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I have nothing against five star hotels – a little creamy elegance and fawning service never hurt anybody – but given a choice, I’ll always go for small, quaint and unusual. Give me a converted windmill, rice barge, convent or olive farm any day over a cookie-cutter corporate chain. There’s so much more to talk…

In last week’s post I wrote, “Age alone does not make you irrelevant.” Apparently the U.S. Transportation Safety Administration doesn’t agree. In January, it declared that travelers older than 75 no longer have to take off their shoes to pass through airport security. In its infinite wisdom, our government has decided that after our 74th…

Lately, in Seville, I’ve noticed a lot of people wandering the streets in pajamas. Well, not all that many, really, just three in as many weeks, which I suppose is a pretty small percentage of the city’s 703,000 residents. I went up to one particularly befuddled octogenarian and asked if he needed help. He looked…

There are rare, sublime moments when city planners bring together the perfect combination of vaulting ambition, wasteful spending and designed-by-committee bad taste to produce an architectural landmark so stunningly wrong that it will give everybody something to gossip about for generations. In Seville, ours can be found in the Plaza de la Encarnación . Photo…

Many years ago, Rich and I were in northern India near the Pakistan border and wanted to take an overnight train that would get us to New Delhi at 7:00 in the morning. We managed to get a private compartment; there was no bedding, of course, but we made ourselves reasonably comfortable during the chilly…

One night in the old Soviet city of Tblisi, Georgia, at the end of many hours of toasting and feasting, our host took out a knife the size of a machete. He seized the remains of the whole roast pig, which by that point in the evening had been reduced to a few rib bones…

My husband, Rich, is blessed with the enviable ability to drop off to sleep just about anywhere, including the dentist’s chair. When I began getting serious about my painting, I often overcame his reluctance to model for me by asking him to stretch out on the sofa for just a few minutes; in no time…

As the old barber slid his comb through Rich’s hair and began to snip, Rich asked the man if he’d ever cut bullfighters’ hair. After all, the tiny barbershop was located in the very wall of the bullring in Ronda, where modern bullfighting was first developed in 1726. “Oh, yes,” the barber said. He began…

Being showered with sweets sounds enchanting, but when frenzied kids are flinging handfuls of rock-hard candies at your head, it feels a lot like being stoned – in the Biblical sense of the word. I would have tried to duck out of the way except that I was jammed shoulder-to-shoulder with the entire population of…

There’s an old woman who sells wild asparagus, herbs and live snails on the sidewalk behind the market in Seville’s Plaza de la Encarnación. While I’ve been know to eat a few escargots myself on occasion, I can’t bear to see the poor little things practically extruding themselves from their shells in their desperation to…