I am devouring a slice of pizza on Broadway in downtown LA and talking to Matthew, a gaunt-looking fellow whose protruding ears make him resemble a coyote from his native Arizona.
"Seven minutes - that's how long your average tourist experiences the Grand Canyon for," Matthew tells me in his cowboy drawl.
I'm fascinated by Florida because it's both obvious - balmy weather and beachside condos - and hard to place. Three visits in, what I'm seeing is that Florida's story is one of man conquering and transforming a very unique natural environment.
Yet driving back from Key West to Miami you follow the broken remains of the Great Florida Overseas Railroad - an emblem, perhaps, of that conquest not being forever...
"So, it's true that the Dutch swapped New York City for your country in the 1600s?"
"Yes. With the English. Dutch are clever people but the worst deal they ever made."
I look up. We have left the Jessica Jones murk of the Times Square hinterland for Fifth Avenue, one of whose doormen is outlined in orange. Grand Central up ahead. "So tell me about Suriname."
There is some debate about which is America's Christmas tree. On the Mall in Washington DC, carefully aligned with the monuments and Oval Office, there is a ghastly looking conical shape that is plastered with green, yellow and purple lights.
On closer inspection, you can actually make out leaves and branches inside. On the plus side, the President of the USA switches on the lights each year. I might put in for tickets if Hillary is in charge (I could skip a Trump lighting ceremony). This year the tree is a 74-footer proudly supplied by Alaska and chosen (I presume) as the best specimen from their vast forests.
But much better, in my view, is the real America's Christmas tree: the one outside Rockefeller Center in New York.
St Thomas's church, an oasis of Englishness on Fifth Avenue, has just helped me empathize with the millions of Ukrainians, Irish, and other ethnic groups who flock to a particular place each Sunday for that feeling of being connected with home.
Each weekend morning in the East Village I would head out in search of borscht, blintzes and other tastes of East European cooking. Why? Because it's available, it's home-made the way the chef's grandmother made it, and therefore it tastes amazing.
In the same spirit, the Ukrainians in my neighborhood have built a spectacular orthodox church with vivid murals and gold ornaments. It turns out that my little piece of cultural turf in the city is right here: squatting on some of earth's most expensive real estate just a few blocks south of the park.
This entry was published on the World Bank Voices blog in November 2015 as What El Niño teaches us about climate resilience.
It was recorded by the Spanish conquistadors, and triggered famines that have been linked to China’s 1901 Boxer Rebellion and even the French revolution.
Named by Peruvian fishermen because of its tendency to appear around Christmastime, El Niño is the planet’s most large-scale and recurring mode of climate variability. Every 2-7 years, a slackening of trade winds that push sun-warmed water across the Pacific contributes to a rise in water temperature across large parts of the ocean. As the heat rises, a global pattern of weather changes ensues, triggering heat waves in many tropical regions and extreme drought or rainfall in others.
My first outing in Egypt is a brisk walk to Tahrir Square. From my hotel, a rather fine and reasonably priced former palace recommended by a former Finance Minister of this country, it is a 30-minute walk along the north shore of Zamalek Island and across a bridge. I arrive with some trepidation, given this is the equivalent of marching up to Place de la Concorde in 1794, but (luckily for me) all is calm today!
Cairo, it turns out, is much like Paris. The buildings are the same height, the boulevards are planned in a similar way (downtown Cairo was also laid out around the same time Hausmann was doing his thing), and people mill around in cafes and bars. The traffic is nearly as chaotic.
A couple of hours in and I'm already giving thanks to divine providence, in the form of Egypt's state airline, for my 48 hours here. EgyptAir (through generous subsidies I presume) was able to offer me JFK to Addis Ababa for $1000. I leave work at 4pm on Friday, and by 11am next day local time, a friendly cab driver is honking his way through Parisian-style traffic for me ("hear that?" beep beep, "Cairo music").
