Travel

Visiting Valor in Villajoyosa

Visiting Valor in Villajoyosa

Last spring in Guadeloupe I visited an archeological park where I got to sample the pulp from a fresh-picked cacao pod. I heard more about chocolate cultivation at two coffee plantations. Given my obsession with chocolate, I decided to take the process a step further on my short visit to the Costa Blanca in Spain,…

Eagle Creek Backpack Review

Eagle Creek Backpack Review

For the two solo trips I took this year—one to Guadeloupe, Martinique, New York and Spain, and one to Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and South Korea—I needed a very specific kind of luggage. The problem Since I was traveling solo, I needed to travel as light as possible. I also needed luggage I could manage…

Alcoy: My Too-Brief Visit

Alcoy: My Too-Brief Visit

After a gorgeous, winding drive through the mountains from where I was staying in the Costa Blanca, finding the Refugio de Cervantes Bomb Shelter Museum in Alcoy took me another hour or so. The delay was due to its humble signposting, and by “humble” I mean a simple sign on a gate next to a…

11 Hotel Management Tips

11 Hotel Management Tips

When you check into a hotel room, chances are you look for particular things that are important to you. Perhaps you want a hairdryer, or a bathtub, or an air conditioner. I tend to check the general cleanliness of a room. If it’s scrupulously clean, I’m not so particular about the rest. Staying in the New…

A Tourist to the DMZ

A Tourist to the DMZ

I’d read about visiting the DMZ a number of times before I arrived in Seoul. DMZ stands for the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, which is anything but demilitarized. It’s a wide strip of no-man’s-land that embodies the tension between these two countries, still officially in a state of war. Outside of that…

Seoul Tower Without a Date

Seoul Tower Without a Date

Seoul Tower, perched on Namsan Mountain above Seoul, is visible everywhere, looking like some sort of 70’s version of the future. Built back in the 70’s for radio and television, it was and still is a communication tower. However, it’s also a destination for tourists and locals: a thing to do on a free weekend afternoon….

Six (!) Seoul Palaces

Six (!) Seoul Palaces

Seoul is home to six different royal palaces, each built by or for a different king. Beautifully crafted and opulent, some are more intact and authentic than others. Authentic? The five older ones all include at least one tale of complete or partial destruction. All were burnt to the ground during the Japanese Invasion in the last decade…

5 Tokyo Gardens

5 Tokyo Gardens

I’m not particularly into gardens. I enjoy them, but don’t enjoy gardening. I visited a few gardens in Tokyo partly because I was curious about Japanese gardens in particular, and also curious as to how they are used by people in such a big city. But mostly I went to them because I wanted to…

Takayama Hida Folk Village

Takayama Hida Folk Village

If you read this blog at all regularly, you’ll know that I particularly enjoy visiting historic buildings: the more authentic the better. That’s why one of my goals in visiting Takayama, Japan, was to see the Hida Folk Village just outside town. (Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you buy anything through them, I…

Strolling Yanaka in Tokyo

Strolling Yanaka in Tokyo

Tokyo is best known for its big-city-ness: huge, new, shiny, crowded, and exciting. I found it overwhelming in terms of noise and crowds, and also in terms of choices: where to go, what to do, what to eat, where to sleep. Add to that my functional illiteracy—I can’t read Japanese lettering or say more than…

Is Kanazawa worth a Visit?

Is Kanazawa worth a Visit?

Kanazawa hit the travel sections in March 2015 with the opening of a new shinkansen (bullet train) line going there from Tokyo. It cut the travel time to less than two and half hours, which makes a Kanazawa day trip a viable option. I’d never heard of it before, but that coverage led me to add…

A baseball game in Japan

A baseball game in Japan

When I took a group of Dutch students to the US a few years ago, I insisted that we attend a professional baseball game, something they were distinctly unenthusiastic about. They said it was a boring game. I told them it wasn’t about the game; it was about the whole event around the game: the…

A day trip to Hiroshima

A day trip to Hiroshima

I had mixed feelings about visiting Hiroshima and initially decided not to. I know a lot about the atomic bomb attacks on Japan. Back in the early 90s, I attended a three-week intensive workshop for teachers about nuclear issues. I learned about the science of the various kinds of nuclear weapons, the mathematics of radiation…