Category Archives: travel

Tibidabo, 11 September 2010

Those words, which I’ve often heard spoken with the fondness that memory lends, have always loomed large in my mind.  I grew up hearing stories of my mom’s travels to the Costa Brava, eating regional pastries with coffee from bowls … Continue reading →

“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 →

Parc Güell, Barcelona, September 2010

Farther up Passeig de Gràcia is Casa Milà, designed by Gaudí and built in the early 20th century (finished in 1912).  The people of Barcelona were so shocked by its unique design that they named it La Pedrera, Spanish for … 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 →