I had long been promising myself a visit to Istanbul, European Capital of Culture for 2010. So with the Bayram festival now approaching and the summer sun warming the earth, I couldn't resist a visit to this most ostentatious city of spires, a fabulously inspiring metropolis of imperial dreams; and it was only a magic carpet ride away. I arrived exhausted but excited, my heart in my hands here at the epicentre of three empires. Straddling two … [Read more...]
Squid on the Floor
At sunrise the buzz of motorbike traffic has not yet begun, and the street is oddly quiet. We come out of the alley and onto the sidewalk where shop owners are opening up and iced coffee vendors await their first customers. We're out here at this hour waiting for a van, which soon arrives. The four of us shove our bags in the back and groggily climb in. The previous afternoon we booked a Halong Bay tour from one of the hundreds of vendors in … [Read more...]
The Journey to South Africa
Johannesburg was chilly cold that winter morning when the Boeing 737 South African Airways plane touched down from Lagos. I was among the teeming passengers that disembarked. I took my turn through custom and immigration clearance. Soon I was in a registered airport taxi to the park station in Braamfontein. I'd catch the early-morning Greyhound coach to Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape to attend the 6th triennial congress of the Shakespeare … [Read more...]
Musings from Mussoorie
There are some incidents that occur in your life, that change the way you look at things. Then there are some that just bounce off of you without a visible mark, but later those memories come back to you at the oddest hours of the day, and you realise that they did in fact, leave a mark - they left one deep within your soul. This is what happened with me; I wouldn't say it was a bad experience, on the contrary, it pushed me into an existential … [Read more...]
A Bunch of Rocks: The Environmental Gutting of Malta
As you look down from the hillside onto the apparent perfection of Malta's Blue Lagoon, you struggle to imagine it in any other condition. Land embraces lagoon like a protective parent. Water shines like a molten blending of sapphires and emeralds. The perpetually cloudless sky appears hazy against such brilliance. Craggy islets guard the entrance like dorsal spines on some mythic leviathan. But you walk the Malta of the modern world, a … [Read more...]
A Local’s Guide to Vancouver’s Top Ten Free Attractions
I grew up in Toronto, Canada. While Toronto is a tremendous city - boasting eclectic neighbourhoods, lush city parks and a vibrant cultural scene - it's also a place people get really practiced at leaving. Every Friday night in summer, the 400-series highways leading out of town are jammed with cars crawling towards the promise of fresher air and a lakeside cottage up north. I've left Hogtown for good and for the past six years have called … [Read more...]
The Lovely Inishowen Peninsula and More
As our plane dipped down below the mist, patchwork fields of green came into view. Then we went in for the landing in Belfast and could see sheep in a nearby pasture. This was hard to explain, but I felt like I was entering into an ancient homeland. Maybe because my family had distant Irish ancestry. My sister-in-law met my mother, sister and I and we went by car to the Inishowen Peninsula in County Donegal along the coast to Moville. The … [Read more...]
Life in a Tree House – memoirs of a 2-week vegetarian
I had been surfing the internet, looking for a volunteer opportunity that would allow us to stay in Buenos Aires for a couple weeks. We thought it would be good to get our hands dirty again, stay in a place for a while, and meet some fantastic people. We were right! We saw the website and thought we'd give it a try. From the name, it was a little risky, here are my immediate, unfiltered thoughts: eco - will we have warm showers? Will we be … [Read more...]
Suds and Solace
"The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face." --Jim Bishop The morning of September 11, 2001, as a Peace Corps trainer I'd scarcely opened an HIV/AIDS seminar in a shabby hotel two hours north of Port-au-Prince, when the Haiti health program manager pulled me aside. "The World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been attacked by planes," she whispered. "It's … [Read more...]
Night at the Museum
I stood in front of the Galleria Borghese, my eyes darting between three lines that seemed to snake for equally infinite distances through the elaborate Baroque gardens before the villa, trying to decide which to join. It was Museum Night in Rome: the single night of the year when all of its fabled attractions are open to the public, and at 8:00 P.M., when the evening began, the most famous sights were mobbed. It was also my first night in Rome, … [Read more...]
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