A travel writer and a chef walk into a bar. They fall in love and move in together. The chef gets a Michelin star, then two Michelin stars, and they live happily ever after nearby the restaurant. Then comes coronavirus.

If you’re a traveler, you can hardly escape a bucket list reference these days. (To pick but one example, Thrillist has used the phrase more than 100 times in headlines over the years. We even made you one in case you weren’t up to the task.) It’s edging toward cliché, yes, but bucket lists endure because they’re so pithy. If you’re really sitting down to articulate the places you want to go and things you want to do before you die, you’re a little macabre and a lot carpe diem.

In the wintertime, everyone craves warmth. Nowhere is this more true than in the German capital of Berlin, where December, January, and February are particularly frigid and gray. But the city does have an antidote: its infamous cuddle parties, where perfect strangers explore physical intimacy in a completely nonsexual way.

A little while back, I took a cheese-making course in the wilderness outside a mountain village in India. You might wonder, "How does one end up on a former tea plantation 7,000ft above sea level, attempting to milk a cow (and failing miserably)?" Well, I'd already got a knack for a few curries, and cheese happens to be among India's hottest new foods.

Virtual reality promises to upend digital life as we know it. Gaming, shopping, teleconferencing, education, actual human screwing -- in the next 10 years, VR is going to transform them all. (Heck, maybe even in just five.) First, though, it's trying to change one of our most basic entertainment experiences, namely, how we sit in a dark room and watch movies together.

Hotel maids don't have it easy; My mom's worked as one for more than 20 years. It's tough physical work. Washing ketchup-stained bedsheets and scrubbing windows covered in baby handprints is about as glamorous as you would imagine. But it's a behind-the-scenes job that someone's gotta do.

Beer yoga is just what it sounds like -- the same sweat-inducing practice of heavy breathing and postures, except combined with drinking cold, sweaty beers at the same time.

When I moved to Berlin in the cold, gray winter some years back, one of the first things my German boyfriend suggested we do was go to a sauna. What he failed to mention, however, was how, in the Vaterland, it’s normal to sauna buck naked.

I'm not sure what’s worse: being too plugged in, or totally unplugged, and that's why sensory deprivation tanks scare the living sh*t out of me.