Category Archives: travel

“It does not seem to me…that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a … Continue reading→

Gaudí’s Casa Batlló, on the Block of Discord on the Passeig de Gràcia, was a private residence for the Batlló family.  Imagine living in a museum.  Of course, it wasn’t a museum then, but everything in it, the walls, the … Continue reading→

On my way in from the airport, the taxi driver, who was very much like a Spanish Pete Postelthwaite, spoke to me about the prevalence of Catalan and how his sons, though fluent in Spanish, Catalan and English, refuse to … Continue reading→

The Walled City The thick stone walls of the old city of Dubrovnik are a source of great pride.  The man who drove me from the airport spoke at length about them.  He then asked me, “You have no questions … Continue reading→

Vigeland Park at the Nobel Peace Center Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra-II at the Kontiki Museum The Kontiki, Heyerdahl’s landmark expedition in 1947, which proved that pre-Columbian South American people could have sailed the Pacific all the way to the Polynesian Islands … Continue reading→

There is grandeur in this view of life…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. –Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859) The great hall and the Darwin Centre’s cocoon–a … Continue reading→

Cambridge, 20 August 2010

There is a strange exhilaration that comes from standing so close to a once wild animal, separated not by a fence but by a shallow ditch that you wonder why they don’t cross.  Coming upon the monkey house, however, and … Continue reading→

Obama and Putin marionettes–the heads are the same, only the color is different In a town that capitalizes on its now extinct Jewish population, and which is situated so close to Theresienstadt, it seems more than a little distasteful to … Continue reading→