My first awareness of the existence of Petra was seeing it in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. When I learned that it was a real place and not just a movie set, I added a trip to Petra to my next Israel trip. (Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links, which means if…
Floating in the Dead Sea is one of those things people put on their bucket list: something that has to be experienced once in a lifetime. The Dead Sea is called the Dead Sea because its salt and mineral levels are so high that nothing lives in it. It is also the lowest elevation on…
In about 66 C.E. (Christian Era, which is the term Israelis use for A.D.), a Jewish rebel movement captured a great fortress and palace built by King Herod. Called Masada, it stood high above the Dead Sea on a flat-topped mountain, surrounded by desert. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. by…
If you visit Jerusalem’s old city, you will surely see the Western Wall. It’s as if the large plaza at the center of this ancient place draws you in like a magnet. All roads don’t lead to Rome; they lead to the Western Wall. Yet the Western Wall is more than the most holy place…
The route by which Jesus is believed to have carried the cross to his crucifixion is now a tourism and pilgrim route in the Old City of Jerusalem.
A protest march in the West Bank turned violent last night when it was stopped by riot police at the checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem. Also last night, I had a very pleasant meal with my cousins at an Italian restaurant right outside the Jaffa Gate to the Old City of Jerusalem. The coexistence of…
Jerusalem, July 23, 2014 When I told people several months ago that I was planning to go to Israel, their reaction was usually “Oh, how interesting! I’d love to go there someday!” or “Really? How exciting!” By the time I told people a couple of weeks ago about our trip, their reaction had changed to…
All we were trying to do was to get out of the car while it was stopped in traffic. The plan was to walk to the restaurant two blocks away while my husband went to park the car. It made sense. I stepped out on the right side, but not before saying to the kids…
That’s part of this admirable hubris: complete and utter self-confidence.
[:en]Let’s look at a particular type of graffiti: the kind that names the person writing it, often accompanied by a date. [:]
What intrigues me almost as much as the chateaux we’ve been visiting, is what we usually haven’t seen. The rooms that are all done up for the tourists, dressed up, you could say, are lovely: period furniture; beamed, painted ceilings; ornate tapestries; and so on. There are signs explaining who lived there, along with interesting…
My oh-so-laconic son, on exiting Arromanches 360, remarked, “Even I found this one moving.” Take my word for it: that was high praise indeed, coming from my perpetually-unimpressed teenager. Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you click on one and make a purchase, I will receive a small commission. This will not affect your…
In the same week that I visited the excellent In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres, Belgium, I also saw the Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy in Bayeux, France. The two museums are quite comparable: the first is about World War I in the Ypres Salient; the second looks at the D-Day invasion of…
Belgium is without a doubt the best place to learn about World War I and to visit historical sites related to the war. It has a number of museums, most notably the In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres, and hundreds of cemeteries and monuments. In places, the scars are still visible of the relentless shelling…
What’s wrong with this picture? We ate lunch yesterday at a café in Gent. Afterwards, I went inside to use the toilet, followed the signs upstairs, came around a corner, and saw this. Except it wasn’t quite this; there was a man standing at the urinal, making some very contented sounds while he peed. I…
An effective museum doesn’t just display items drily in glass cases; an effective museum gives those items meaning to the people viewing them. It entertains, but it also makes visitors think. It gives the items an emotional weight. The In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium, is one of the most effective museums I’ve ever…
Everywhere we’ve gone so far, there have been very few foreign tourists like us. Most of the tourists — and in some places all of the tourists — are Chinese. Sometimes they’re in pairs or families, sometimes in groups. When they’re in a group, even if it’s just 5 or 6 people, they hire a…
Note added in December 2019: I wrote the following article years ago in Hancheng, China, and I see now how terribly judgemental I was about toilets in China. I’ve added some tips and comments to update it a bit. My message now is: be aware of how you communicate and behave around the issue of…
When I started teaching a class in intercultural communication this past year at the teacher training college, I didn’t actually know anything about it. Or rather, I didn’t know any of the theory, but I’d had a whole lot of practice. I had plenty of anecdotes to share, for example, about differences in expectations and…
In my last entry, I mentioned how it seemed to me that the Chinese have wholeheartedly embraced conspicuous consumption. Visiting the Forbidden City the other day emphasized that for me. You could say that the emperors of pre-revolutionary China were the originators of the concept for this part of the world. They represent the ultimate…
We were in Rome yesterday and the day before, but apparently so were representatives of the G8 nations and other VIPs. Sights/sites closed or opened arbitrarily to accommodate their whistle-stop visits. A note from 2020: I wrote this post back in 2009, one of my earliest ones. I usually try to keep my articles useful…