Walking Welsh Winds. South Wales reminded me of the Driftless Region of Minnesota and Wisconsin, with rolling hills, rivers, and a mixture of forest and field. Yet there was the ocean and warm gulf winds. Plants we only see indoors in Minnesota, grow along the side of...
I began this essay in Montenegro where people speak a local Serbian dialect they defiantly call Montenegrin, and finished writing it in Wales, where Welsh is defiantly visible on every signpost, yet English is undeniably dominant. Such is the language of empire. And...
In Montenegro, I think of sandwiches. Not the mustard/mayo, whole wheat-or-rye kind. I think about rivers, lakes, and bays, sandwiched between mountains. These are waterways of unsurpassed beauty. From where I sit overlooking the Bay of Kotor, one can get to...
“I accepted the story I heard on foreign media: that the [1997] Albanian civil war could be explained not by the collapse of a flawed financial system but by longstanding animosities between ethnic groups… its plan could be disrupted only by outside...
Berat— Albania’s oldest city —has 1,000 identically-shaped windows in its Ottoman-era old town and a Byzantine city on top of one of its mountains. The Osum River runs through the town with buildings hugging the slopes. A green ridged range covers its north side....
