This was a souvlaki of epic proportions, near the ancient site of Mycenae in southern Greece.
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Herculean Skewer
Tag: travel
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Postcard From The Emperor
The style of mailboxes around the world varies considerably. This opulent one, in eastern Germany, looked like it could have been used by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
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Holy Business
Straw hats, maracas, decoratives masks … The ancient Sri Lankan city of Anuradhapura is considered sacred to the Buddhist world, and a great place to buy just about anything!
Our faithful Peugeot 404 makes a cameo appearance, with the Ribat fortress of Monastir in the background.
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Hanging On
If you visit northern China’s Xuankong Temple, the famous “Hanging Temple” built into a cliff some 75 meters above the ground, believe me: You won’t let go of the hand rail.
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Hard To Process
The penitent on the right-hand side of this picture was having a hard time breathing under his capirote, during Easter processions in southern Spain.
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At The Crossroads Of Continents
The Þingvellir rift valley, in southwestern Iceland, marks the the separation between the Eurasian and North American Plates, clearly visible in the canyon-like Almannagjá fault.
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Haute Couture
It must be tricky for the Bigouden women to wear their traditional lace bonnets — some of them 35 centimeters in height — in windy Brittany.
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Sitting In History
My wife was sitting in the opulent mansion of the Madewood plantation, near New Orleans — its antebellum elegance in stark contrast with its troubled history of slavery.
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Dental Work
The Mayan site of Copán was hard to reach. But when we did get there, we were rewarded with remarkable examples of Mayan sculpture — some with very peculiar dentition.
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Helping The Spanish Miracle
In our own modest way, we contributed to Spain’s economic boom in the 1960s, back when the country, then led by Gen. Francisco Franco, opened up to tourism. This is Toledo’s wonderful Alcázar, with the Tagus River in the foreground.
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Go Up Moses
In the Bible, Moses ascended Mount Nebo in Jordan, and from this ridge on the King’s Highway, he was granted a view of the Promised Land. Unfortunately, like Moses, I never made it there.
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The Painter’s Village
If Ornans looks picturesque enough on my photographs, it’s nothing compared to the way 19th-century painter Gustave Courbet — arguably the most celebrated artist from my neck of the woods — depicted the village in his masterpieces.
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Floating To Sleep
This unusual float, part of the Madeira Flower Festival that fills the streets of Funchal every spring, looked very comfortable indeed.
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The Other Island Of Tears
This monument on Minsk’s Island of Tears is dedicated to the memory of the Belarusian soldiers who died in the 1979-1988 Soviet-Afghan war.
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Well-Deserved Shade
The choir of traditional French music I was part of was often invited to folk festivals at home and abroad. One time in Villefranche-de-Rouergue, in southern France, I was picked as a judge for a bourrée competition, and ended up watching people dance for hours under a scorching July sun. Needless to say, the dancers […]
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Praying Primate
Not only is the Swayambhunath shrine near Kathmandu fascinating, it’s also swarming with monkeys — some more pious than others.
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Back In The Saddle
Denmark, much like the Netherlands, is mostly flat. That helps explains why cycling has been the country’s transportation mode of choice for decades.
BERLIN — During the last school year, some 18,000 young Germans began year-long adventures abroad, thrust into complete independence: suddenly, they were on their own, in a new environment, surrounded by strangers who spoke a language the students had only experienced from inside the safety of a classroom. Psychologists from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena […]
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Greek Break
Like me before him, my grandson (who’s been translating my comments into English for this here blog) is taking his spring break in the Greek Cyclades archipelago. Wishing him well on his journey — who knows, he may also stumble upon a Crete-shape cloud? During this two-week hiatus, take a look back at all the […]
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Guatemalan Marimba
Some things never change. If you stay at the Posada de Don Rodrigo in Antigua, Guatemala, it looks like you will still be treated to the sound of a traditional marimba band, as I was 27 years ago.
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The Lion Guards
In Tunisia’s capital, colorful Bardo guards kept a watchful eye on the Lion Staircase, one of the entrances leading to the parliament building inside the Bardo Palace.
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Soviet Tenacity
The Georgi Dimitrov mausoleum in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, was built in 1949 to contain the embalmed body of the country’s first communist leader. After the fall of the USSR, some members of the government started thinking the monument was an embarrassing nod to Bulgaria’s totalitarian past, and in 1999, they decided to blow […]
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An Island After My Own Heart
The Scottish island of Staffa, with its other-wordly basalt pillars similar to the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, unites two of my interests: German classical music composer Felix Mendelssohn composed an overture, inspired by the cathedral-like echoes of the island’s Fingal’s Cave; and the place is also mentioned in the adventure novels of French writer […]
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Every Amazonian Vote Counts
Democracy flourishing in the tiniest hamlets deep in the Brazilian rainforest, as a city council campaign takes root in the northern state of Pará.
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Cool Like The Romans
When in Rome, on a particularly hot day, do as the Romans do: Leave town, head for the nearby Villa d’Este and walk behind the water of the Fontana dell’Ovato.
PRAGUE — Czech Republic was the first country I visited that wasn’t either Latin or Germanic. Czech, as I found out the hard way, is a very tricky Slavic language, one of those that rarely lets you deduce the meaning of a word and in which entire sentences seem to have been written by somebody […]
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Lost In Time
At the markets of Peć, in western Kosovo, there was no real way for me to tell whether I was in the 19th or 20th century.
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Not Nobel Yet
On our first trip to Norway (driving from France in our Peugeot 203), we stopped for a moment in Oslo before making our way to the country’s inland regions. You can see the capital’s new two-towered City Hall, which had been completed 10 years earlier. Three decades later, in 1990, it would become the site […]
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Fair Bear Warning
It’s easy to be lulled into a sense of calm by the Canadian Rockies’ peaceful lakes and beautiful landscapes — and to forget that they’re also home to deadly grizzly and black bears. I was kindly reminded of their presence, in both English and French.
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No Carnival Today
Rio“s Sambadrome is not always this quiet: Picture countless samba school dancers parading down the 700-meter stretch of street, with up to tens of thousands of spectators cheering from the concrete bleachers.
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Napoleonic Trinkets
Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile on the Italian island of Elba, about 50 kilometers east of the French emperor’s native Corsica, was still commemorated when I went there 47 years ago, although with slightly unflattering knick-knacks in souvenir shops.
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Entrance Examination
If you want to catch a glimpse of the Emerald Buddha inside Bangkok“s Wat Phra Kaew, the most sacred Buddhist temple in Thailand, you first have to make it past the two imposing demon statues.
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Pick Your Poison
A saiga antelope’s head, dried seahorses, horn powder and God knows what else was in those jars … Much like La Paz, Singapore was a great place to buy exotic souvenirs.
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Mending The Nets
Participating in the world-famous Fêtes de Cornouaille with my choir of traditional folk singing in Britanny, I got to take some candid snapshots of a life that was still very much turned toward the sea.
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Achilles’ Wheel
Larissa in eastern Greece is traditionally held to be the birthplace of Achilles. This would-be motorcycle hero was also destined to fall, caught by the heel by a local traffic cop.
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LOL In Translation
I could tell you about the state of traffic in Indonesia, about the refined paintings adorning Bali’s rickshaws, or pretend I took this shot to show the hardships of precarious workers in Southeast Asia. But really, it boils down to the fact that I thought “Muncul” sounds like “my a**” in French.
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Pricing Pawns
On Moscow’s Sparrow Hill, tourists can buy nestling dolls or wooden chess boards while enjoying the view over the Russian capital.
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It Takes Two To Paraty
When my grandson went on his honeymoon in Brazil two years ago, I advised him to go to Paraty, a highly picturesque colonial village south of Rio, with its very colorful harbor and cobblestone streets. He had better weather than I did.
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Paella Epicenter
If you’re eating paella in a restaurant in Valencia, there’s a good chance you’re eating the real deal: The authentic paella valenciana was born there.