TRAVEL

I was mildly surprised when the elderly man who took his place beside me at the trough-like urinal in the park in Wuhan was my height, maybe even a scratch taller.…

Even after fifteen years I sometimes slip into saying “the Soviet Union” or “USSR.”   When I first went there, only a couple of years before the great scary bugaboo…

Continuing the adventures in foreign dining that I began in “Eating Chinese, Parts I and II” (see January 2004, in the Archives), this entry tackles the question:   Is there…

In 1997 I bought a tattered old postcard from a street vendor in Hong Kong.   Its postal cancellation mark reads July 1, 1907.   Addressed in faded ink to…

When I mentioned to our driver, Hisham,   that I could swear people were getting laid all over the Great Pyramid of Kufu he seemed unimpressed.   It may have…

Giza is a good fifteen miles from the center of Cairo, a long ride on a road that, although built less than twenty years ago, is rutted, potholed, and crowded…

In 1991 I made my third trip to Egypt, this time not as a tour escort, but as a scriptwriter for a documentary on a cooperative agricultural project between Egypt…

The more reserved Hiberianized Roman Catholics used to be shocked at the sight of an Italian RC (almost always a woman) conversing with a religious statue (usually, but not always…

In 1979, Patty, pre-teens Laura and Lisa, and I sat in our car in a piazza parking lot in Bari, Italy, waiting for the American Express office to open.  …

It’s a blurred margin that separates the traveler’s desire to interact with his foreign hosts and the cautious reserve to prevent falling prey to scams and hustles, or worse.  …