Author: Karen McCann

Coming soon: my book Dancing in the Fountain: How to Enjoy Living Abroad . The title comes from the story about a blazing hot night when my husband and I were sitting on the edge of a big stone fountain. We began dabbling our feet in the cool water, and the next thing I knew, we…

A late entry! Looking for something else on the Internet, I stumbled across a picture of this fountain at a nearby Seville hotel. I ran down to take a look and this photo. I love the tile work, which is SO Spanish and would add a lot of color to the cover of my book.…

So I’m in this temple in Nepal, walking through a maze of crumbing shrines, throngs of worshippers, monkeys underfoot like kids at a church picnic and clusters of holy men. Many are ascetics who have renounced society to seek enlightenment through self-deprivation, such as wandering the world nearly naked, smeared with ashes and refraining from…

This interview just appeared on the popular expat website, Costa Women . As it’s a members-only site, I got special permission to reprint it here, so you’d all have the chance to see it. Introducing Karen McCann Did you find Spain, or did Spain find you? I kind of stumbled across Spain on my way…

Remind me again, does the ladies’ room sign start with a character that looks like cross stitching, or is it the character kind of like a stick figure with a window for a head? In a visit to Japan years ago, I found it so difficult to decipher the kanji signs that I usually just…

So Rich says to the horse, “I bet you five dollars I can tell you where you got your shoes…” This horse doesn’t like losing the five dollars. Here, he appears to be eating Rich. .

So Rich and I are walking along a deserted street in New Orleans, and this tall, good-looking young man comes up to us and remarks, in a charming Southern drawl, that he hopes we are enjoying his fair city. A bit warily (we’ve read a lot of stories about untoward events that start this way)…

This is a famous set of tiles on the outer wall of San Pedro’s church in Seville, depicting people suffering in purgatory so they can eventually get into heaven. I love the way that nobody seems to be in real torment; some appear irritated while others merely look bemused, as if they were at a…

I knew a jungle lodge in the Peruvian Amazon was not going to be a Four Seasons, or even a Motel 6. But I had no idea that a few days after we arrived, the guide leading our little group would announce that we were to leave the lodge’s comparative comforts (mattress, mosquito netting, wooden…