My blog has migrated to a new host and is being painstakingly reconstructed here. Please bear with me as I iron out wrinkles, hammer out the dents, and apply enough spit and duct tape to hold it all together.— Karen
The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania Watching resistance movements growing around the globe, I’ve started thinking of places I’ve visited where oppressed people have won their freedom against seemingly impossible odds. Last year Rich and I traveled through the Baltic States, where much of the last century involved occupation by the Russian Empire, the…
When I was a teenager, a student at a nearby high school asked his history teacher the inevitable question about why good Germans did nothing while the Nazis rose to power. The teacher, Ron Jones , hit on a creative way to demonstrate the answer. His classroom experiment began the next Monday with a description…
Wednesday morning, I had a truly astonishing experience. I sat in a coffee house surrounded by more than a dozen people of various ages and nationalities, and — get this! — not one of them was using an electronic device . I didn’t see a single laptop or iPad, and while one woman did pull…
“I got out of bed in the middle of the night,” my sister Kate recalls. “And stepped into a pool of water.” She tried to wake her husband, but he just mumbled in his sleep, “Put a towel on it.” “I don’t think that’s going to do it, honey. The entire house is flooded.” That…
I am very excited about my new biometric American passport. And I really hope that I get to see it someday. Because like just about everything else that happened in 2016, it’s gotten . . . complicated. It all started simply enough. To avoid even the remote possibility of a hiccup in my ability to…
About four o’clock Sunday afternoon, Rich and I strolled out of our house in downtown San Anselmo, California and ran into a neighbor in her eighties. She was jauntily attired in pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers to walk her dog. “Some things never change,” Rich murmured happily. Embracing eccentricity is one of the hallmarks of…
Our route on the “In Search of America” tour When you live abroad, you always worry that you might start to feel a bit disconnected from your home country. America is something you have to stay in practice for, and I don’t want to lose my touch. Arriving in my native California just in time…
“I always plan trips to the nth degree,” a reader wrote me last week. “But we’ve decided that for our Greek Island trip next year, we’re just going to follow your lead (plan ahead, but don’t book anything in advance) — we’re just going to hop on the ferry and go. This is a bit…
“When you were a kid in New Jersey,” I said to Rich, “did you ever think you’d move abroad?” “Never.” “Me either. I thought it was something that people only did in books and movies, not in real life.” So you can imagine how gobsmacked we were a dozen years ago when we found ourselves…
Would you have answered that ad? Me neither, but it allegedly drew 5000 applicants for Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Antarctic expedition . As it turned out, the ad actually understated the dangers; things went horribly wrong for Shackleton and then they got much, much worse. What was meant to be a triumph — “the last great…
CELEBRATING GOOD NEIGHBORS These days I’m writing about Good Neighbors, exploring how the people around me are working to help each other get through these challenging times. My weekly posts appear on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on my travel and research schedule.
THIS BLOG IS A PROMOTION-FREE ZONE. As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things I find interesting and/or useful.
