Worldcrunch
We saw another glimpse of Zulu culture in Swaziland, the landlocked country where a small portion of this community lives. The pompoms these dancers wear on their arms and legs are actually frilly goatskin bands.
The expressionist style of Reykjavik’s Hallgrímskirkja, Iceland’s biggest church, can be initially unsettling. But it actually suits this land of volcanoes and geysers.
Forty-nine years ago, the gondola traffic jams on Venice“s Grand Canal somehow seemed more manageable than today.
I was a young philosophy teacher in eastern France when we went to Berlin, then divided in two. My wife took this picture of me at the crossroads between Leibnizstrasse and Kantsstrasse — though Spinoza has always been my favorite.
When we went to Florida’s Cypress Gardens in the late 1980s, the botanical garden theme park was trying to survive, threatened as it was by a nearby rodent stealing all its visitors.
The Dol Cathedral in northwestern France is missing one of its two towers. Some say it’s because an angry giant once threw a menhir — Brittany’s trademark standing stone — that decapitated the cathedral before landing in a field. The Menhir de Champ-Dolent weighs 150 tons, so it’s fair to say that little boy wasn’t […]
Driving on the rugged roads of Northern Greece in our valiant Simca Aronde, we stumbled upon a couple of quaint surprises — enormous piles of watermelons, for instance.
After it was burned down during the 1990s, Dublin’s Old Jameson Distillery re-opened in 1997 as a tourist attraction, guiding visitors through the stages of whisky making. I even had dinner inside the beautiful distillery — although, for some reason, I’m having trouble remembering what I ate that night …
Chess has been a favorite hobby of mine long before 1963, when I took part in the Franche-Comté regional finals in Besançon. (I finished third.)
Although it was built to protect the Chinese Empire against military incursions, the Great Wall of China faces a more insidious enemy: erosion caused by sandstorms, which has chipped away at the massive structure for centuries. I witnessed the potency of the assault when I went there almost 20 years ago: The haze in the […]
It’s in this picturesque town hall of St. Gilgen, on the shores of Lake Wolfgangsee, that the birth of Anna Maria Walburga Pertl was registered in 1720. The name rings no bell? Well then, you’ll recognize her son’s: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Becici, a sea resort near Budva in western Montenegro, boasts one of the most beautiful beaches in the country — and the hotel from whose terrace I snapped this picture offered one of the best beers I’ve ever had.
I’ve already told you about the knitting abilities of Peruvian men and women. But the Uru people living on Lake Titicaca take it to a whole other lever: Not only do they use bundles of dried reeds to make boats like the one on this slide — but they weave the artificial islets themselves!
The Raj Ghat memorial in Delhi is a black marble platform that marks the spot of Mahatma Gandhi’s cremation. Comparing my slide to recent pictures, I noticed that an eternal flame was now burning on one end of the memorial; it doesn’t look like it was there when we visited the monument.
Welcome to Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, the city in the middle of the world, about 30 kilometers north of Quito. My wife Claudine and I were standing on each side of a line symbolizing the Equator. Modern equipment has since shown that the Equator actually lies about some 240 meters north, but this stays between […]
The Arbore church in northern Romania was built in the early 16th century and dedicated to St. John the Baptist — the martyr beheaded by Salome. Coincidentally, the Orthodox monastery itself suffered a comparable fate when marauding Cossack troops melted the lead roof to make bullets.
Funny how a picture without any people in it can still illustrate a city’s dual heritage, both linguistically (French/English) and demographically (Acadian/Creole).
I told you we were going to publish this slide soon, didn’t I? As you read this, my grandson may be taking pictures of the same statue of the Little Mermaid before which his mother, my daughter Cécile, was posing 47 years ago: He’s in Copenhagen today.
Sometimes it’s best to just let the slide do the talking.
Al Karak, with its famous Crusader castle, used to be an important place of power because of its control over the caravan route between Damascus and Egypt, and the pilgrimage route from Damascus to Mecca. But that was a long, long time ago. Just three months before we went there in 1996, there were food […]
More than once have I experienced the power and joy of a 70-300mm telephoto lens. Looking from afar, in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, I couldn’t even make out what these little creatures were — they even looked like they could have been penguins! But once I zoomed in, I could enjoy watching these locals […]
When I dug up this shot of the statues of Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza next to the monument to their author Miguel de Cervantes, in Madrid’s Plaza de España, it got me hunting for other literary characters who had come to statufied life: I’ve got one photo of the Little Mermaid in […]
In the 1970s some elderly women in Volendam in northern Netherlands were still wearing traditional dresses and bonnets as part of their daily lives. Back in my native Franche-Comté, I was the conductor of a traditional folk choir in which the singers — including me — wore 19th century costumes.
The Bay of Brest, in northwestern France’s Brittany region, has been an important military port for centuries. I walked a hundred meters or so on a forbidden but unguarded path overlooking a naval base to take a picture of this fine example of our glorious French fleet.
If snake skin and dried llama fetuses are your thing, then La Paz” El Mercado de las Brujas (The Witches’ Market) is a must-see.
Romania was one of the largest automobile producers in Central and Eastern Europe during the Communist period. But that doesn’t mean horse-driven carts were entirely discontinued, especially on a traditional wedding day like this one.
Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome’s Piazza Navona, with its four allegorical statues representing the Nile, the Ganges, the Rio de la Plata and the Danube, contains one of the most comical pieces of sculpture I’ve ever seen. Actually, Nile’s head (center) is covered with a piece of cloth because at the time […]
We arrived in our Los Angeles hotel at night, happy to rest after a long trip. The next morning, Easter Sunday, we got a nice Easter egg: This was the view from our hotel room!
Here is a view from a boat trip we took on the khlongs, the canals that crisscross Bangkok. Traffic is so bad in the Thai capital that locals still rely heavily on these water routes to go from one place to another. The many khlongs earned Bangkok its nickname of the “Venice of the East” […]
Five years after Latvia’s independence was recognized by the Soviet Union (one of the last things the dying Union got to do), we toured the Baltic states, still then in the early stages of painstaking de-Russification. But from above, Riga, the largest city in the three Baltic republics, looked as beautifully Latvian as ever.
Back in the 1960s, many Greek widows, like these two in the northern Pindus mountains, still chose to dress in black for the rest of their lives after the death of their husbands. Nowadays the mourning period tends to be somewhat shorter, although traditionally not less than 40 days.
Time to share a little vintage family portrait. This was my daughter Cécile’s first trip outside of her native Franche-Comté; here she’s with my wife and my father, walking along the Promenade des Anglais on Nice’s Bay of Angels. In the background you can catch a glimpse of the world-famous Hotel Negresco.
Niagara Falls are far from being the most impressive waterfalls we’ve seen, but it comes with a couple of neat features. The Whirlpool Aero Car for example, which traverses the river above the Niagara whirlpool downstream of the falls. It’s also one of the few times we crossed a border without having our passports stamped: […]
I knew Wadi Rum in southern Jordan, had been used as a filming location: Much of Lawrence of Arabia was shot there in 1962, which made sense since the British officer himself passed through the region in the early 20th century. What I didn’t know was that since then, several science fiction movies were filmed […]
BUENOS AIRES — Cash-strapped amid a deepening recession but still, in many cases, reluctant to take public transportation, Argentines are turning to car sharing or carpooling to move about. This relatively environmentally friendly practice is well-established in some U.S. and European cities, but is still embryonic in car-loving Latin America. In Argentina it is catching […]
Legend has it that if you stand at the front gate of Dunguaire Castle and ask a question, you’ll have an answer by the end of the day. I don’t know who’s doing the answering, but I’d be more curious to hear from the ghosts of W.B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, the two Irish […]
If you click on “show story map” at the top of this page, you’ll have a global view of the slides published so far, and begin to get an idea of how widely my wife and I traveled. Still, you may notice some gaps on the map — and Zimbabwe was the closest we got […]
These students’ colorful saris contrasted nicely with the white marble of Ranakpur’s Jain temple, dedicated to Adinatha, the founder of Jainism.
From the Place d’Austerlitz, the statue of Napoleon watches over Ajaccio, the town in which he was born. Some may see a resemblance with Prague’s Stalin Monument, but the statue of the French emperor is significantly smaller — adding to the myth that Napoleon was short in stature when in fact he was 5 feet […]
However neatly and methodically organized my 20,000 slides may be, in more than 60 years of travels I am bound to draw some blanks here and there. So whenever I can’t remember where I snapped this windmill or that mosque, my grandson puts his Internet detective hat on and helps me track it down. In […]