I began to write this as we pulled out of the bus station on our way to the Netherlands. Ten days in northwestern Germany was hard on me. My body told me so – a painful rash, heart palpitations, chest pains, and a headache that began each day the moment I woke up. We...
Brussels, like Paris, unfolded as a mash-up of old and new. While Paris was a hard 24 hours, Brussels was an inviting and fun three days. The difference was serendipity, not a true reflection of these two venerable places. This is the problem with short...
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....
