One night in Bangkok and the world’s your oyster The bars are temples but the pearls ain’t free . . . So what am I doing, sitting up in bed at midnight with my laptop in a hotel room in Bangkok? The truth is jetlag, and I can’t rest till I put a line through …
It’s a total anathema that Bucharest’s Parliament Palace was designed in such opulence to house all the organs of a communist state. It is the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon and cost six billion dollars to bring it to 90% completion. The sheer magnitude screams excess! Nicolae Ceauşescu was totally out …
True to my usual form . . . Slave to my obsessive ways . . . I probably expend too much energy taking notes . . . instead of sitting back and enjoying the ride . . . smelling the forest. I’m exhausted trying to understand the convoluted history of Romania, the oppression of its …
I’m sitting by an open window by a lake in the Cişmigiu Gardens near my hotel looking at young people having fun in rowing boats. I watch ducks paddling, dunking and flapping their wings and all the time can’t but help hear the birds in the trees, not just singing but singing piercingly. A truly sylvan …
Under a relaxing shower, tasting dried salt on my lips from the sweat of climbing mountainsides, negotiating dark secret passages and broad walnut staircases in old fortresses and palaces, I pause to wonder where to start in sharing of my experiences from a long day’s trip into the pristine forests of the Carpathian mountains on …