Do you ever wonder how fairy tales survive—or crumble—when they’re dressed in uniform? In my latest Camino a Ítaca column for HOY, I explore exactly that: how the stories we inherit transform when they’re repackaged by institutions, power, or conformity. I reflect on the tension between imagination and order, and trace how even the most…
Have mercy! Been waiting for the bus all day on the Camino a Ítaca. Things are going to get partisan ugly this election year here in Spain and a simple bus ride can tell the tale. Click over to read the originally published version in Spanish at el HOY or read the English translation below.…
Crossing the Tagus River enroute to Plasencia by bus. This week’s Camino a Ítaca looks back on a recent event where I was … stranded, 80kms from home because there were no connections. Click over and read the original in Spanish or read the English version below. Eighty kilometres really isn’t far, but after six-thirty…
COVID has created our own Siberias. My next installement on the Camino de Ítaca travels from Vladivostok all the way to Extremadura. Click over to the original Spanish version or the English one below. We were somewhere around Chita on the blurry edges of Mongolia and China when the vodka really started flowing. I remember,…
The scene of the crime I had narrowly avoided massacring a dozen newly hatched chicks in a box, whose chirping had accompanied us up from Qax. Stumbling backwards as the rusted-out Soviet-era bus corkscrewed us deeper into the Caucasus, I instead tumbled into the lap of heavily mustached Georgian-speaking shepherd. He didn’t smile… Writing in…
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. I’m not really a betting man. I can clearly remember when my great grandfather used to get dressed up take me on his weekly trip to his place…
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. I had always imagined that we had done something terribly wrong, something so unpardonable that we were now suffering the consequences of this unnamed act. Something must have…
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. Like it or not, the first and last faces that visitors encounter when arriving someplace new are its taxi drivers. And while the vehicles they drive around the…
Riding the Metro in Madrid and you suddenly turn around. Is it a new horror movie that’s just been released?
Every traveler has been there…jet-lagged and coming out of an airport or getting off an all-night train where the only wink you got was from the fellow across the aisle with the extremely dirty fingernails, stepping into a new country with no language or local currency and suddenly the mass descends on you. If not…