You cringe, close your eyes, gasp, and think of the worst. That truck can’t cross that bridge, it’s 2000 years old! But wait, it’s not turning back and is indeed crossing. Two millennia later, goods are still crossing the 71-meter (231-foot) high bridge that spans the Tagus river, just shy of what is now the…
Perched high above a patchwork of olive groves and cork forests, a holy mountain juts 758 meters (2486 feet) from the surrounding plain. It’s a sacred playground overlooking neighboring villages where naughty gods once used huge granite boulders as their croquet pieces, and left them scattered, forgetting to clean up after themselves. Over the centuries…
Around these parts the border is porous and exactly where Portuguese villages become Spanish is lost among the cork tree forests (and in today’s Europe so is the point). Sometimes the little white houses are fringed with blue sometimes yellow but walk through the immense walls and past the Visigothic church and into a bar and the confusion ends.…
Writing in the local paper. Local issues with a global take. I never translate literally and the editor trims at will to make it fit. Here’s my version, then theirs. Once upon a time, long before the giant Shanghai Bazaars arrived with their low-cost, low-quality plasticy imitation rags, legend has it that Cacereños would drive…
What’s the difference between an A and an O? Cross the border at Oroville and see how a thin line can change more than just the spelling of a valley. North of the 49th parallel in the Okanagan lies a string of some of Canada’s premier tourist resort cities. Canadians migrate here every summer to enjoy…
It seems like it is everywhere. Twitter feeds every minute and retweets every 2. This ‘revolution’ will be twitterized. The enormous country that links the Middle East with South Asia but is neither, is on everyone’s lips and in every flickr. The world has briefly stopped worrying about Nukes and is suddenly worried about its…