It's not palm trees and neon signs in Florida; it's strip malls, highways, hot sun beating down on you.
I live in New Orleans, because it's the strangest city in the United States. It has the highest murder rate in the country, the highest incarceration rate, and often we have to boil our drinking water, but there's nowhere else remotely like it.
Rainforests are not confined to the tropics: a good definition is forest wet enough to support epiphytes - plants that grow on other plants. Particularly in the west of Britain, where tiny fragments persist, you can find trees covered in rich growths of a fern called polypody, mosses and lichens, and flowering plants climbing the lower trunks.
What sets seersucker apart from other materials? It's the 'coolest' material to wear in hot and humid weather. 'Coolest,' as in temperature, and 'coolest' as in hip, baby! There is nothing like it.
I love New Orleans physically. I love the trees and the balmy air and the beautiful days. I have a beautiful house here.
The L.A. weather is a lot like Taiwan's, where you don't observe four seasons, so the years can pass and you don't feel a thing.
When you get into Louisiana, it really is like a different country in a lot of ways. The plants you see are a little different, like the weeping willows and the cypress trees that come up out of the bayou. And it's steamy hot.
I spent a lot of my adolescence in Miami, where it was super humid, and my hair would get super frizzy, and my waves weren't really consistent or pretty.
Where most of the country is, well, hot - from the bone-baking dry heat of the desert to the flesh-melting humidity of Kerala in the south - Kashmir is cool: so cool, in fact, that in the winter, the temperatures can sink to sub-zero.
Philadelphia is a town where even the sidewalks seem to sweat.
I think New Orleans is such a beautiful city. It looks like a fairytale when you walk through the French Quarter or the Garden District. There is such a lush sense of color, style, architecture - and the people themselves.
Everyone goes on about how Bombay is so similar to New York, so I had see what the big deal was. The bustling crowds are the same, but it's a lot quieter, it's a lot cleaner, and it's not humid. I think the energy is very similar to Bombay.
I've been to Indonesia, but I've never been to Thailand. I hear the people are lovely, the food is delicious, and that the heat and humidity are lethal.
The rainforest has an intense beauty that at times seems almost suffocating. The jungle is one twig short of impenetrable, and the greenery seems to crowd in on you with a sensation that has been described as akin to snow blindness.
Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.
