An Armenian-born American businessman has been paying to book Europe’s finest concert halls so he and his orchestra can play for tiny, unimpressed audiences. Who is this mystery man?
Author: Bertrand Hauger
Bertrand Hauger is a graduate of La Sorbonne Nouvelle school of bilingual journalism, and joined Worldcrunch after working briefly as a reporter in a local newspaper in his native eastern France. He now serves as Worldcrunch’s deputy editor-in-chief and director of content.
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A Transylvanian Burial
When you’re in Transylvania, you really can’t help but think about vampires. So you can imagine how it felt to suddenly see a funeral procession approach…
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The Sweet Spread Of Urban Honey
Did you know that city life is good for bees?
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Another Kind Of Fly Fishing
Fishing often makes for nice pictures, no matter where in the world you may be. Here in Southern China we learned about the ancestral and peculiar art of cormorant fishing, where the “rod” stays in place and birds are cast off to do the work.
An Argentine couple struggling to afford rising housing prices went down to the dock and took matters into their own hands.
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Who Built That Bridge?
My wife Claudine was asking our daughter Cécile to guess which architect built the Garabit viaduct we were looking over, in France’s Massif Central region. Does the wrought iron structure look familiar? It should: The railway bridge was constructed by Gustave Eiffel, 10 years before a certain Parisian tower made him famous worldwide.
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300,000 Miles Without A Scratch
I find it amazing, in hindsight, that over the 300,000 miles or so I’ve driven during my lifetime, I’ve only had two flat tires — one in France and one in Czechoslovakia. That’s it. No accident, no bumping into a hippo in South Africa or a camel in Algeria.
We bid farewell to eight global notables who died this past month.
In serving the plundered art worth hundreds of millions, historical justice is being served. But it comes at the expense of legal rectitude.
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Very Old Habits
I don’t remember what the lady in the foreground was doing, in front of Teotihuacan’s majestic Pyramid of the Sun. Maybe she had come up with an early version of the e-cigarette, trying to break free from her Mayan ancestors’ tradition of smoking tobacco …
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Ancestral Shade
Fellow travelers from our organized tour were catching some rest in the shade of the tongkonan, the ancestral houses of the Toraja people in southern Sulawesi (the Indonesian island formerly know as Celebes). This was one of the first package holiday tours we went on, after having started to experiment with this form of group […]
A Turkish writer tries to piece together a particular episode that offers a grisly European postscript to the slaugther of the Armenians last century.
Reports say the North Korean leader has made his slicked-back, shaved-on-the-sides coiff mandatory for young men in his country. Here’s how international VIPs look with Kim Jong hair.
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Period Costumes
This is how Nazaré’s fishermen used to dress every day, back in the 1950s. What was then an unassuming fishing village has become the Portuguese equivalent of France’s Saint-Tropez. The throngs of tourists looking for a little authenticity can still catch a glimpse of the traditional costumes today — courtesy of the town’s visitor center.
BAHIA BLANCA – A transsexual in this Argentine city died after injecting silicone into her backside in what was most likely an attempt to look more feminine, the Buenos Aires daily Clarín reports. Cecilia Báez, 35, was at her home in Bahía Blanca when she lost consciousness after injecting the silicone into one of her […]
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Mystery From Up High
Travelling the world for more than 50 years as we did, you are bound to see some incredible sights. The Nazca Lines, in southern Peru’s Nazca Desert, rank high among these unbelievable wonders. No one really knows why and how the geoglyphs — some of which are over 200 meters across — were made … […]
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An Oasis Of Tradition
At Ouargla’s traditional market in southern Algeria, this merchant was selling wooden bowls carved from single blocks of wood. Even though palm trees are ubiquitous in the several oases surrounding Ouargla, Saharan craftsmen prefer to use Atlas Cedars, found in the nearby Algerian mountain range of the same name.
CARACAS — The rigid black-and-white vision of a Venezuela divided between government supporters and opponents obstructs any understanding of the multiple identities that have emerged since the start of mass anti-government protests in February. For those looking in from the outside, the media have presented a veritable caricature of events. The situation reminds me of […]
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It Doesn’t Get More Irish Than This
A pint of Guinness maybe?
TEL AVIV — When Stanley Fischer left his senior post at the International Monetary Fund in 2001, he made sure to mention of one of his closest IMF friends and colleagues during his farewell speech. That friend is Alassane Ouattara, who served as Ivory Coast’s prime minister in the early 1990s before moving on to […]
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A Forest Without A Tree
Fires caused by people are thankfully still relatively infrequent in the vast Yellowstone National Park, with just six to 10 per year. Most wildfires, such as the 1988 blazes that destroyed almost 40% of the park, are instead caused by lightning. In 1994, driving through a recently burned patch, we could only imagine what that […]
The refusal to give up amid dire political and financial conditions – call it old fashioned Optimism – helped Peruvians turn into a growing economic force.
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Soviet Disobedience
At the end of WWII, several monuments were built across Berlin to commemorate the Soviet soldiers fallen during the war. As imposing as this memorial in Treptower Park seems, I was unimpressed: I’ve always been circumspect about soldiers. So was my wife Claudine, who looks like she’s turning her back to these Soviet occupiers, who […]
A married man from the eastern Chinese province of Anhui was looking for some online hanky-panky. So the man, identified by the Market Star Daily as a forty-something named Mr. Zhang, reached for his mobile phone and clicked on “Shake”, a location-based social plug-in service provided by Weixin (Chinese for WeChat). Zhang began chatting, and […]
PEREVALNE — While Russian flags fly in Simferopol and people celebrate the “return home” in the main square, a few miles away in the village of Perevalne a strange calm has descended. For weeks now, the Ukrainian military regiments here have been surrounded by Russian forces, and armored vehicles have patrolled the streets. Pro-Russian activists […]
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Fishing Through The Ages
Among the most beautiful countries I’ve explored is my own. This is what we call la France profonde, literally “deep France” — the heartland. Aptly enough, the Château de la Bussière in the background is nicknamed the Fishermen Castle and features a collection of works of art related to freshwater fishing. There is still a […]
Argentine politicians may not all have liked Jorge Bergoglio when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. But from President Kirchner to her potential successors, all want a piece of the pontiff.
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Bright China
I remember being mesmerized by Shanghai at night — maybe even more than by Las Vegas. Twenty years ago, the Chinese city also seemed to be at the vanguard of technology. That’s where I saw people using cell phones in the street for the first time.
With the world focused on Crimea and trying to figure out what Vladimir Putin will do next, we stumbled upon some old photos of the Russian leader. We couldn’t help notice a certain resemblance…
Lopsided election results from North Korea to Crimea were among the notable numbers of the past 10 days.
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The Lion’s Share
We haven’t seen much of Sub-Saharan Africa over the course of our travels, except for Zimbabwe, Swaziland and South Africa, where I took this picture, in one of the continent’s largest game reserves. This lion was feeding on giraffe remains by the side of the road. As grim as it sounds, there is something about […]
HONG KONG — Rarely do Chinese names appear in news stories about people donating their art collections to museums. That is especially true in the realm of contemporary visual art. But prominent Chinese art collector Guan Yi recently made an exception by donating 37 pieces of his collection to Hong Kong’s M+ Museum, which is […]
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Stairway To Heaven
This is the famous Dashashwamedh Ghat in Varanasi — the city also known as Benares, the holiest of the seven sacred cities in Hinduism and Jainism. “Ghats” are a series of steps leading pilgrims to the Ganges River to perform ritual ablutions (while tourists on a moving boat try to take non-blurry pictures).
BAGHDAD – Everywhere in the Iraqi capital is an off-limits “red zone” for Westerners except for the American invasion’s legacy known as the “green zone.” This central quarter in Baghdad, accessible only by the right identification document or special permission, is actually a sort of privileged prison for those with valuable blood. But I have […]
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Portuguese Passersby
Going through all my slides, I’ve noticed some recurring themes in the thousands of photos I’ve snapped. One of them is “women carrying things on their heads” — like in this Portugal street scene in 1958, when the country was still under the authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.
Some of the images that have caught our eye, and events that have captured the world’s attention…
BEIJING — McDonald’s is planning to expand franchising in China’s biggest cities, such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, for the first time since its entry into the country. Since its founding in 1955, McDonald’s has relied on its franchisees to play a major role in the company’s global success. Franchisees account for 80% of the 30,000 […]
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The Llama Guarantee
There are llamas and alpacas everywhere in Peru. Contrary to what people may think, they are very docile creatures and their infamous bouts of spitting are apparently quite rare. More to the point, both animals produce high-quality wool, which I can attest to: The bedspread I bought in Peru on this trip is still as […]
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Parthenon Like It’s 1961
In 1961, my wife Claudine could still walk freely inside the Parthenon — the world-famous temple on the Athenian Acropolis. Actually, we didn’t even have to pay an entrance fee. The government didn’t begin restoration efforts, at which point it limited tourist access, until 1975. Up until then, there were no fences around most ruins […]
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When Poverty Is ‘Picturesque’
Brazil’s Nordeste was written about in the 1990s as one of the poorest regions in the world. What travelers find out is that photographs in the middle of poverty risk looking “quaint” and “charming,” losing that feeling of desolation that we felt there. That seems to be the case looking at this shot 22 years […]