Daughter in Australia sent me this link to a Melbourne newspaper that was celebrating bumping Vancouver from the top of the “most livable city” list. I thought it was quite funny that they put a photo of the riot to illustrate Vancouver’s downfall. (See my post on the riot.) Apparently the riot won’t actually affect the scores…
This week I spent some time in Niagara Falls. Having grown up in Canada, outside Ontario, I always KNEW that Niagara Falls was not a desirable place to go – impossibly tacky, commercialized, only visited by foreign tourists, and disappointing.
The Lunatic Express is subtitled “Discovering the world… via its most dangerous buses, boats, trains, and planes.” I requested the book from the library after reading an article by Hoffman in the National Geographic Traveler. The book was well-written and fun to read – for the first half anyway. After that, the grueling bus/train/boat trips…
The city library has an email newletter for which you can select categories of interest. This book was featured in the ‘travel’ category. Subtitled “Life and Love in India,” it is written by an American journalist who lived in India for several years in her 20s. The book is not a a funny-style travel memoir…
Here is a blog post that struck a note with me – reminding me of myself in my mid-20s when I decided to come home. I still carry a bit of the urge to backpack forever, but I value that “state of affairs where we can find familiar comforts” (see quotation below). In “Passing up Paradise in Colombia”, Luke…
The Custodian of Paradise is brilliantly written, very complex, and full of intricately woven themes. However, it is very heavy in spirit. I am not sure I’d recommend this book to everyone, but I intend to try another one of Wayne Johnston’s books. Looking for a review of the book, I found a defense of fiction as travel…
Havana is stunningly shabby and elegant. It could be the years of neglect, or it could be the type of materials used in construction, but everywhere there are crumbling buildings with vestiges of ornate detail and grandeur. The view from the rooftop is an unrelenting mess – one can’t imagine where to start renovating! Streets in…
I diligently wrote daily draft blogs on my i-phone during the trip, but didn’t have access to wireless internet to send them. Then, on return, I had some trouble with Gmail on my phone, so I removed and re-installed the app. Hadn’t thought about the fact that the drafts existed only on my phone, and they…
Seeing Clarely 