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Savoring the World: Hit and Misadventures - a memoir
Not your typical travelogue. Instead, this book is organized by the nature of the experience the author had while traveling.I am an avid world traveler. I have lived in a variety of international locations, and I have both studied abroad and taught abroad. I have backpacked, camped out, stayed at youth hostels, and now, in my senior years, I have stayed in topnotch hotels and resorts. I have flown standby, and I have flown first class. I have hitchhiked, and I have taken public transportation, slow trains, fast trains, boats, and ships. I cherish my memories. They are solid, like granite, and they remind me of what I have been through and of how they have made me into a better person. World travel has taken me out of my comfort zone, has freed me from ever living a cocoon like life, has taught me to reach for the stars, and has provided me with an education that far surpasses any level that I could have achieved in any other way.“Thank you, world!” I can shout from the greatest heights and from the lowest depths, from Germany’s Zugspitze to California’s Death Valley. I’ve been in the burning sands of Saudi Arabia, and I have been in the Arctic freeze of Lapland in Finland. I’ve been there and I am a better person for it.Everything and everybody in this book is factual. All details are true to life. This is exactly how it all happened. It is as if yesterday is today, and, in a way, that’s the way it really is. These glimpses of my world journeys are poignant, funny, comical, inspiring, and sometimes frightening, but one thing is for every word details precisely and truthfully how it all happened.
- GenresTravelNonfiction
159 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 17, 2020
25 people are currently reading
36 people want to read
About the author
Michael Meyer
240 books94 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Michael Meyer is an American travel writer and the author of In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China and The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. He graduated from University of Wisconsin–Madison. He first went to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps. Following Peace Corps, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied writing under Adam Hochschild and Maxine Hong Kingston.
His work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Smithsonian, the New York Times Book Review, the Financial Times, Reader’s Digest, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, and on This American Life.
In China, he has represented the National Geographic Society’s Center for Sustainable Destinations, training China’s UNESCO World Heritage Site managers in preservation practices.
He lives in Singapore and Pittsburgh, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, teaching Nonfiction writing.
After a five year clearance delay, his book The Last Days of Old Beijing was published in mainland China.
Michael Meyer is an American travel writer and the author of In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China and The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. He graduated from University of Wisconsin–Madison. He first went to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps. Following Peace Corps, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied writing under Adam Hochschild and Maxine Hong Kingston.
His work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Smithsonian, the New York Times Book Review, the Financial Times, Reader’s Digest, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, and on This American Life.
In China, he has represented the National Geographic Society’s Center for Sustainable Destinations, training China’s UNESCO World Heritage Site managers in preservation practices.
He lives in Singapore and Pittsburgh, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, teaching Nonfiction writing.
After a five year clearance delay, his book The Last Days of Old Beijing was published in mainland China.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 25, 2020
Well Written and Very Informative
What a wonderful account of Mike's travel all around the world. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about his adventures starting off as a young man of barely 19 up to present day.
Coming from a small desert town where everyone knew everything about you he became an international traveller embraces all that the World has to offer. Yes he trusted people taking them for who and what he saw, there were times he was duped....the Exotic Watch springs to mind, on the whole he was well treated and earned the trust and friendship of many of the people that he met along his travels. Mike spent his life as an English Teacher all over the World, travelling whenever he could with friends in his younger day then in later times with his dear wife Kitty.
The places he visited were described in exacting detail and brought them to life and I could visualize them. Thank you Mike for a very enjoyable read.
What a wonderful account of Mike's travel all around the world. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about his adventures starting off as a young man of barely 19 up to present day.
Coming from a small desert town where everyone knew everything about you he became an international traveller embraces all that the World has to offer. Yes he trusted people taking them for who and what he saw, there were times he was duped....the Exotic Watch springs to mind, on the whole he was well treated and earned the trust and friendship of many of the people that he met along his travels. Mike spent his life as an English Teacher all over the World, travelling whenever he could with friends in his younger day then in later times with his dear wife Kitty.
The places he visited were described in exacting detail and brought them to life and I could visualize them. Thank you Mike for a very enjoyable read.
January 28, 2021
This was an enjoyable read about the author's decades of not just travel but being immersed in some of the most lovely and exotic locations in the world. The easy to ready short essays about his memories and misadventures were a great read. It allowed this reader to hope to see some of those places "someday" and mourn that some of them are not likely to be experienced as things have changed. However, this is also timely as the author wrote this as the world sits impatiently for the 2020 global pandemic to recede so that those with wanderlust can once again embrace this beautiful world and the people in it.
August 25, 2020
Good book to read
A lot of descriptions of the places they went to, I didn't see much humor in it but everybody's views are always different. I enjoyed reading this book. Got to visualize the different places. They visited many places something so fun to do when your younger and has more energy.
A lot of descriptions of the places they went to, I didn't see much humor in it but everybody's views are always different. I enjoyed reading this book. Got to visualize the different places. They visited many places something so fun to do when your younger and has more energy.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews