Loving London
By: Kimberly Mollo
May 4, 2014

Just a few weeks ago, in early April, I was fortunate enough to spend nine days in London with one old friend and one new friend. I’ll take my recount of this amazing experience day by day, as I think that will (hopefully) cut down on my ramblings. I could write a novella about the City — and another about how much I want to go back and visit again, and again, and again — but that wouldn’t be good blogging practice. So, onward.

Day One

Sluggish, weary, and quite close to miserable after an overnight flight that yielded absolutely no sleep and a long, long Tube tide from Heathrow Airport to our flat, our first day in London was on the low-key side. Yes, I said flat, not hotel — through lodging rental website Airbnb, we were able to book a place with three beds (two being pullout couches, but they were more than fine), a private bathroom and a small kitchen (with a washing machine!) for about $375, for each of us, total. $375 for nine nights in an apartment? Yes, okay, we’ll take that, cheers.

Even better was the location, which we didn’t fully appreciate until we’d checked in and started exploring. We stayed above a Vietnamese restaurant on Kingsland Road, a main throughway in Hoxton. Hoxton is a neighborhood next to Shoreditch in East London; a trendy, young area of the city filled with pubs, clubs, street art, hipsters, artists and students. Hackney College had a campus within a short walk of us, and there were student housing buildings across the street. We absolutely loved our neighborhood, and having so much nightlife right outside our door meant never having to worry about missing the last train home at night.

We were also a few blocks’ walk to the Hoxton Overground Station, which meant we’d take that train a few stops and then transfer to one of the Underground lines to get to the heart of the City. Don’t let the transferring intimidate you — the Tube is very easy to navigate, with signs just about everywhere and trains coming so often that, unless you have some sort of appointment, it doesn’t really matter if you miss one. If you’re used to the New York Subway, the Tube stations will look like the cleanest things you’ve ever seen. If you’ve taken the Washington, D.C. Metro, the Tube won’t be such a shock.

We purchased 7-day Oyster cards, which can be used for Underground and Overground trains and on the London buses — those famous, double-decker red guys, yeah. The buses are a little tricker to navigate as a visitor, but we took one through Camden on a rainy afternoon and another on our last morning without any problems.

 

Day two

For all our exhaustion on the first day, our second day in London can only be likened to a hyperactive puppy on speed. I like to think of day two as our “London’s Greatest Hits” sightseeing day: we experienced London Bridge, Borough Market, Tower Bridge and Tower of London, Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, London Eye, St. James’s Park and the Buckingham Palace grounds.

Phew. Our feet were aching by dinnertime, but it was so worth it.

It was all so much fun, but I think we found our happy place at Borough Market. A retail food market in Central London, Borough is one of the largest and oldest of its kind in the City, and sells a large variety of foods from all over the world. It was all so delicious — the fresh fruits and vegetables, the shellfish-packed, spicy paella, the meats tucked into pies, sandwiches and just about anything else you can imagine, the macrons, meringues and other sweets, and much, much more.

Day Three

Camden Town. My favorite. I liked it so much, I advocated to go back on our second to last day. Camden is just cool, period. One of the major draws to the neighborhood are the markets, and, as evidenced by my love affair with Borough, markets are my jam. The Camden markets are a collection of adjoining large retail markets near the Hampstead Road Lock of the Regent’s Canal (popularly referred to as Camden Lock), and are often collectively referred to as Camden Market or Camden Lock. Food from every part of the world can be found here, too, but visitors can also find books, paintings, crafts, clothing and more.

One of the highlights was the Camden Stables Market, which houses an army of shops in, you guessed it, what were formerly horse stables.

Apart from the markets, I can’t recommend highly enough taking a canal boat ride in Camden. For a small fee, we were treated to a 90-minute trip down the Regent’s Canal — floating through the London Zoo at one point, and passing the dozens of personalized boat homes that families live aboard at another. The ride comes with a tour guide, who gave us context and fun facts about the different sights passing before our eyes.

Day Four

We spent a good portion of the day filling our brains at the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, a hop skip and jump from one another in Kensington. The Natural History Museum boasted a dinosaur exhibit, among other things, but we decided to retreat after walking through a few rooms — our holiday unfortunately coincided with the local schools’ spring holiday, and the museum was packed with running, crying, screaming children. That was less than ideal, but it was much quieter at the V&A Museum, which was a bit too artsy for kids, apparently. Think more fine art, fewer dinosaurs.

Like Washington, D.C., a great number of museums in London do not have entry fees. Donation boxes are installed at the doors to help keep the museums running.

Before the museum trips, we filled our bellies at the uber-cool (and right by our flat) BOXPARK Shoreditch, a pop-up mall with tiny apparel, shoe and accessory stores at street level, and eateries upstairs. We tried some traditional British fare by snapping up pies and mash with some pints at Pieminister pies. Absolutely delicious. I would recommend walking off the food baby that results from finishing one of these guys.

 

Day Five

Our fifth day in London brought gorgeous weather. It was consistently around 60 degrees during our entire trip, which was lovely, but a good deal of the time, the weather consisted of grey, overcast skies. That was the weather I expected, and I actually think London is pretty magical cloaked in that chilly, foggy greyness, but it was nice to have a sunny spring day on our hands. We took full advantage by bringing towels and a picnic lunch to Hyde Park, the Central Park of London. Tucked in the greenery is the Serpentine Gallery, which offered another art fill.

Day Six

After nearly one week in the City, we finally made it over to one of the major London landmarks — Trafalgar Square. More beautiful weather meant time spent watching street performers, relaxing beside the Square’s massive fountain, and taking plenty of pictures before ducking inside to check out the National Gallery, which houses one of the greatest collections of paintings in the world.

Continuing our art kick, we headed from Trafalgar to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where we saw Hito Steyerl’s satirical video installations, among other works. We took the scenic route through London’s Chinatown to our next destination, the famous British Museum. In case all that art wasn’t enough, we rounded out the day with a bit of theatre — after scoring cheap tickets at a discount stand on the street, my friends and I enjoyed a performance of Wicked at the The Apollo Victoria Theatre, a West End theatre in the Westminster district.

Day Seven

As I hope this post has made clear (or, at least, hinted at), the neighborhoods in London each have a distinctive character. Camden Lock is not Kensington, which is not Shoreditch, which is not Soho. One of my favorite areas of London of the bunch we visited was Notting Hill, which boasts the Portobello Market. Portobello Market actually consists of two connecting markets in Notting Hill — an antiques market and a full street market which sells food, clothes, crafts and more. The rows of multicolored homes, the quirky cafes and the even quirkier shops made this neighborhood a highlight of my trip.

We also took a stroll over the Waterloo Bridge at night on the recommendation of a lovely customs official at Heathrow, and were not disappointed. You can see Big Ben and the London Eye illuminated in all their glory from the bridge, as well as some fantastic cityscape.

This post has already grown into a monster, so I’ll spare you another two days’ worth of details. We also visited Liecester Square, Piccadilly Circus and Covent Garden (Times Square-esque, an unholy amount of tourists, and not our favorite), Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the Tate Modern museum. After nine fantastic days and nights, we packed up on an early Sunday morning and boarded the train for Heathrow, sad to be leaving, excited to go back in the future, and totally, irrevocably in love with London.

~

Ten days in Antigua and Barbuda
By: Kimberly Mollo
Jan. 31, 2014

As I sit down to write this post in frigid, snow-coated New Jersey, my skin peeling and my tan lines fading, I can’t help but yearn for the sun-drenched shores of a tiny island in the West Indies called Antigua and Barbuda.

I was fortunate enough to spend ten days basking in the Caribbean sunshine, immersing myself in the sublime white sand beaches and translucent, aquamarine waters, earlier this month. Islands of the Caribbean have always enamored me. The Bahamas, U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico — all beautiful, interesting, inviting in their own ways. Antigua and Barbuda, lying between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, was further south than I had previously traveled, neighboring Montserrat, Guadeloupe, and Dominica, and not too far off from the shores of Venezuela.

No matter where I go, I am never content to relax in a resort or on a beach for the entirety of my stay. I know plenty of people who are perfectly happy to do just that, but I can’t seem to sit still for longer than two days or so. Although I spent my nine-night, ten-day stay on the 108-square-mile island of Antigua — about one third the size of New York City — I wasn’t bored for a second: and as I pull on boots, a scarf and gloves in preparation for snow shoveling, I wish I had another ten days to meet more incredible people and learn more about the Antiguan culture firsthand.

I spent my stay at Jolly Beach Resort, on the west side of Antigua. People often remark on Antigua’s 365 beaches — one for every day of the year, brochures are prone to boast. I didn’t do my own count, but I will say travelers seeking postcard views of seascapes, tropics and cliffs won’t be let down. There’s something about a white sand beach with those enticing aqua waves that never gets old.

For someone like me, who can appreciate a day spent languidly baking on a beach towel but craves more active pursuits during their holidays, Antigua offers coral reefs in which to snorkel, rainforests in which to zipline, boats in which to sail and wildlife with which to play. Oh, and bring a camera — if learning lessons in history and culture by visiting preserved landmarks is your thing, you may as well book a flight now.

Perhaps the biggest highlight of the trip was my visit to Stingray City. After a short speedboat ride — and I mean speedy; hang on to something! — everyone in my group was guided into waist-high, translucent water of Mercers Creek Bay to meet the gigantic rays. We were told to shuffle our feet while walking along the bottom, so as not to accidentally step on a swimming stingray. Although the feeling of being surrounded by five-foot, slippery creatures was disconcerting at first, I soon discovered what the guides already knew well; the rays’ personalities were as big as their fin discs.

Guests are able to feed the rays prawns, which they suck up through their vacuous mouths, and cradle them for a quick picture. They were playful, often swimming over to the guides and raising a fin out of the water to splash them. The guides knew each one well, and had nicknames for many of them, like “Split,” a big female with, appropriately, a split in her fin. The rays also loved being pet; a firm rub to the rough top of them will send them swimming back for more. I loved talking to the guides and watching them interact with the animals. All of them were so joyous and affectionate with the rays that I was immediately set at ease and able to enjoy the wonder of the outing.

I also stopped by Betty’s Hope, the ruins of a sugar mill plantation on a quiet hill several miles from the capital town of St. John’s. For a small donation fee, visitors can learn about the significance of sugar in the British colonial economy and the sobering history of slavery on the island in the on site museum. The place has an eerie, lonely feel to it, with the rubble of the planation manager’s house strewn over the grass and the mill towering over it all, now unmoving in the independent Antigua.

I could go on forever about my stay, but to avoid turning this post into a novella, I’ll briefly mention some other highlights. Traveling around the island on Fig Tree Drive is an adventure in itself — the roads are a sort of controlled chaos in Antigua, but Fig Tree Drive is gorgeous, with recently-renamed Mount Obama towering over colorfully-painted homes and schools on one side, and spectacular beachscapes on the other.

Devil’s Bridge, a natural formation and national park off the steep, unpaved Indian Town Road, is something worth the journey. The wild surf has blown holes in the limestone arch, and shoots up dramatically as visitors gaze at it from the cliff’s edge. I met a local woman selling jewelry up at Devil’s Bridge, who said slaves would hurl themselves off the bridge into the rough waters below in an attempt to escape the brutal desperation of their lives. People who lived there declared the place must have the presence of the Devil, hence the name. Another eerie feeling here, but it was awesome in the literal sense of the word to witness the surf blowing through the limestone.

Nelson’s Dockyard is a great place to gawk at the super yachts and get a firsthand look at the enormous draw Antigua holds for top-notch sailors. Indeed, sailors from all over the world travel to the tiny island for the Antigua Charter Yacht Show, and the island is home to a yacht club and sailing school. I was able to spend an afternoon sailing the seas and having an incredible amount of fun with the lovely people at Miramar Sailing. What better place to hop on a boat then Antigua?

Of course, I couldn’t leave Antigua without spending a day in its largest and capital city, St. John’s. I bought some fresh pineapple and figs — known as bananas to Americans — at the Saturday morning market there. Antigua Black Pineapple is incredibly sweet and delicious on a hot day. I also sampled some sugar-apple, which is cream-colored inside its green skin and tastes similar to a custard.

Apart from pineapple, “fig,” and sugar-apple, I also enjoyed some dishes like curried conch and British-style fish and chips. And, of course, lots of rum.

I’d recommend visiting Antigua and Barbuda to anyone. The residents are some of the friendliest people I’ve ever met, there’s a ton to do and see, and the beaches…well, the pictures say enough. I’d love to go back someday and explore the bird sanctuary on Barbuda, as well as sail over to Montserrat. For now, I guess I’ll apply more lotion to my peeling legs and scroll wistfully through my pictures.

~

Aloha and Mahalo
By: Kimberly Mollo
July 1, 2012

As the title suggests, I’ve just returned from a week’s stay on the “Big Island” of Hawai’i. The flight was 10.5 hours nonstop on the way there, and peppered with long layovers on the way back home (especially in LAX, from 5-9 in the morning…yikes), but all the traveling was definitely worth it.

I went kayaking and saw some amazing sea caves and marine life. Staying in Kailua-Kona was a great idea, because unlike rainy Hilo on the east side of the island, Kona is usually dry and sunny, albeit with some island wind. The breeze is like a godsend on a hot summer’s day.

I went to the Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, and got poured on all afternoon (hence no decent pictures), but standing on an active volcano is really something else. I thought standing next to a monstrous European cathedral makes one feel small, but standing next to (or on top of) a natural wonder like Kilauea Volcano made me feel absolutely microscopic. In a cool way.

Another highlight was a tour of the Greenwell coffee farm in Kona, a farm that produces a significant portion of the world’s Kona coffee bean supply. In every Kona coffee supplier I visited in Hawai’i, from gourmet shops to farms to the ubiquitous ABC Stores, the cost of these world-famous beans was pretty steep. The brews I sampled were delicious enough for me to drink them black, though–something I rarely do. (I’ve also taken coffee black in Florence, but that’s pretty much it.)

Another thing that struck me about the Big island is its incredible amount of diversity. There are 13 climate zones that exist in the world, and Hawai’i has 11 of them. Volcanoes, waterfalls, and snow-capped mountains sit alongside white, green, and black sand beaches. Goats, horses, and cattle are frequent sights along the dry, desert-like highway 19 through the Kohala Coast, or the west wide of the island.

The right side of the island, the location of the city Hilo, is basically straight out of Jurassic Park or Jumanji. In fact, it very well may be a child of the two. You can hear parrots in the rainforest and feel smaller than ever in front of Akaka Falls.

I cut myself on sharp rocks while snorkeling with sea turtles, I got bitten by scores of bugs while tromping through forests, and I’m sporting an excellent sunburn after frying on the white sands of Hapuna Beach. Basically, I had tons of fun, and I’m dying to go and see the other islands–although I hear they have significantly less adventure than the Big Island. Maybe Waikiki is just what I need to nurse these scrapes and bruises.

~

Bringin’ the heat
By: Kimberly Mollo
2012

The heat in the room was palpable as I pushed my weight up on my palms and feet, bending my body into the best likeness of an upside-down “V” that I could manage. The chanting of the Hare Krishna music did nothing to calm my frantic pulse, and the incense that wafted around each sweaty body only seemed to make the room hotter.

My forearms began to tremble as Alisha, our instructor, told us when to inhale and exhale and to continue holding the position. Finally, she allowed her class to sit for a moment. I collapsed onto the bright blue mat, downing a quarter of my Poland Spring in one gulp. I grimaced as I realized the water was already lukewarm.

Alisha then announced that the warm-up exercises were over.

Hot yoga is a phenomenon that I hadn’t put much stock into when first hearing about it. The theory is that it helps the body to sweat out toxins, while at the same time allowing a person to reach their maximum flexibility in each yoga pose. The room temperature for a hot yoga class typically ranges from 85 to 122 degrees.

Yoga Bliss opened in 2006 in Ocean Township, New Jersey. It is a small one-story building sandwiched between an old pharmacy and a pizzeria. My friend had asked me to try a class with her years ago, but I was too busy with tennis practice and a part-time job to spare a night for it. After we recently caught up over coffee, she asked me again. I looked up the classes and this time I was intrigued.

We chose a Vinyasa class that runs Saturday mornings from 9:30 until 10:45. Vinyasa, as Yoga Bliss explained on their website, has mostly to do with synchronizing breathing with movement, and involves Sun Salutations, which sounded harmless enough. My friend and I made plans to meet there come Saturday, confident that an hour and fifteen minutes of breathing, balancing and greeting the solar system would be a delightful way to begin the weekend.

A smiling woman greeted us at a desk adorned with rings, candles, teas and skin products for sale. A few racks of clothing from brands such as Pink Lotus, Hugger Mugger and Buddha Nose also stood in the front area of the building, next to propped up yoga mats of all colors. We paid our fee for the day, with two extra dollars for mat rentals, and joined the waiting others to start the class.

The warnings I had failed to read before class began included arriving on an empty stomach, and I immediately regretted the bowl of soggy Cheerios from an hour earlier as the temperature skyrocketed. Already breathless after the warm-up routine, I was beginning to panic. My friend seemed equally flustered, but we made a silent agreement to stick it out. After all, everyone else in the room was at least a decade older than us, and they didn’t look like they were quitting anytime soon.

Alisha, our sprightly, blonde instructor, was so full of smiles and positive encouragement that Oscar the Grouch couldn’t hold a grudge against her. I decided to try and hold off on the lukewarm water for another few poses—poses in which, to my relief, I remained upright. I couldn’t quite take the music seriously, but the room was nice and bright from the sun shining through the full length windows at the front of the building.

Alisha transitioned from pose to pose along with us, smiling all the while and talking us through each movement, walking up and down the rows of pupils to correct our postures or nod and smile if we were doing it right. It could have been paranoia, but it seemed that she came over to my corner more often than the others.

Some poses were easier than others—my favorite was the warrior, which only consisted of standing to the side with your arms stretched in either direction while in a sort of lunge. After the initial shock of the dense heat, my body adjusted to the temperature, and the sweat became less noticeable as the minutes ticked by.

After every series of poses, we had to drop to our stomachs on the mat, do a push-up and then hold it, pushing on our hands to make the “V” shape again. The push-ups got harder with each round, and the lukewarm water was gone before the first 40 minutes were up.

One pose, which demanded that we lie on our backs and stretch until our feet were behind our heads, was so difficult for me that, even with Alisha’s patient encouragement and assistance, I was reduced to a rolling, sweaty heap on the floor. When I very nearly kicked her in the face after losing my grip on my own lower back, Alisha silently chalked it up as a lost cause and went on to the next exercise.

When 10 o’clock finally approached, my limbs felt leaden and I was fairly sure there wasn’t a drop of sweat left in my body. Still, with the exception of the feet-behind-head fiasco, I had managed to hold every pose successfully. In the final fifteen minutes, Alisha instructed us to lie down on our mats, close our eyes and totally relax our muscles. She went around and massaged sweet-smelling lavender oil onto our feet (I had to mentally battle my ticklishness) and the napes of our necks.

After Alisha told us to slowly wake up, finger by finger and toe by toe, I felt miraculously rejuvenated. I crossed my legs on the mat and beamed as I returned her “Namaste” that signaled the end of the class. I had survived, and felt much better than I had before the class started—but the true joy came in the celebratory cool shower I took after I got back home.

~

Profile of a journalist: Gwen Florio
By: Kimberly Mollo
2012

Gwen Florio had only worked at the Denver Post for three months when her editors needed to send a reporter to Afghanistan. It was 2001, and the paper wanted to cover the aftermath of 9/11 with an overseas perspective. Although she was the new hire, Florio asked to go–and they let her.

With only certain hours safe enough to go outside to report and no electricity, she was too intensely focused to feel real fear.

“It wasn’t until later, looking back on it, that I realized the danger,” she said.

Still, it didn’t stop her from traveling to Somalia, Sudan, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Syria in 2002 and Iraq and Egypt a year later. She never felt a calling for the embedded journalism seen so frequently on TV, so she returned to work in the States.

Florio, 55, started her college years without a calling for journalism at all. She chose an English major because she liked to read, but it was her father who told her to take a journalism course to better her chances of getting a job after graduation.

Realizing that journalism did appeal to her, she wrote for The Review and took more journalism classes. In 1977, two weeks into her last semester before graduation, she was offered a job at the Associated Press. She decided the job was too good to pass up.

“I thought, when will this opportunity come again? So I jumped on it and dropped out of school,” she said.

Florio spent five years at the Associated Press before moving to the Philadelphia Bulletin. It folded. She went to News American in Baltimore. It folded. She landed a job at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she ended up staying for 15 years.

She could have spent those 15 years in the familiar Philly area, visiting her hometown of Smyrna, Delaware and perhaps returning to her former university to finally get that diploma. Instead, Florio became the Inquirer’s Denver correspondent. This, and a family trip, sparked a new interest in Florio.

After backpacking with her brother in Glacier Park she developed an affinity for Montana. After returning to work she felt a strong pull to pack up and resettle herself among those mountains.

“That was partly why I wanted the Denver job, so I could go to Montana,” she said.

She took a job at Rocky Mountain News in Denver after her job at the Denver Post, and the East Coast girl felt at home in her new surroundings.

“I fell in love with the West,” she said.

Florio was in the West, but she wanted Montana–she checked job postings constantly to see if there were any openings in the state. Finally, a job at the Great Falls Tribune opened up, and then one in Missoula, Montana, at the Missoulian, which is where she works today.

Florio likes hiking but feels that she isn’t “hardcore” enough to write for outdoors magazines (“The people out west get really into it,” she said with a laugh). She also had a love-hate relationship with her old position as city editor for the Missoulian.

“I loved the editing but hated the business aspect of the job,” she said.

What Florio enjoys is breaking news–it surprises her, but she still gets a thrill whenever she is the first reporter on a story. She currently covers the “Cops and Courts” beat for the Missoulian so a large chunk of her work involves crime. She is also surprised at her growing sensitivity to sad stories.

“I think I have become way more sensitive to the feelings of the people I write about,” she said.

Stories about children are especially affecting to her, as Florio is a mother of two, but her job at a small community publication also plays a large role in her sensitivity.

“The Missoulian has a personal relationship with our readers,” she said. “They read the stories closely, and a lot of times they come right into the office to say hello or to comment on what they’ve read.”

Florio still likes a “newspaper-paper,” but she does most of her reading online and has Facebook and Twitter accounts. She also blogs her stories on the Missoulian website. Web reporting reminds her of her days at the Associated Press, when the wire service format called for quick skeletons of stories followed by continuous updates to expand and fill in details.

She says her wire service experience astounds her colleagues on occasion.

“People say, God, you write so fast–and I say well, I wrote for the AP, we had to do it that way,” she said.

News reporting isn’t the only kind of writing Florio enjoys. Her father managed the Woodland Beach Wildlife Refuge, and growing up there spurred a lifelong love for animals. Florio, who owns an 8-month-old Brittany named Nell whom she describes lovingly as a handful, incorporates animals often into her short stories.

Her time in a newsroom has only reinforced her affinity for writing about animals. After her colleagues at the Missoulian began tacking the front page stories to the wall, they noticed a pattern: every story that made it to the top involved an animal.

“You can never go wrong with critter stories,” she said while laughing. “That’s Journalism 101.”

~

Battling the Oriental Bittersweet
By: Kimberly Mollo
2012

I stomped through the brush, balancing a large pair of hedge clippers in one hand and a miniature saw in the other. The small blonde girl walking next to me began to panic, frantically scanning her arms for tiny black spots. Prentice, our project supervisor for the morning, turned to face her.

“Don’t worry, we haven’t seen any ticks all day,” he said.

He stopped suddenly, glancing down at his ankles and then bending down to pluck something small and black off his skin. The girl squealed.

A community service weekend with our sorority had landed us in the thick brush at Cape Henlopen State Park on a hazy Saturday morning. Prentice, an employee at the park, led a small group of us through the woods for our first project of the day. From 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., our mission was to hack down the invasive oriental bittersweet that slithered up the trunks of native trees, choking them slowly to death.

Invasive species is a term used to describe non-indigenous plants and animals that have harmful effects on the regions they invade.

Invasive species have some benefits. A study done by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that the Asian oyster could help the Chesapeake Bay clean out its pollution, as they grow faster and are less susceptible to disease than native oysters.

However, there are also significant costs to allowing invasive species to overtake a region. The loss of biodiversity is a long-term effect, and study done by staff at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences reported that estimated damage control of invasive species in the U.S. costs more than $138 billion annually.

Oriental staff vine is now common in the U.S., and is classified as an invasive species by the USDA Forest Service. The vine has naturalized in woodlands all over Eastern North America. In the U.S. it can be found as far west as the Rocky Mountains and even down to Louisiana.

There are 302 reported exotic species in the state of Delaware. The oriental bittersweet holds fourth place in the top reported species. The woody plant’s defining characteristic is its spindly, thin vines that strangle its host trees to death.

The easiest way to get rid of a small infestation of the vine is to rip them out of the ground by their roots. If it is a large infestation, like the one my sorority was knee-deep in, experts recommend simply cutting the plant at the root and applying glyphosate which will kill them, unlike most herbicides which will have no effect on the vine.

Our section of forest definitely had a large infestation, so we began cutting the vines at their roots, careful not to snip any neighboring native plants. As three of us approached what looked like a car-sized thicket of the oriental bittersweet, we realized with a shock that a tree fought to poke the tops of its branches out into the daylight. My small blonde companion, Sunni, had recovered from her tick-instigated panic and now looked at the buried, choking tree with concern.

“We have to save it!” she said with her clippers in hand. I agreed and we got to work.

Prentice seemed surprised and amused at our enthusiasm. A 35-year-old entomologist, he most likely hadn’t been surrounded by a dozen college-aged females since his own days at the University of Delaware. His expectations turned out, as he soon discovered, quite inaccurate.

“I have to say, when they said they were sending me sorority girls…” he paused, shifting his weight from one foot to another. “I didn’t think you’d be, you know, so excited to be chopping down plants in the dirt.”

Prentice regaled us with stories of his days at the university—after attending West Virginia University for a year and choosing partying and playing rugby over going to class, his parents refused to continue paying for his education and he joined the Navy. Upon his return he enrolled at the University of Delaware and discovered entomology.

He also studied abroad in Peru, which he remembered fondly as a place full of strange food and fascinating insects. The girls in my group shared their own study abroad stories and, as we found out, Prentice had visited many of the places mentioned, including New Zealand and Italy.

Our tree was in poor shape: the oriental bittersweet vines wrapped viciously around its trunk and branches, so intertwined with bark at some points that it was impossible to tell where the tree ended and the vine began. It took 45 minutes to clear a path big enough so three of us could stand around the trunk and start hacking away at the twisted vines.

For the next hour, we snipped, pulled and chopped at the menacing vines, slowly untangling our tree branch by branch. Finally, miraculously, the little tree was free of its oppressor—it stood vine-free before our eyes.

Invigorated by our heroic rescue, we set out to help other trees in danger. The piles of bittersweet grew so large that Prentice began jumping and stomping on them to keep them in manageable sizes.

We named each tree as we set about rescuing them—almost all the names referenced a pop culture character. Soon Frank n’ Furter, Little John and Ronald Weasley could breathe once more, and as the clock struck noon we felt immense satisfaction.

After we stumbled out of the woods, we checked our arms, legs and ankles. Sunni had no ticks. Prentice had five.