Tag Archives: travel
I’m that lady in Taipei eating dumplings with a spork
Today we spent with temples and dumplings in Taipei: both are exquisite. I’ll have to wait until I have more time to write about the temples, but here’s a taste of the enchanting Baoan temple. My sister-in-law is Taiwanese, so I am really lucky and have the insider scoop on where to eat. This afternoon we ate […]
An open letter to my husband re: this 16 hour flight to Hong Kong
Dear HOB, How is it possible to sleep for 16 hours straight, waking up for meals and then instantly–poof!– back to slumber? It is a cruel time to desert me, your insomniac wife who suffers from fear of flying. Here I am, wearing knee high compression socks and watching an insufferable movie about wedding dates. My […]
Mini-bus magic: tips for traveling in Albania
Followers of Picnic at the Cathedral will recall that this fall my husband HOB and I spent two weeks in the country of Albania. If you haven’t had the chance to visit, allow me to highly recommend it. Albania has spectacular (surprisingly mountainous) geography, an interesting mix of classic Ottoman architecture and Communist era monuments, and a […]
Funniest Travel Moments of 2016
I needed a bit of cheering up today so I decided to research my end of year blog stats on the WordPress admin site. I ignored the numbers and charts and went right to the juicy part: search terms. These words and phrases that curious web searchers type into their search engines never fail to restore […]
Korçë, Albania: come for the tolerance, stay for the Modernist architecture
The people of Korçë are proud of their tolerance and I like it in them. “We are a tolerant people” we heard several times and surely this is true. After all, this Southeastern town is famous for having the first girl’s school in Albania and still has an intellectual and cultured vibe (bookstores and museums, hooray!) […]
A Roman amphitheatre, Byzantine mosaics, and an emergency picnic with bragging rights in Durrës
Our rushed day in Durrës went like this; rain, walk, rain, walk, rain, where the hell is the amphitheatre, rain, walk, oh there’s the amphitheatre, oh there’s the archeological museum, oh man am I ever hungry, torrential rain, thunderstorm, emergency picnic, walk, rain, salad, mosquitoes, vagina lamp. I have the impression that Durrës, due to […]
Where to store your bags of weed in the Ottoman houses of Gjirokastër
If you want to visit Zekate House, a traditional Ottoman home in Gjirokastër, Albania, walk up a steep hill, make a right, ask directions from a man tending his grape arbor, go up hill a bit more and then find the building with it’s two wood-capped towers and go inside. No, Zakate house is not locked and no one works […]
These 14th century frescos in Mborja, Albania have something to say about the US election
This Wednesday, November 10, 2016, I finally gave up on trying to sleep, slammed down two espressos and started looking though images of the apocalypse. Wednesday morning’s art binge was not out of character, given my love of medieval apocalypse manuscripts and Romanesque church art with all it’s fabulous carvings and frescoes of sinners tormented in […]
Lost in the Orientalist painting that is Gjirokastër, Albania
Our furgon (minibus) arrived in Gjirokastër, Albania in the lower part of town and since we didn’t have a map and the old city is built on a steep hill we took a taxi to our guest house. When I say we took a taxi I mean we paid a guy who was using his […]
Post-communist rainbows fade to hipster in Tirana
Here’s what happened to Tirana, Albania: communism screwed it over for 40 years, destroyed much of its historic architecture—mosques, Orthodox cathedrals and an Ottoman era baazar—and then replaced those once beautiful buildings with architectural train wrecks. Architecture train wreck case in point: this so-called Pyramid of Tirana was originally the Enver Hoxha Museum. (For those of you […]
Picnic at the Cathedral 