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Rich on the ferry arriving in Genoa “Genoa? Last time I was there, it was full of prostitutes and muggers,” commented a friend upon learning Rich and I were planning to take a ferry there last summer. “Especially down by the docks.” Yikes! Arriving shortly after dawn one August morning, Rich and I felt lucky…

A friend tries Kim’s Barber Shop, San Francisco There comes a moment in every long journey when you look in the mirror and face the fact that you’re overdue for a haircut. Perhaps a soupçon of gray is showing where it shouldn’t. Possibly your faux hawk is beginning to flop, your bob is becoming a…

“You’re getting a Christmas tree ?” Spanish friends used to say, with such incredulity that I might as well have announced we were building an igloo in our living room. “A live tree? Really?” “Where are you getting a tree?” expat friends would ask, eyeing us a trifle suspiciously, as if we had a direct…

Kids, this is what cameras looked like in the 50s. When I was little, my mother took some phenomenally bad photos because she never learned how to close one eye, which you had to do to see through the tiny viewfinders on pre-digital cameras. As a result, her pictures showed miles of background – often…

Original contents of my 54 x 34 x 19 cm (21 x 13 x 7.5 inches) suitcase Three months of living out of a suitcase has taught me a lot about packing. For one thing, I’ve learned how to jettison stuff that wasn’t as essential as I’d thought. (Click here to see my original packing…

Our cabin on the Dubrovnik-Bari ferry It was a dark and stormy night on the Adriatic. “’The sea was angry that day, my friends,’” said Rich, quoting the Seinfeld episode where George plays a marine biologist. “’Like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.’” We were reeling about the pitching ferry,…

“I’ve been on the road for six months,” said Denise, an Irishwoman I met in the Czech Republic. “Sure, that last town was pretty, but at this point, for me to say a place is special, it would have to be dipped in gold.” Now, after three months of travel, I know just what Denise…

The speakeasy’s front gate Belgrade is a city that knows how to keep its secrets. The underground bar we were seeking had two different names, the street it was on ceased to exist years ago, and while our map was in standard Roman lettering, the street names, if posted at all, were in Cyrillic. Naturally…

​“Sorry about the smell,” said our hostess, leading us into a large, chilly apartment that stank of sewage. “There is nothing we can do about it.” She flung open a window, and the temperature began to plummet. “Unfortunately there is no heat. Heat is controlled by the building, and they have not yet turned it…

The communists have a lot to answer for, not least of which is their brutal architectural style. In Bucharest, Romania, hideous, concrete, Soviet-style apartment blocks blight the downtown landscape, often mashed up against some genteel old Victorian with filigree, turrets, and an air of being appalled to find itself in such rough company. Of course,…