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in moscow, stephanie:
- volunteers at a children's shelter
- studies at Moscow Linguistics Institute
- gets attacked by a belligerent babushka in a Metro for
admitting she's American
- falls in love with an ex-soldier who slit his wrists to escape
clean-up duties at Chernobyl
- joins a "Take Back The Night" feminist rally
- observes an underwater menage a trois at Shans',
Moscow's premier gay discotheque
- gets chased down a dark alley by a pack of drunken Russian men
- consumes 12 shots of vodka in one sitting
- realizes that open elections and a free media does not make
a democracy
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in beijing, she:
- polishes propaganda at the English mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist
Party
- fights to save the Spice Girls from the Censor Board's wrath
- eats fish lips, chicken feet, and yak penis soup (losing her vegetarianism
in the process)
- learns the art of saving face the hard way
- hangs with China's most controversial painters
- studies a form of belly dance with a young Muslim Uighur woman
- dates a Chinese college student who carts her around on the back of
his bicycle
- learns family secrets during a visit from her mother, including why
she was raised more gringa than mexicana
in havana, she:
- stalks Fidel Castro
- marches with 100,000 mothers demanding the return of Elian Gonzalez
to Cuba
- hangs with hip-hop artists who rap about Revolution
- smokes a lot of Cohibas
- belly dances with rumba queens and a particularly fine king
- distributes medical supplies to a children's hospital and school supplies
to students
- realizes she really needs to learn Spanish
stephanie is:
- half Mexican, half gringa
- started traveling at age 21, began the book at age 24, is currently
28
- speaks Russian, Mandarin, and Spanish with (somewhat) respectable
coherency
- has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Latina Magazine,
AP, USA Weekend, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Austin Chronicle, and
numerous travel anthologies
- recently drove 45,000 miles across the nation in a 1981 Honda hatchback,
documenting US history as a national correspondent for The Odyssey:
US Trek on a $15 daily budget
- has studied tribal gypsy belly dance six years and incorporates the
dance into her readings
- plans to launch a national Bloc Party tour to promote her book in
2004
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