you also cover so much of the outdoors for us. But before we talk about this summer and why it's different, I want to know what your top three national parks are and whether you can choose. MS: There's over 60 national parks, which I'm not sure the average American even knows, but top would be Arches in Utah, just the crazy red rock formations, big red sandstone arches, that very iconic, dramatic Utah scenery. LA: I'd kind of argue what, at least for me as a foreigner who moved to America, kind of what I thought of as the national parks, that's what I envisioned was going to a national park, was going to those landscapes. MS: Yes, very traditional, driving through sort of desert lands, big blue, open sky, and just these crazy rock formations that almost look like petrified waves. So that's Arches. And then, okay, so I love Acadia. I know we both love Acadia National Park.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Yahoo
Women Who Travel Podcast: Hawa Hassan's Recipes from Somalia, Egypt, Lebanon, and More
All products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by Condé Nast Traveler editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission. You can listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify each week. Follow this link if you're listening on Apple News. In Hawa Hassan's second cookbook, the chef and author explores the recipes and stories born out of displacement, and the sense of community and resilience that can be found through food. Lale chats with her about the travels and research behind the book, which took her to The Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, and Lebanon, among others, as well as how her own path from Somalia to the US informed her personal food journey. Lale Arikoglu: Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and today I'm talking to chef and author Hawa Hassan about her groundbreaking book Setting a Place for Us. Its subtitle explains its radical scope, recipes and stories of displacement, resilience, and community from eight countries impacted by war. Hawa and her family fled the Somalian Civil War. A few years later, she was sent to friends in America and was separated from her mother and siblings who moved to Oslo. The stories of the people she meets in her book often mirror that of her own life. Hawa Hassan: I migrated to the U.S. in 1993, November of 1993. My mother and family never made it to America. Till today, my family has never been to America. I only have one little brother who's born in Norway that's come to New York, and he came in 2018 just as he was getting out of high school. But my family has lived in Somalia, Kenya, and then Oslo. LA: Moving in 1993 means that you were very young when you moved. HH: Yeah. The first two years of living in America, because I assumed my family was still coming and that was the game plan. I went as a part of a team of six people. At the time, it was my five siblings and my mom. So I was like, "Okay, the rest of my teammates are coming. They're just waiting for sponsorship to the U.S.," which never came because Black Hawk Down happened and the Clinton administration had shut it down at the time. And in hindsight, I don't think there's a better place than Oslo that my family could have ended up in for so many different reasons. So for the first two years, I was still very much a Somali child. I was still trying to cook. I was still trying to clean with the people that I was living with because I wanted to be an active participant of the group that I was living with. LA: What were you cooking? HH: Well, there was an older person in the house, a woman. She did all the cooking, but I did all the cleaning and the chopping those first two years. LA: You were sous chef? HH: I was sous chef. I didn't know I was a little chef in the making, okay? But I had already been a sous chef with my mom and my brother, and so this was just a different version of it. But after those first two years passed and I realized no one was coming, honey, I was eating hot dogs, Doritos, pizza, gas station food was my survival tool. LA: When you say survival tool, what do you mean? HH: It was what fueled me. I would have me a little something in the morning before school and then after school I would walk right over to Mr. Henry's gas station. I would go right over there and he knew Hawa wants a hot link. Don't make Hawa's bread too thick, cut the crust off for her. LA: Remind me where in the US you were. HH: I grew up in Seattle, Washington. LA: Was there a Somalian community there? Where you were aware of one? HH: So when I arrived in Seattle, it wasn't only my arrival, it was the Cambodians, it was the Russians, it was the Vietnamese, the Eritreans, the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, and Somalis. My elementary school was so diverse. I've always had, whether it be the Somalis or others, there's always been a diversity around me just because of the time that I came to the U.S. LA: Did your family that was in Oslo and your mother, did they have the same or... HH: Yeah, well, kind of and not. When they migrated to Norway, they were some of the very first immigrants, and so there wasn't a huge Somali population. And I don't know why this happens. When migration happens, oftentimes governments place you in the middle of the center, in the city center, and so my family grew up in an area called Gronland, which is downtown Oslo. But downtown Oslo, if you just walk, it's full of Somalis now. Yeah, so they now have a very healthy community. LA: It sounds like for your family, Oslo is a haven of sorts, or at least feels like home. HH: Totally. Yeah, totally. I mean, my siblings, they're Norwegian kids. They fight in Norwegian. They have grown up there. Some of them were born there. They've been schooled there. Some of them are married to Norwegians. The last time I was in Somalia was 1991. My father still lives there, and my older brother goes every year. My little sister goes. She's taking her kids to go see him. But there were a few of us that hadn't seen him since I left Kenya, and so I took everybody to Turkey, to Istanbul because it was the only place that my father can get, we can get him to get a visa. LA: Which is interesting because there are other people I know who have family. I'm thinking of a friend whose family in Iran and Istanbul is the meetings point. HH: Oh. LA: And I think that happens for a lot of diaspora communities- HH: Totally. LA: ... which are all trying to come together in a place, and Istanbul seems to be that city. HH: Absolutely. I mean, we knew it would be easy to apply at the embassy in Somalia. It would be familiar for my dad because people speak Arabic, he's Muslim. So all of us went and we had a family reunion for 18 days. It was really nice. LA: Back in 2020, I sat down with Hawa to chat about her first book, In Bibi's Kitchen, which won the James Beard International Cookbook Award. Then, she shared food traditions of African countries bordering the Indian Ocean. But this book also covers Asia and Central America. The eight countries Hawa talks about are usually featured in the media as being in a state of disarray or in crisis. But here she focuses on community spirit and the power of food to bring people together. HH: I visited the Democratic Republic of Congo, El Salvador, Lebanon, and Liberia. And then the other four countries that I did intense research and hired other people to help research were Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Egypt. LA: You list off those countries, and at first listen, you might think that's quite like a sort of disparate list of places. But there's a through line and a thread that stitches them all together and is why you chose them. What is that thread? HH: Yeah, so I wanted to examine countries that there was conflict and instability. There was refugee and migration, humanitarian crisis, and then historical and cultural significance. Some of these countries are the oldest civilization on earth. I wanted to talk about that because oftentimes when we hear about these places, even though the through line of this book is a part of my story, which is civil unrest, and I wanted to examine that for my own reasons and also for the purpose of saying, "Hey, here's another way to look at these people." And so this book, there's no sad stories in it, and I say that about my own life. I have no sad stories to tell. LA: And that there isn't this sort of two-dimensional view of what a person from X country is like or if they choose to leave, what their life as a displaced person could be. HH: Correct. Because the desires are the same no matter where we are. We're a lot more alike than different. LA: Could you tell me a little bit more about how you were weaving your own personal story into the book, or at least how it was driving the book? HH: Yeah, so originally when I started thinking about food in 2014, I was so curious about my own personal story and I wanted to confront so much the otherness of my own life. When you've been separated from your family or from your homeland, there's a desire to return always in hopes of finding yourself or finding out new information, like, "I want to discover more of who I am," and that's what this book was for me. That's what all my work is. In Bibi's Kitchen was a selfish project. I wanted to preserve those stories. I wanted to make Africa accessible. I wanted to talk about the Indian Ocean from an African's perspective. This book is the same. I want to talk about displacement from a displaced person's perspective. It's not all sad and gloom. It's not doom and gloom. LA: When you were choosing these countries, did you have some sort of criteria that you were looking for, or was it literally just kind of looking at a big old map and thinking, "These are the places that fascinate me."? Or were there kind of certain political or cultural moments or touchstones that you were keeping an eye out for? HH: The main things that I wanted to examine were historical and cultural significance, migration, conflict, and I also wanted to examine it from the perspective of... Somalia has been in constant conflict almost for as long as I've been born. And some of the countries in this book also have been in prolonged conflict. And some of them have been in conflict and are kind of out of it now, but they're still residue of some of those old feelings. And so I just wanted to see the similarities of the places and I wanted to tell a different story about what it meant to be from those places. Displacement can also come at the cost of climate change. And so even though in this book I talk about 177 million people across the world, the people that you speak to on the ground do often talk about the lack of rain or too much rain. I'm no climate expert, but the shifting of crop season and things like that, because ultimately you fill it across the board. And when there's conflict within a country's borders, movement of food isn't the same as it is in our world. I think things change and people are much more mindful and they're not as wasteful as we are here. And I hope that also comes across in the book. LA: There are four countries that you visit physically in the book. Tell me a little bit kind of about what you were searching for in each one. HH: Yeah. So El Salvador, I went to in February 2020, right before the world shut down. I went with my photographer and I'd already had my friends in El Salvador, so it was simple. And El Salvadorians are such kind people, loving people, welcoming people, and so it's a easy place to feel at home. And I was on the beach the whole time, and so it was lovely. LA: A challenging but empowering visit to Kinshasa coming up. I'm here with Hawa Hassan on Women Who Travel. HH: The next place I went to was the Democratic Republic of Congo. I went to Kinshasa. And I say that in the intro to Kinshasa, or going there, the travel for it was chaotic, and it feels like an ongoing shell game where at every turn you're meeting a cast of new hustlers and you are the target. So Congo taught me so much, and to my Congolese brothers and sisters, I take my hat off to you because I just cannot. They are such resilient people, and they dance and they dress so incredibly and they're so joyful, but they don't suffer any fools. LA: Often when I am reporting for Condé Nast Traveler and I sort of arrive in a place, sometimes I'll connect with it right away and be like, "I gel with this place. I get it." I know how to find my way around it, or it's like something just clicks. And then there are others that are a little harder to understand at first and you have to work a little harder to make sense of it. HH: I didn't get Kinshasa. I didn't understand the movement of the American dollar before I got there, at the speed in which it moves, I should say. LA: Wait, explain that a little bit more. HH: So they basically, well, at least with me and my experience, everything was done in U.S. dollars. So something that could cost you a cab ride that should be $30 would be $200. LA: Wow. HH: And it was like, "There's no question about it, pay the 200 or get out." So there was a lot of things I didn't understand in Kinsasha, but I spoke to somebody else who'd gone there and she was like, "Oh, it's probably because you look different." But she's right. You're talking about a country that right now is on the brink of breaking because of their next door neighbors in Rwanda. And so I am East African. I do look Rwandese. And so there was some of that flare up when I was there. And some of those stories I won't go into because they don't serve me or the people that I met, but there was that unspoken tension and you had to be aware and move accordingly. LA: I want to hear a bit more about this trip because so far we've talked about how it was... It does sound like it was challenging and probably quite exhausting, but clearly it was a success because you have recipes and stories in the book. HH: Yeah. LA: What were some of the outstanding moments of being... HH: Oh, man. I met a young woman named Natalia that owned a restaurant called Bantu. She had been a student in Cape Town and had been craving home and returned home to build from the ground up. She was a successful entrepreneur. Her restaurant was so stunning. I met a woman named Lina and her husband. LA: Wait, can you describe the restaurant to me a little bit? HH: Yeah. It actually just looks like a cafe out of Soho, but it had African baskets that she had weaved across the walls and it had all these plants. And Natalia was beautiful and young and just bright and she wanted to be a part of the rebuilding of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And she and a lot of young people like herself had become entrepreneurs during COVID, which was so interesting to learn. I also met another woman named Emily, who was the beignet lady. She had been living in Belgium and returned home also. And she started online and it caught wildfire and everybody goes to her home to get their beignets. And she was contemplating about opening up a brick and mortar. And so there was so much hope. LA: Can you describe to me just kind of what it's like to walk around there a little bit? Sights, sounds, just kind of like the vibe just to kind of bring a picture into people's heads. HH: Lots of moving cars, bustling markets, lots of motorcycles, bunch of people talking over one another. I mean, imagine a busy market and that being the streets. Lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. LA: What kind of fruit? HH: Lots of mangoes and oranges and papayas and watermelons and things like that. When I went, it was in June, so there were a lot of fruits more than there was anything. A lot of fruit stands. LA: Is there a dish from there that you now cook regularly or that you think of regularly? HH: Yeah, there's a skewered goat dish that you can actually buy on the street and is very popular in the DRC. But that's like a quick snack, a quick delicious meal. It's incredibly well-seasoned. And that was something that I really enjoyed while we were there. LA: And you just grab and go down the street with some goat on your skewer. HH: With a newspaper. Yeah. LA: Delicious. HH: And then the next place we went to was Morovia, the capital of Liberia. And I'd known some friends there. So Liberia felt like a reprieve. It felt like joy. It felt like a vacation. Morovia can almost feel like a beach town because it's on the ocean. I had sushi every night. I was staying in an incredible hotel where everybody was just so welcoming. And then we went to Lebanon after that. We went to Beirut and then went all over Lebanon for 10 days. And again, same thing in Beirut, just kindness and open doors and so much food and conversation and joy. I feel very grateful because every place offered a new way of seeing things. LA: After the break, what these very different food traditions have in common. You're back with women Who Travel. Okay, moving on, we've got to talk about the recipes. HH: Okay. LA: I think of there's so many commonalities between different recipes or foods around the world. What were some of the kind of recurring things that you found in these recipes that are from all these different places with different stories? HH: One thing that I saw everywhere is that people's usage of dates. LA: Oh. HH: I thought that was really nice. Some people were drinking date tea, some people were making date soup, some people were making date cookies. There's a date cookie recipe in the book. I also loved people's capacity to eat sweet and savory together, which for me, I do because we're Somalis. LA: Did you walk away from that thinking, "I want to bring some of this back into my own cooking in my own life." Or did it feel like when you come back from vacation and you're like, "I'm going to change everything," and then you get back and it's just immediately everything's the same? HH: Yeah, I did. I mean, as soon as I was done with the book, I made a lot of stews, which was, I mean, my husband once said to me, he's like, "What is it with you and these stews?" LA: And you're like, "I'm slowing down." HH: Yeah. He didn't understand that. God bless his heart. But I did come back and I was cooking a lot slower. LA: Were there any foods that you tried that you were surprised that they reminded you of Somali food? I think sometimes it's like you can have a cuisine that seems so different to your own, and then you suddenly are like, "That flavor or that method of preparation reminds me of this dish and I would've never have expected it." HH: Oh, totally. A lot of the food. There's a seven spice in both the Iraq and the Lebanon chapter. That spice is very similar to Hawaij, which is a Somali spice, which is the bedrock of most of our cooking. And so that centered me home often. And then the other thing was is that in a lot of these countries, people have fruit on the side with all their food. And in Somalia, that's something that we do. Fruit is a part of your meal. And so that always made me feel like I was at my mom's table. LA: You started this book five years ago, but does it feel even more timely than when you started it? HH: Yeah. I mean, I think just like In Bibi's Kitchen. In Bibi's Kitchen, I started it because I was looking for community and I was looking for those stories. And then it came out in COVID when everybody was at home and thinking about community and how to sustain it and how to make it and how to be better at it. And we're in a different phase now, but we're still trying to answer questions. How do I be a human in the world today? How do I be kinder to more people? How do I talk about USAID if I don't know enough about who USAID serves? And I hope these are questions people are asking themselves. Don't be distracted by the splashy headlines. Pay attention to the details. Who is USAID serving? What diet are people in Somalia eating during drought season, effectively climate refugees very soon? LA: Well, and I was going to say, what can we learn from that level of resourcefulness? HH: Yep. Because guess what? We're not immune to it. I hope that this book is a gateway into answering some questions, but I hope it's a pamphlet that allows people to go on a deeper search for themselves. LA: I'm going to ask you the impossible question, which is if there's one meal that you could take from this book and make over and over again? HH: Yeah. There's actually, and we both love it at home, and it's so simple. There's this beef and rice and pepper, stuffed pepper recipe in the book that is so delicious and so simple. It's just onions, beef, parsley, and uncooked rice all together. And then you make everything on top of the stove, and then you bake it for a while. You bake it for I think 25 minutes or 28 minutes. And it's so delicious. And I make it all the time and it's so healthy. So that's boring to say, but that's what I would make all the time because it's not time-consuming and I love it. LA: And my mouth is watering just hearing about it. HH: Oh, good. LA: If there's kind of a takeaway you want people to have when they close this book and they put it back on their kitchen shelves or they pull it down and they're in search of something, what is it? HH: That single-origin stories are not true and that people in the world at large are all living differently, but we're innately very similar. LA: Why don't we talk about... The one thing we haven't talked about that much is you mentioned your photographer, so I'm going to just get you to say something about that. HH: Yeah. LA: I'm flipping through the book right now, and there's so many beautiful stories and recipes, but also the imagery is gorgeous, from the food and the people and the kind of scenery from these places. What was the kind of vision between you and your photographer as to how to capture these places? HH: I wanted to work with actually a dear friend, Riley Dingler, who is a college mate of my husband. They met at Boulder in Colorado. And Riley is a photographer and a videographer, but for commercial businesses. And I think one of the things about my vision was, "Let's shoot this in the most beautiful light to showcase the people, the food, and the place." He's blonde hair, blue-eyed and like 6'2". So he was not blending in most places. But his spirit did, and people loved him everywhere we went and people were excited to meet him. But he got the most incredible shots because you didn't even know he was there. Just same as me, I was enthralled in the interviews and in the conversations, and there weren't phones and there weren't a lot of distractions, and Riley was similar to that. His energy was of that. And that comes across in the book. Yeah, that photo actually with me and Emily. LA: Tell me which photo we're looking at and describe it a little bit. HH: You're looking at a photo of Emily. I think she's telling me about the herbs that she's growing in her garden. This is the beignet lady that I was telling you about. We're sitting in her courtyard and I'm facing her, and she is speaking with her hands and telling me about what she's growing in this season. LA: You're deep in conversation in this photo. HH: Totally. LA: And then there is a beautiful picture- HH: Of her beignets. LA: ... of her beignets. HH: Those are beignets that she made for us. So Riley just took a photo of them. LA: And also, because they're on some sort of blue table, where were you eating them? HH: In her courtyard. We were just picking them up and eating them in her courtyard. LA: Freshly baked. Amazing. HH: Yeah. LA: And I think that is a lovely note to end on. HH: Thank you so much. LA: Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel. I'm Lale Arikoglu and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineer is Pran Bandi. And special thanks to Jake Lummus for engineering support. Our show is mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Jude Kampfner is our producer, Stephanie Kariuki, our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is head of Condé Nast Global Audio. Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler The Latest Travel News and Advice Want to be the first to know? Sign up to our newsletters for travel inspiration and tips Stop Counting the Countries You Visit How Safe Is Flying Today? 5 Things Experts Want Travelers to Know The Best Places to See the Northern Lights Worldwide
Condé Nast Traveler
19-05-2025
- Condé Nast Traveler
Women Who Travel Podcast: Hawa Hassan's Recipes from Somalia, Egypt, Lebanon, and More
You can listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify each week. Follow this link if you're listening on Apple News. In Hawa Hassan's second cookbook, the chef and author explores the recipes and stories born out of displacement, and the sense of community and resilience that can be found through food. Lale chats with her about the travels and research behind the book, which took her to The Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, and Lebanon, among others, as well as how her own path from Somalia to the US informed her personal food journey. Lale Arikoglu: Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and today I'm talking to chef and author Hawa Hassan about her groundbreaking book Setting a Place for Us. Its subtitle explains its radical scope, recipes and stories of displacement, resilience, and community from eight countries impacted by war. Hawa and her family fled the Somalian Civil War. A few years later, she was sent to friends in America and was separated from her mother and siblings who moved to Oslo. The stories of the people she meets in her book often mirror that of her own life. Hawa Hassan: I migrated to the U.S. in 1993, November of 1993. My mother and family never made it to America. Till today, my family has never been to America. I only have one little brother who's born in Norway that's come to New York, and he came in 2018 just as he was getting out of high school. But my family has lived in Somalia, Kenya, and then Oslo. LA: Moving in 1993 means that you were very young when you moved. HH: Yeah. The first two years of living in America, because I assumed my family was still coming and that was the game plan. I went as a part of a team of six people. At the time, it was my five siblings and my mom. So I was like, "Okay, the rest of my teammates are coming. They're just waiting for sponsorship to the U.S.," which never came because Black Hawk Down happened and the Clinton administration had shut it down at the time. And in hindsight, I don't think there's a better place than Oslo that my family could have ended up in for so many different reasons. So for the first two years, I was still very much a Somali child. I was still trying to cook. I was still trying to clean with the people that I was living with because I wanted to be an active participant of the group that I was living with. LA: What were you cooking? HH: Well, there was an older person in the house, a woman. She did all the cooking, but I did all the cleaning and the chopping those first two years. LA: You were sous chef?
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Yahoo
Women Who Travel Podcast: A Life-Changing Move to Italy
All products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by Condé Nast Traveler editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission. You can listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify each week. Follow this link if you're listening on Apple News. Ever fantasized about giving up the grind and starting a new life in Italy? This week, we hear from a listener who did just that, swapping her life in San Francisco for the rolling hills of Piedmont, where she renovated a 300-year-old farmhouse' and built a new life—Under the Tuscan Sun-style. Listen to the episode to find out how Barbara Boyle, who penned the experience in her new memoir Pinch Me, pulled the move off and found joy and community in a small Italian town. Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. It's Lale Arikoglu and this is Women Who Travel. Today, we have one of our listener dispatchers from around the world. It's the story of how Barbara Boyle, an advertising executive, does the whole under the Tuscan sun thing and retires and moves to Italy. She doesn't reckon with the challenges ahead, but well, she's going to reveal it all to us. And she also describes her love affair with a remote town in her book that was recently published called Pinch Me. Barbara Boyle: This story isn't like a handbook for how people should move to the Piedmont and buy an old house and fix it up because that was our story. The story is more, if you have a dream, be open to it, listen, kind of tiptoe into it. Follow your heart. Here's my story. Basically, I'll tell you today about how we found it, what we love, and why we are so in love with this special place. We found it when we were on our honeymoon. It was a second marriage, so we weren't children. We got married in December and by March, we decided we should take a two-week honeymoon. We picked a really nice place in the south of France, more Burgundy than Provence, but I've always loved that area. That was beautiful. And then we drove over to Northern Italy, mostly because it was convenient to where we were going in and out of, which was Geneva, not because I had a clue about what I was doing. So as we come driving from gorgeous, lush, elegant France into Northern Italy, it was cold, it was rainy, it was March 31st. It was getting snowy, foggy, and I'm thinking, "Oh dear, what have I done? This may not be the end to my honeymoon that I'd hoped for." And it was sort of flat. There was a lot of manufacturing. There were freeways. It just wasn't the charming honeymoon I pictured, until the last 45 minutes to an hour. And suddenly the whole topography changed. The landscape changed, and little hills were appearing, and on the hills were little castles and churches and stone buildings, terracotta tiles. So the weather's getting worse and worse. We're driving finally up the hill to Montfort, to Alba, to this hotel I had seen online. And as we're going, following the GPS up this tiny little hill on a winding cobblestone road, I kept thinking, "Oh my gosh, where are we? We're lost." I thought we might slide down the hill at any time. But by the time we got to the top, suddenly right before me is this just beautiful, charming hotel, like an old house, clearly a restaurant off to the side and the most lovely woman greeting us. So we go up these beautiful old stairs and check into this just charming room with velvet curtains and high ceilings with frescoes and a big comfortable bed, old furniture, a bottle of wine waiting for us and three little candies. And I just said, "Okay, if we never leave the hotel room for the next week, it'll still be a good honeymoon. I'm okay with this." So we rested a bit and went downstairs to check in with Monica and said, "Okay, we're feeling a bit better. Would it be okay if we just eat dinner in the hotel?" And she says, "Oh, we serve breakfast and lunch, but unfortunately not dinner. But there is one restaurant, it's not far, less than a kilometer, right down the hill." Well down the hill, were nothing but icy sleety, snowy cobblestones. I'm in my slippery leather shoes thinking, trying to picture me walking down there, and I thought, "Well, this might not work. Is there a taxi?" And she says, "Yes, but he's in Milan." And then she says, "But that's okay. I'll take you." So she locks up the hotel. We get in the back of her little Fiat, we have this amazing dinner, and there was one other table of people in the whole restaurant. And as dinner's winding down, we had a couple glasses of wine and just a delicious meal, felt very nourished. I started worrying about how we were going to get back up the hill, when the chef/owner came to us and said, "Okay, I'll take you home. I promised Monica that I would." So he drives us back up to our hotel, just that kind of welcome warmth, a sense of family from the get go. So we just knew we had found something really special. We were there five days and when we left, we said, "We really need to come back." When we went back to San Francisco, it just kept calling to us. It was really love at first sight, but you don't know if it's just a crush or is it true love. Lale Arikoglu: How Barbara and her husband put down roots in Piedmont After this short break. You're back with Women Who Travel and this dispatch from Northern Italy. Barbara Boyle: So after we left, after our first visit, you get back into your world, your life, and we're going about newly married, figuring out our very nice life in San Francisco. But we kept wanting to go back and wanting to go back. So 18 months later, we went back, we looked at a couple other regions in the same general area, but just there was something about this town. We had a realtor taking us around for a couple of days, but everything we saw was too far out or just not quite right. And the day before we were going to leave, he says, "You know what? There's this other house you might like." He says, "Are you okay about a fixer upper?" We said, "Sure." I had been in advertising for all those years. So I have a pretty good imagination. And my husband was a real estate developer, so he is okay with taking something old and fixing it up. And we always thought it would be a fun project for our sort of semi-retirement. And we go down this lovely driveway and pull in front of this house that was just beautiful, lots of shutters, all stone and brick and tile, nice driveway. And I said, "Wow," because it was a very modest price. I mean the price of a good car in America these days. I said, "Wow, this is the house?" And he says, "Oh no, the house is over there." And we look behind us and there's this falling down, rickety, but beautiful stone barn, rusted tools, weeds, mud, but it had an aura about it. It was sort of a demure and proud these two or three stories because it was a barn with a home attached to it. And he goes, "There's the house." And actually, I said to my husband at that time, "This is it." And he says, "What do you mean this is it? We haven't even seen it." But I was sitting outside waiting to go in and just sitting perched on that little level, looking out at the Alps and the valleys between here and there, the hills, the vineyards, the birds everywhere were chattering away. And I just said, "I could spend the rest of my days, right here in this little place I'm sitting and I'd be perfectly happy." He says, "Let's go check it out." So I followed him eventually, but he then fell in love as he walked into this old literally ruin of a falling down barn and building and down four or five, very steep, kind of goofy, dark stairs was this gorgeous big cantina where they were making wine and had all these wine barrels and wine bottles, and he was just enchanted with that. He says, "Oh, that would be a great place for a winery, and we could have dinner down there." Which that one I could not imagine, but he was smitten with that. I was smitten with the view and the town, and we said, "Okay, this is it." What I find interesting about a 300-year-old structure is there is a lot of history. I learned that the person who was selling the house had passed away, she was 98, and she had left the house to our next-door neighbors in her will because she didn't know who else to leave it to, so they were selling it, and they told us about her, her name was Emma and she was born in the house, lived her whole life there. So there are so many nights when I sit there on the couch and I'm looking at the layers of stone that go up to 30 feet or so in the living room. Because we've removed the hayloft and you are looking up at this huge ceiling and you can picture what they were doing during the different wars. I just can imagine what their lives must have been and what their hopes were and dreams during the good times, maybe some of the leaner times with all the things we were going through as well. I imagine it wasn't all that different from their hopes and dreams. So I feel very close to her because I feel like when we first went into where she slept, there was this twin bed and this little crucifix on the wall and a picture of the Pope in her bedroom drawer and a rosary, and that's very intimate, very personal. So I feel like we're now the shepherds of the house for this decade or two, and we want to do it with respect. We didn't leap in with both feet immediately. We took our time and really were open to what it could be. And there were issues. We didn't realize it, but in the end, it turns out the person handling the real estate was skimming money from us, and that was a heartbreak. But in the end, he found us a house we would've never otherwise found, and it's still very reasonable by the real estate standards in America. So it was a good thing. You just have to be aware that there are people, it was only one really who took advantage of us, I think, to a degree. You have to learn what you're doing. You ask questions, you get advice. We had lawyers, we have accountants, we have people that we check in with, friends and neighbors and study the laws. It's a very bureaucratic country, and there's a thousand signatures for every thing you do and a different contract for the roof and for the floor and for the windows, all these different contracts and a lot of paperwork. But in the end, we started construction and finished from an old barn to a really lovely house in 18 months and were able to live there. It's in the middle of nowhere and I liked the idea that if my husband wasn't home one night or something, my neighbors were not exactly shouting distance, but not far. There's a path between our homes. We go across our lawn and their vegetable garden and their lawn, and we're at their door, and they're the two nicest neighbors I've ever had. She's an ex-nurse, he's an ex-construction guy. So we have medical issues, they just, no problem, they take us where we need to go and help us. My husband has a project out in the yard and within two minutes, Biagia shows up and he's got a chainsaw and two more tractors to help him do it. Part of what we fell in love with and what's just absolutely interwoven into the culture there is the food. It's extraordinary and it's extraordinary in its simplicity and its authenticity. Everyone has vegetable gardens and little orchards, and they all cook with fresh, natural, nearby and seasonal ingredients. Their cheeses are famous. They're quite incredible. Obviously Parmesan comes from Parma and that's nearby, but they have their own kind of creamy, smooth cheeses that are quite wonderful. Their pasta is called plean, which means pinch, because you pinch them to hold the butter. Their butter, their creams, their milks, their ice creams, their yogurts are delicious. I'm just in awe of how they put their food together. It's a gastro tourism area for Europe, but it hasn't yet been discovered by most Americans, and even a lot of Europeans don't head for Piedmont immediately. They'll go to Rome, Tuscany, Florence, maybe Sicily now and Sardinia, but Piedmont is very special. And the little town we found, Monforte d'Alba, and then we moved into Roddino, which is a suburb of Monforte d'Alba, are both really tiny and just extraordinary. We're very happy there. Lale Arikoglu: Sometimes you only realize how much a place means to you after facing a life-threatening setback, after this break. It's the 300-year-old renovated barn that's now home, even though Barbara's ties to San Francisco are still strong. Barbara Boyle: The big surprise on this travel adventure came after we'd been living there full-time for a year and a half, almost two years. I just noticed I was tired all the time, but I'd just seen all my doctors, so I didn't think much of it. But I, one morning, found this little lump in my breast and I thought, "It feels like a lump." So I decided to have it checked out locally, and it took about three weeks for them to get back to me, which I found a little frustrating. And when they got back to me, in fact, it was cancer and it turned out to be a very lethal kind, they say. It was stage two, triple negative. Our son was in medical school at the time, and so we called him back home and said, "What do you think we should do?" And he says, "You need to go be treated where you have the most support." And we realized that was San Francisco still. That's where we had doctors and where people would look after me if I had to undergo a whole year of treatment, which in fact I did. And it was a hard year. It wasn't as bad as it might've been. I was fortunate, but I did have surgery and five months of chemo and radiation. The whole time I'd go to bed at night, I wouldn't let myself think too much about Italy during the day or it would be too hard. But when I'd go to bed at night, usually around 8 o'clock, I'd pull the covers over my head and close my eyes and pretend I was in my bed in Italy and I could picture the stars above me being Italian stars. And I just fell off to sleep and it was a really soothing way to get through it. And I'm cancer free and have been now for seven years. When I came back, it had never looked so beautiful. We'd been gone about eight or nine months and we pulled in. It was August and it was so green and lush and velvety. I said to my husband, "Was it always this beautiful?" And he says, "Yeah," but it looked especially beautiful to me. I just fell in the pool and laid there and said, "Okay, I'm alive. I'm in Italy. It's okay." Our day-to-day life is very different from the states. It's wonderful, but very different. My husband decided out of the blue that he wanted to have a winery. He had never had anything like that in his life. And I said, "How do you intend to do this?" He says, "Oh, I bought a book." So he bought a book and he did it. He planted it. We got help from people, and this is his project, and it's actually turned out to be really pretty good wine. I'm shocked. And the sweetest thing is he calls it, it's a Barbera wine and he calls it, Barbera di Barbara, in honor of me. So how could I be anything but happy about that? And it is delicious. We make 100 bottles a year. We get to share it with friends. So it's a treat. And my day is really spent slower and more purposefully because the town closes from 12 till three every day. So the only sensible thing to do then is to have lunch and take a nap, so I do that. In the morning, I take my walks through the rolling hills for an hour or so. We love shopping. We love going to the butcher or to the cheese place or to the weekly markets, which are huge big marketplaces. And you see your friends and you have coffee and plan your meals. We do have a small pool, so in the summer that keeps us cool and we have a giant yard. Everybody there has huge yards. And now we have a vegetable garden. We garden, we drink wine as watch the sun go down and have a delicious meal and pretty good. The book that just came out is, Pinch Me, Waking Up in a 300-year-old Italian Farmhouse, but Pinch Me started as a blog and I figured as a book, I could just share my love of this beautiful land. There's a lot of people that we encounter these days saying, "Oh, you live in Italy, take me with you." A lot of people are feeling the divisiveness in our country right now, the conflicts and the frustration of the two sides that are at war here in America. And I would say if you feel the need really to pack up and go somewhere else, it's doable. I don't care if it's traveling to Piedmont or decided to become a painter or maybe making wine, something like that. Go for it. Try it. Don't leave your country completely. I'm an American still in my heart and always will be. Lale Arikoglu: So do you have a memorable travel story or maybe there's a topic you'd really like us to pursue and dive into. If you do, please share it with us. Just write to WomenWhoTravel@ Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel. I'm Lale Arikoglu and you can find me on Instagram @Lalehannah. Our engineer is Pran Bandi and special thanks to Jake Lummus for engineering support. Our show is mixed by Amar Lal at Macrosound. Jude Kampfner is our producer, Stephanie Kariuki, our executive producer and Chris Bannon is head of Condé Nast Global Audio. Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
