Early spring and an entire valley looks to the sky and prays. However this isn’t one of the many religious festivals in Spain, but a delicate dance between the weather and the calendar. Snowcapped mountains descend into green terracing where two million trees await their cue from Mother Nature before exploding into one of nature’s…
I look back on the time that we lived in Vientiane, Laos very fondly and in fact often question why we ever left. The city was opening to the world back then and seemed to change daily and I’m sure that it would be unrecognizable now, but memory has a way of playing tricks on…
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. As I write this, a constant hum drifts up to my fourth floor vigil from the busy Rua Mayor below. I’ve been to Salamanca many…
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 grew up attending a French immersion school on the very English speaking prairies of western Canada. Every subject, except English, was given in French by first language…
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. A few years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the neverending civil war, I found myself in northern Syria tracing the footsteps of the sixth…
For many this was the end of the line, a place at the end of Africa to get lost in purple hazes and naked lunches. But long before Burroughs and Hendrix added their hipness, a local boy took the Tangerine brand far beyond the Levant. A medieval gap-year wanderer who saw it as a beginning…
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 write this from a cold damp grey dormitory city on the outskirts of Cologne, Germany. My wife, being as persuasive as wives tend to…
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. It’s that time of year again. The time when coworkers loudly spill out of restaurants at all hours and then pour themselves into nightclubs only…
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. One of the things I liked most about living in an ex-Soviet republic like Azerbaijan was the public art. It seemed that every square had…
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…