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
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,…
Woman in the Augustin train station Sitting around a Transylvania dinner table, one of the British guests told me he’d recently met some Texans in London who, upon learning he was heading to Romania, said apprehensively, “But is it safe ?” Romania is a wild place, but having spent some weeks here, it seems to…
So we get off the train at the station – more of a shed, really – in the dark, in a small village deep in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, and despite email promises, no one is there to meet us. The unpaved road holds no taxis, cars, or even the horse-drawn carts we’ve been…
“Stop! Our passports! Stop the train!” we shouted out the window. The Hungarian-Romanian border is no place to lose your passport, and it had been with some reluctance that we’d turned ours over to a couple of burly men in uniform who’d come on board, headed directly for our compartment, taken our passports (and no…
My beer with grapefruit flavoring & straw “And after dinner, of course,” said one of our new friends, “vodka and pickles.” At this point in the evening, I felt nothing could shock me. Earlier I’d been staggered to observe people in many of Krakow’s charming bars casually drinking liters of beer through large plastic straws.…
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.
