Passing further away, towards Austria, travelling up the Isar, till the stream becomes smaller and whiter and the air is colder, the full glamour of the northern hills, which are so marvellously luminous and gleaming with flowers, wanes and gives way to a darkness, a sense of ominousness. (More…)
In the 21st century, many countries border each other with roads, and tunnels. But Georgia’s neighbour is Russia, not Switzerland, or France. Russia is not a modern, thinking country, and has no plans to be so. (More…)
In most European cities, the propaganda of public monuments is much more tasteful. However in the last several years, Freedom Square, often a starting point for Budapest’s 2.7 million annual visitors, has become an increasingly complex public riddle with each chunk of cultural neurosis dropped by government decree for every tour-bus rider, pub-crawler, and clueless backpacker to ponder. (More…)
Viktor produced a thick volume from the Yugo’s trunk for me to read while he drove. Inside were maps and graphics of red replacing blue with each subsequent year, reminiscent of the famous map of Palestinian displacement. The landscape itself was not so different either. (More…)
In the Lonely Planet guide to Croatia, the Sibinek-Knin county of Dalmatia is called “underrated.” Hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to the coastal cities of Split, Dubrovnik, and the dozens of nearby islands each summer. Only a fraction make it anywhere inland, where only Krka park’s waterfalls and the nearby Serbian Orthodox Monastery are recommended. (More…)
“So how are you leaving Armenia?” Levon asked, with a smile. After six months in Yerevan, I was soon to return home. I regretted my decision. Levon, the composite character of Syrian-Armenian refugee and kebab stall owner I had come to know during my stay, was arranging triangular Khachapuri, Georgian cheese pastries, on a baking tray. When tessellated, he grinned at his handywork, then up at me. (More…)
The tourist season had long since left Gosh. It packed its souvenirs and memories and returned to Yerevan, squeezed into a vacuum-packed minibus. At least that’s how I got here. Gosh, a village of just over one thousand people, at the end of a small valley in Armenia’s heavily wooded Tavush Province, is known for its twelfth century monastery of Goshavank, burial place of the founder, monastic scholar Mkhitar Gosh. (More…)
DECEMBER 25, 5:45 PM
The people that have been busying themselves under the metal awning are finally ready for us, and have decked out their standard-issue light blue plastic chairs with elaborate gold sateen covers and politely bagged all the table settings in plastic. They have also prepared no small amount of food. (More…)
DECEMBER 24, 11 AM
I arrive in Cambodia thirty hours late, due to a blizzard in central Europe. I am sleeping next to a posh pool in a Phnom Penh hotel, when I get a text from Saem Vun, a singer with a musical group called The Messenger Band. (More…)
We were stunned by the bleak beauty of the golf course when we first found it. It was like something out of a dream, the kind of place you find yourself wandering through in the middle of your sleep, a place with no beginning and no end, a place out of place and out of time. (More…)
When my mother’s worsening health recently made it necessary for my parents to relocate from the Washington D.C. area, where they had lived for over three decades, to be near me in Tucson, Arizona, I volunteered to drive both their cars across the country. (More…)
Last winter, I drove from Berlin to London. Waiting in Calais to take the Channel Tunnel train to the UK, I took a dozen pictures of asylum seeker-related graffiti. My own family was displaced internally, within France, during WWII, so I connected with the graffiti a little more personally than usual. “Droits humains?” (Human rights?) Downtown, November 25th.