This weekend I brought a friend from the little town where I live to visit New York and stay with my very dear friend in Brooklyn, and we had a nice time enjoying the fruits of the city. We ate foods we can’t get in our town, went to a great old movie, walked around Prospect Park, and drank good margaritas. It was nice! We kept noticing how, unlike in our town, New Yorkers do tend to look pretty great as adults. Our town does not have an overwhelming number of great-looking grown-ups in it.

But something odd happened to us as our train got closer and closer to home. My friend and I grasped one another’s hands as we sailed past the farms and hills outside our town. Horses! Donkeys! Mules! Cows! Look at that old old train car in that field! Look at the way the sunlight falls on that farmhouse! We’ll be home so soon!

Both of us had spent the previous decade in the big cities of our childhood dreams, on opposite coasts, living out the fantasy of life in public, dating artists and writers and musicians, coming home—if at all—at dawn after deciding on a whim to be out all night. We met people and threw them away, or were thrown away ourselves, for no reason at all. We bitched about everything because in an environment of maximum density, we could always find some pleasure more refined than the last.

Over a lunch of omelets in a diner near the train station, we tried to come up with ways to describe our love of small-town life. Would it be possible to communicate why it’s so great to someone who can’t imagine leaving the city, someone much like ourselves less than a year ago? That is, you wouldn’t want to convince them to leave, but just to respect your enjoyment of something else. Certainly most small-town people can imagine New York being right for someone else. Can city folk imagine what we love?

It most closely reminded me of a time when a woman who lived in my building in Brooklyn told me, over our ritual weekly glass of bourbon, that she was in love with a man. Oh please, I said. A month before she’d picked up some cokehead lawyer to screw her in the ass after a gallery opening. Tell me about this “love.” Well, they’d met at a wedding, and he asked to see her again after sharing a dance. He got reservations at a nice restaurant, where they talked and ate and had good wine. He took her home and didn’t kiss her yet, but invited her to breakfast the next day before he flew back across the country, and they did kiss, and now she’s in love and going to move to marry him. I couldn’t see it. She might as well have been speaking random syllables for all I understood. That is really weird, I said.

Our small town, my friend and I decided, is like having some new boyfriend who’s really dependable and likes your company and is fun to be around but gives you space without being creepy or passive-aggressive about it. And when you try to explain your love to people who’ve known you and the kinds of guys you go for, it just sounds way too healthy and sane to hold any interest.

Backyard Birds

Fortunately, it’s easy to stay amused, especially with so many great shows to discover. The Boston-NYC Chinatown bus offers long viewing session opportunities, just right for the six-to-eight hour length of most British series. One trip down and back, and you’re done!

Are English shows really smarter, or do they just sound that way? Sure, the accents are a plus, but the writing rocks, too.

Skins proves a strong exception to the one-or-two-series-and-then-quit rule of a lot of the best British shows, yet the format allows for constant reinvention. It follows a group of friends through their sixth-form college (the two years of schooling that roughly correspond to end of high school in the U.S.). They party a lot, but aren’t precocious in the American sense, where most TV teenagers are played by actors pushing thirty. These are real kids, mostly nonprofessionals, acting the hell out of complex, ensemble-driven plots.

Most seasons consist of eight episodes, and eight kids make up the main group. Each episode is told from a different character’s point of view, so while the story arcs develop across multiple ranges of vision, we also get one deep look (but only one!) at each character per season. This format makes for brilliant, riveting TV; I wish an American series could adapt it in a way that wasn’t stupid and trusted viewers to keep up. (My So-Called Life sort of tried it way back when, with separate eps that featured Brian, Rickie, and Rayanne, but it was always Angela Chase’s world–the rest of them just lived in it.)

I have only gotten through the first two seasons (there are five to date), so it’s time to exchange one group of sixth-formers for another. But this show really got to me; I am not ready to move on quite yet. It’s that good.

One sort-of guilty pleasure is an action series called Strike Back, about John Porter, a disgraced soldier who signs on with a black-ops division of MI6 to try and redeem himself. Mission after ethically-dubious mission, he strives to do the right thing, even when it conflicts with his creepy boss’s orders. Two things save this show from its own formula: first, each mission gets spread across two hours, which allows it to be fully developed and granted feature-worthy production values, including exotic locations that give the stories verisimilitude. (British audiences don’t seem as terrified of subtitles as American viewers, thank goodness.)

The second thing that makes Strike Back so fun to watch is the presence of Jodhi May as Porter’s liaison in the field. Trust me on this one, guys. May is one of the finest actors working today, and she doesn’t choose bad projects. She won the Best Actress award at Cannes when she was twelve. She is endlessly versatile–films, TV, stage, costumes, accents, you name it. She could be our generation’s Meryl Streep, she’s so good. (Oh, did I mention that she has a literature degree from Oxford? Just sayin’.)

I saved the best (and most embarrassing) one for last: Lip Service. If you can set aside the strange concept (an L Word-type show set in Glasgow) and the god-awful name (seriously, is that the best they could come up with for a lesbian drama?), you will be pleasantly surprised. The show is sexy, incredibly funny, affecting, and wonderfully cast, especially with the luminous Laura Fraser in the central role. Fraser’s Cat Mackenzie has just gotten over her bad-girl ex (Frankie) and started getting serious with a responsible detective sergeant (Sam) when Frankie reenters her life. Which one will Cat choose?

Without giving anything away, I can tell you that I am firmly on the side of

Six hours of charming Scottish accents, ace storytelling, and great love scenes (did I mention the accents?) later, you’re ready for Series 2, coming in Spring 2012. I should get around to watching it this time next year, probably on the Chinatown bus back from New York.

This is the very first photo we took. It’s the ATM at the airport, which offered us an ambiguous suggestion that cash had been dispensed, but no actual cash. I took the photo in case I had to file a future appeal. In Indonesian. Whatever! I was tired from 23-plus hours of travel!

The view from our hotel window in Jakarta. Calls to prayer emanated from the mosque at 4 a.m. sharp. I was awake already – damn jetlag. Anyway, a reasonably pretty view in a not especially pretty city.

At the National Museum, where random white ladies (such as these pictured) may find themselves treated as rock stars by excited throngs of Indonesian schoolgirls.

Goodbye, Jakarta, hello, Bali! No more crowded cities. Time for the kind of resort experience that costs about as much as a Howard Johnson’s here.

Now, some random sights from Bali:

The Blue Diamond, a glass beachside structure built for weddings.

A boat stranded on the reef. So odd-looking, propped all askew almost all the way out of the water.

The afternoon thunderstorm rolls in.

Balinese people place these small woven baskets filled with flowers and food every day outside their shops and homes as offerings. Thanksgiving, indeed.

If you go to the Monkey Forest, heed the signs. Because the monkeys are not shy.

Here is one charging up to try and grab the sunglasses off my head. I ducked and ran just in time.

A sweeter monkey moment.

Traditional Balinese dance show at sunset, at the Ulu Watu Temple.

Thanksgiving dinner. Not so traditional, but every bit as tasty.

Still feeling thankful.

When you have a window seat, you’re trapped in a more confined space and have to ask strangers to move if you want to get out. If you have an aisle seat, you can sometimes stretch your legs a bit more, and you can get up and down as you please. I’ve heard people make the argument that once you’re over 10 years old and the thrill of flying has presumably worn off, you’d have to be a moron to want a window seat.

But I always want the window. I will stare out for hours, even if there’s not much more than cloud cover. I can never quite get over the fact that we’re hurtling miles above the ground, able to see the landscape change drastically from west to east (or vice versa). I try to find ballfields for good luck. I look at tiny houses and wonder whether the people in them are glancing up to see us pass by in our tiny metal tube.

On a recent trip from LA to DC, the first leg was so unexpectedly clear that I started snapping photos, not stopping until we landed in Chicago, where I had a brief layover. Here are a few of the shots; fasten seat belts, please!

Long Beach / LA, on an uncharacteristically clear day. You can see the city in the upper right corner.

Mojave Desert

Cloud cover over the Rockies

the Great Plains

the Mississippi River