An Argentine pharmaceutical firm has begun testing lab beef production and expects to have a tasty and ‘painless’ product sizzling within a few years.
Category: Food / Travel
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For Whom The Notre-Dame Bell Tolls
I’m not sure the exact date, but it was the month of July when my then wife-to-be Claudine and I climbed the 400 steps of Notre-Dame, only to be startled by the sudden (very) loud ringing of the Parisian cathedral’s bells. Just a few months later, back in our native eastern France, other bells would […]
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India’s Most Photogenic Temple
Sure, there’s the Taj Mahal. But at this moment in the Jain temple of Ranakpur, in northwestern India, everything an amateur photographer like myself could ask for fell into place: the whiteness of the marble contrasting with the visitors’ colorful garments, the rays of sunlight gently filtering in, the symmetry of the architecture, the depth […]
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Unidentified Frying Object
When it comes to international cuisine, I must confess that I’m not that much of an aventurier. Amid the street markets of Indonesia, like elsewhere, I would much rather take pictures of unidentified, deep-fried delicacies than take an actual bite …
Grapes grow almost anywhere, and they’re easy to ferment. So don’t worry, even if the world as we know it crashes and burns, we’ll have wine to ease our souls.
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All Scallops Lead To Compostela
All across Europe, you may stumble, as my wife and I did many times, upon discreet scallop shell symbols: They mark the ancient “Camino de Santiago” routes that lead to the Christian shrine of the apostle Saint James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The facade of the Casa de las Conchas in Salamanca is definitely […]
Hotels are changing their design to reflect the style of modern travelers. A key component now is the entrance and lobby, which are morphing from the secluded and palatial into a multipurpose space that welcomes both guests and the public.
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Everything And The Kitchen Sink
Fish, fruit, pottery, an endless selection of drain pipes: the massive open-air markets were a vivid memory from the northern Brazilian city of Belem.
The government recently gave foreigners the go-ahead to visit 137 peaks in four states, paving the way for a potential flood of visitors to the world’s tallest mountain range.
VAL D’ARAN — It wasn’t until I’d made may way clear through to other side of the village that I finally crossed paths with another human: A man about my age returning from a walk in the hills with his dog. “The only thing I can tell you is that up along the road, after […]
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A Turkish Camel’s Life
My clearest camel memory from this same trip to Turkey 30 years ago was witnessing the millennia-old tradition of camel wrestling. Just a few miles down the road, near the Ancient Greek site of Ephesus, this fellow was in the mood for nothing of the sort.
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Music Soothes The Sulawesi
This concert, courtesy of the Toraja people, provided a welcome balance to our day: My wife and I had just witnessed a traditional burial, in this village of southern Sulawesi — and it featured the pretty gruesome slaughtering of a water buffalo.
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Home Is Where The Mailbox Is
Some 7,000 kilometers away from my neck of the woods in eastern France, Martinique feels like home. In this French overseas region in the Lesser Antilles, people speak French, pay in euros … but perhaps the most strikingly familiar feature is the unmistakably French yellow mailboxes across the island.
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The Gateway To Norway
Svolvaer is one of the first scenic stops upon entering the famous Lofoten archipelago of northern Norway. The fishing village, with its typical wooden red houses, offers a nice warmup to the insular (and chilly!) world of dramatic mountains and pristine bays.
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Not Sure About That Romanian Style
For a moment, the streets of Sibiu turned into a fashion show — and that woman didn’t seem too convinced by the man’s dress sense … Was it the traditional căciulă sheepskin hat, or something else?
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The Missing Croatian Well
The “Five Wells Square” in the old Croatian city of Zadar is not a misnomer: For some reason, I could only squeeze four of them in that shot. Oh, well.
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Dry As A Sardinian Sculpture
These wrinkly clay busts were sitting in the backyard of a Sardinian sculptor’s workshop. With the sun on their grimacing faces, this felt like the right image to share today as temperatures broke records across my native France.
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Carthage Must (Not) Be Destroyed
Carthago delenda est. “Carthage must be destroyed.” As I was wandering the ruins of the ancient capital (near modern-day Tunis) I had Cato’s famous oratorical phrase stuck in my head … Clearly a remnant of my Latin-learning years!
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The Not-So-Zen Li River
There are things photographs capture well: the lush hills that flank the Li River, the fishermen on their frail-looking bamboo rafts, the strange rock formations you get to see along the way. But this moment remains in my memory for what you can’t see: my (mostly Chinese) fellow passengers on that cruise boat who seemed […]
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Ruinous Parking
This shot dates back from the very first of my 11 trips to Greece. My wife (whom you can see in the car) and I had driven our Simca Aronde from France through Italy, then onto a ferry, and up the Epirus mountains — to finally park smack in the middle of the ruins of […]
NEW DELHI — While growing up we were subjected, like most school-going children in this country, to rather boring texts in class. The texts were taught by teachers who were even less interested in the excruciatingly painful narratives than we were. The results of such exchanges were obvious: we remember little of what we were taught. Amid all our vagrant behavior, when we were trying our level best to – in the words of Mark Twain – not allow school to interfere with our education, there were things that were somehow imbibed and some of them have remained embedded in […]
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Parisian Visitors And Natives
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Now unlike Ernest Hemingway, I never actually lived in Paris as a young man, or otherwise. I was a visiting 20-year-old […]
A recent trip to Caracas showed a city where many people continue to function for better or worse, and where the rich are still living large.
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Spanish Depth Of Field
When I recently pulled out this shot of the Spanish countryside in the 1960s, it reminded me of my childhood when I would watch farmers work in the fields of Burgundy in eastern France. In case you’re counting, that was the 1930s.
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Save The Last Bulgarian Dance
In the lobby of my hotel on the shores of the Black Sea, locals in full folkloric attire were dancing to traditional tunes. It felt strangely familiar, having had my own experiences preserving the music and folklore of my local traditions.
The country faces dramatic debt levels among small-scale coffee farmers, as prices fall on world markets. Some have suggested a fixed minimum price for this key Colombian export.
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One-Of-A-Kind Skyline
I found striking cityscapes all around the world, from the feng-shui buildings of Honk Kong to Rio de Janeiro’s lush bay and the odd-looking houses of Indonesian villages — but to me there’s nothing quite like Turkey’s “fairy chimneys,” the ancient troglodyte structures of the country’s Cappadocia region.
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Sunshine State By Night
Before we were able to feast on these luscious oranges and grapefruits of Florida“s many roadside stands, my wife and I had gotten off to a rather bumpy start in the “Sunshine State.” Landing in Miami, the first item on our list was to find our hotel. I knew it was “on the seafront” and […]
A Le Monde journalist attempts to keep up with French baking superstar Pierre Hermé, one of the world’s best pâtissiers. It does not go well.
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The Dashing Priests Of Vilnius
The many beautiful Roman Catholic churches in Lithuania’s capital are a sight to be seen … as are the glorious beards of certain priests strolling the city’s streets.
Argentine laws set a minimum weight for slaughtered cattle, forcing farmers to produce ‘fattened’ beef, but meat eaters are not so keen.
Monday marks the debut of the third stage of Energy Observer’s revolutionary six-year journey toward a cleaner, hydrogen-fueled future. After four months of updating its equipment and infrastructure, including custom photovoltaic panels, the state-of-the-art ship has embarked from French harbor Saint-Malo, this time heading towards Northern Europe. This first major vessel in the world powered by hydrogen is led by Victorien Erussard, founder and captain of Energy Observer, and Jérôme Delafosse, expedition leader and documentary filmmaker. The odyssey began in Saint-Malo June 26, 2017, as the vessel travels the world’s waterways in search of innovative solutions for the environment. Here’s […]
We often flocked to Italy for Spring, as weather there tends to be better than in my sometimes rainy neck of the French woods. But mornings can be a bit cloudy — nothing to worry this woman at the center of the picture, who was diligently setting up deckchairs, waiting for the sun to warm […]
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Soviets Soldiers, Past And Present
In the background, one of Treptower Park“s massive monuments commemorating Soviet soldiers fallen during World War II. In the foreground, real-life Soviet soldiers still trooping around the USSR-occupied section of Berlin.
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Flying (And Landing) High In La Paz
La Paz“s airport delivers on its name: El Alto is indeed the highest international airport in the world. Luckily neither my wife Claudine (pictured here in the foreground) nor I suffered from altitude sickness during our often elevated travels through Bolivia and neighboring Peru.
“I (had) never seen a high-quality image of a wild black leopard come out of Africa,” British wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas wrote recently. So he sprung to attention when word arrived about a sighting at Laikipia Wilderness Camp in Kenya. Using a series of Camtraptions motion-triggered camera traps, Burrard-Lucas managed to snap this powerful shot of the ever-elusive big cat. With OneShot, this rare photograph emerges from the darkness of the night. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/-PLQuhpZakY expand=1] Black Leopard (©Will Burrard-Lucas) | OneShot OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. […]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/GrGHbA32YJ0 expand=1] When War Was Just A Game (© Étienne Mallard) | OneShot Etienne Mallard has spent a lifetime venturing far and wide. A retired high-school philosophy teacher, he has always considered himself just an amateur photographer — with decent equipment. He has visited a running total now of 80 countries since he first […]
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A Happier Kind Of Philosophy
I’m not a religious person. As a philosophy teacher, my go-to thinker was Spinoza, who once wrote that religion was created “to deceive the people and to constrain the minds of men” But I guess that if I had to pick one faith, the smiles of Buddhism I discovered throughout my Asian travels would be […]
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The French Venice
Port Grimaud, near Saint-Tropez in southern France, has it all. Canals, bridges, islets … It’s just missing a couple of gondolas.
WASHINGTON — If you ever want to fly to America from Charles de Gaulle Airport, be sure that you are not landing in terminal 2F, as you might miss your flight, or even get arrested before reaching your point of departure, Terminal 1. But if you are starting your journey towards the U.S. from Charles […]