I have never laid eyes on the Mona Lisa, despite having visited Paris numerous times. My childhood home is 40 minutes from San Francisco, yet I have never stepped foot on the Golden Gate. In New York City, “Top…
Browsing Category
Places
One of my favorite cities of all time is also one of the easiest to overlook. Is it a must-see? Probably not. Is it beautiful? Not particularly. Is it packed with sites? Eh, maybe a few. It’s kind of…
Tibetan flags, weathered faces and muted colors greet you upon arrival. After a few weeks of moseying around Ladakh’s dusty mountains life takes on an addictive simplicity that steadies the pace, deepens the breath and slows the heart. The trip…
Google Manali–Leh Highway and the first couple of hits you’ll find include dangerousroads.org and thrillophilia.com, the sort of websites whose hyperboles I tend to take with a grain of salt. As I noted the rusted underbellies of the vehicles…
“How was Myanmar?” Pause. Awkward pause. Four years on and I’m still not sure how to answer that question. The country? Beautiful. The locals? Welcoming. But the trip itself… Sometimes the stars align and you take a vacation where…
When I think of Varanasi I think of bodies. They’re everywhere, some living, some not. The shores of the river are where they gather. If the city had a heartbeat, the Ganges would be its source. The banks are alive. Corpses burn…
Angela Carter once said that “Cities have sexes. London is a man, Paris is a woman, and New York is a well-adjusted transsexual.” There’s no doubt about it — Paris is svelte, sophisticated, captivating, provocative and drop-dead gorgeous…and she…
The summer light in Norway is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s different. It’s a half awake, dreamy kind of light — soft, with a lazy hue. Blue at midnight, yellow at midday, but always fuzzy and indecisive. It…
I’ve never heard of a sweepstakes offering plane tickets to Belgium as the grand prize. No one is anti-Belgian of course — what’s there to hate? But Spain, Greece, France, Austria, Italy and a number of other countries fall…
I can hear the scraping of a broom but can’t see anyone, just blue, glittery static, unsure if my eyes are open or closed. I sit, enjoying the cool surface beneath me. The static grows lighter and fades away. I’m…
You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but it might be fair to judge a place by its seasons. By popular demand, here is finally a post on Luxembourg, a tiny, often overlooked country that I have called…
Now that we’re fully immersed in that awkward period after Christmas when the snow hasn’t yet melted away but our holiday cheer has, let’s take a moment to reminisce on the most wonderful time of the year. This post…
At first glance it’s all borderline absurd: the wait, the expense, the costumes, the music, the special effects and the scale. The line to get in started three hours in advance. Through the glass doors we could see smartly…
Istanbul is the end of the road – the Silk Road namely – the point on the map where the East and West come to a head: symbolically, geographically and, in many ways, ideologically. It’s situated on the Bosphorus strait, which stretches…
“Avoid hiking at night. Mountain lions are nocturnal, humans are not,” said Google. Great. Few things are more humbling than basking in the beauty of California’s wild northern coast, but basking in its beauty after sunset might just qualify.…