December 13, 2008
In Amritsar, I insisted that the cab driver take me to the Grace Hotel near the Golden Temple even though he had another hotel in mind. The owner of the Grace was welcoming. I took a 1200-rupee room touted as super deluxe that turned out to be just another ordinary grungy hotel room on the lower end of the scale. It does however have clean sheets and good hot water. These, I’m learning, are things not to take for granted in India.
Dear Friends,
Pardon my French. Actually, not my French. Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait a beau voyage is a line from a sonnet by French poet Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560). I recently came across it in the prologue to Rebecca West’s lengthy Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the best travel book ever written according to our favorite travel author, Robert D. Kaplan. It recounts a journey that West and her husband made through the Balkans in 1937. The spirit of du Bellay’s line resonates with me. I like to think there is still something, if not heroic on the scale of brave Ulysses, at least important about choosing to expose oneself to the vicissitudes of personal travel. Although the mechanics of travel have probably never been easier, its industrialization, by which I mean mass tourism, tends to diminish our experience of it. As people conscious of the sense of adventure and discovery that the tourism industry tries to remove from travel, we struggle to regain these things. Fortunately, we have our imaginations for this. Continue reading Vienna
August 2006
The journey that Kay and I recently undertook from Istanbul to Helsinki — with stops in the cities of Plovdiv, Sofia, Brasov, Bratislava, Krakow, Gdansk, Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn — lasted a month and became a test of endurance. At one point, in Tallinn, Estonia, I seemed to be failing the test when my body told my mind, “Enough, already” and refused to keep up the pace. It took a couple of days of long afternoon naps and long nights of sleep before I felt myself again.
July 2005
In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson observes that “Earth is not the easiest place to be an organism.” This is especially true if the organism in question is one of us, for as Bryson continues, “in terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless. Of the small portion of the planet’s surface that is dry enough to stand on, a surprisingly large amount is too hot or cold or dry or steep or lofty to be of much use to us.”
May 19-23, 2005
We doubt that Kyiv (you may know it as Kiev), the capitol of Ukraine, is on many of your short lists of places to visit, but perhaps it should be. We were intrigued enough to go there by a single line in a newspaper article which speculated that, as a tourist destination, Kyiv may soon become the next Prague. Continue reading Kiev Was a Gas
August, 2003
After our retirement in 2001 Kay and I thought it would be fun to live as expatriates for a few years. To prepare to live in other countries we enrolled at New York City’s New School to earn TESOL certificates. Our idea of teaching English to speakers of other languages was not in order to earn our living but rather to give ourselves a focus abroad and to better integrate ourselves into whichever country or countries we chose to live in. The culmination of our program was to do a three-week practicum in which we would teach a class under the supervision of an experienced TESOL instructor in order to show we had learned our lessons. Along with seven of our classmates, we had the opportunity to do our praticum in Prague. Following is an account of our experience.
From Memory in 2017
Kay and I arrived by air in Budapest from Munich in December of 1989. The Malev Airlines flight that brought us served salami-and-pickle sandwiches. Naturally, it was cold, and the hours of daylight were short.
This was quite an exotic trip for us, our first to Eastern Europe that was just then emerging from decades of Communist rule. At the time of our arrival the red star was still standing atop Hungary’s parliament building, and, in Berlin, the wall was coming down.
What’s Left of Jerome, Arizona, a copper-mining town founded in the 19th century, sits on the flank of Cleopatra Hill overlooking the state’s Verde Valley about a two-hour drive north of Phoenix. I remember Jerome from my days in the 1970s when, based in Scottsdale, I spent many weeks making car and truck films for the Chevrolet Division of General Motors.
