This is a hard post to write, like telling an old lover that yes yes you’ll always be my first love, but you simply lack the power to thrill anymore. It’s about Paris, that wonderful city that used to be the capital of Western cuisine but where nowadays it is rather hard to find a great meal.
Some days, at some places, and for some elements, travelers simply find themselves saying, “Damn, this is irritating.” In the Petra area of Jordan, an ancient complex of stone structures which is the major attraction of the country, I found myself saying this repeatedly.
Photo essay of Piran, Slovenia and Rovinj, Croatia. Venice isn’t the only city the Venetians built. Along the coast of the Adriatic Sea, Venice spread its influence for 500 years, leaving many towns in the area marked with the lion of St. Mark. These towns often look like a mini-Venice, with narrow alleys, red roofs, and bell towers. They’re on the sea and they are part of the sea, inseparable.
The Venetians built a central square and a striking bell tower over their town of stone buildings and snaking, maze-like alleyways there on the Adriatic Sea. They just didn’t always do it in there in Venice. If you’re within striking distance of Venice and you’re on the water, you might run across an old Venetian-built…
Bankgok shopping malls are the opposite of those in the West: fun, hip, up-to-date, and full of good food. Read more reasons you should hang out there.
There’s a secret behind one of the most photographed and accessible waterfalls in Iceland, a secret that made the afternoon I visited it the most pleasant of my trip there, a secret that I’m going to tell you. It left me befuddled and open-mouthed and delighted with the surprises that this beautiful island can deliver. You should know this secret and that’s why you should keep reading.
Somewhere in the course of cooking a new dish, you have a eureka! experience, a mental bang moment where it all comes together and you realize that you indeed have before you your goal, the dish imagined. During a technical sauce-making class at the cooking school La Cuisine Paris (indeed in Paris), I had six…
A beautiful and pristine alpine lake, a small island in the center capped by a perfect little church, a medieval castle perched dramatically on a cliff face above it, all surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Crimey, I don’t know what’s happened to me. I don’t usually write using such trite, stock phrases, but Slovenia’s Lake Bled…
“Hello!?” the older blonde woman behind one of the many counters in Vienna’s Naschmarkt is saying to me, her voice dripping with sarcasm in that particular manner that means, “You are not acting correctly and thus let me draw attention to your misbehavior.” We had been standing in front of her counter in the market…
Everything seems to be only five or ten kilometers apart in Istria. All day, when I looked at my next destination on the map, it always seemed to be about ten clicks away, as the bird flies. Driving, however, wasn’t much harder. In the northern part of Croatia’s Istria peninsula, one could hop to a…
I drove into the one main turning circle in the tiny town of Svetvinčenat, in the Istria Peninsula in the very northern part of coastal Croatia. The rental car’s GPS was spouting instructions about turning left, right, or perhaps upward, quickly, but I could tell I was as central as one could be here, and…
Tokyo’s Kabuki-cho (or Kabukicho) is often described as a red-light district and I suppose it is, but it resembles famous ones like Amsterdam almost not at all. Kabuki-cho is not people hanging out inviting you in; in fact, you may not get in a place at all, and may not understand the system if you do.
