TRAVEL

Remember that old saying about “the sun never sets on the British Empire”?  It was true once.  But it hasn’t been for a long time and the apt saying today…

The obit/tributes to Anthony Bourdain continue to pour in.  As a former tour guide, independent traveler and resident abroad it is almost reflexive to draw some contrasts with our different…

I have travelled to over seventy countries, explored hundreds of cities and spent years living abroad in England, France and Hong Kong, enough to confer some understanding of what foreigners…

              No one can fully comprehend China; wherever and whenever you start from will not likely be the same by the time one gets to…

I loaded my CD of Soldier of Fortune again the other night. It certainly is not a movie of much renown, certainly on nobody’s “great films” list, not even mine…

A Lesson in Guilin I never taught English in China. In fact, other than a little shipboard course in travel writing I have never taught English anywhere.  I doubt that…

In an earlier essay I (half) joked that American tourists to Paris often return home—usually to some very un–Paris-like town in the American “heartland” of Iowa or Missouri—grousing and grumbling…

In an age in which it is possible for a drone to take out a terror suspect sitting in a public toilet in Yemen it is reasonable to wonder how…

Square Jean XXIII is a little park space at the west end of the Ile de la Cité in Paris. It consists of some trees and benches behind the apse…

Phissssssssssscht! The tour coach’s front door popped open like an airlock in a Star Wars spaceship. An assault of superheated exterior air immediately scorched my sinuses. Egypt air! Air that had…