Category Travel
Why I Hate Boats (It’s All Nova Scotia’s Fault)
The lasting effects of a particularly rough ride in a high-speed catamaran across the Gulf of Maine.
You Can’t Go Home Again – And Sometimes That’s a Good Thing
The changing face of a Southern city rediscovering itself.
Scandinavian Color: The Houses of Visby
Photographs of the colorful cottages of a medieval walled city in the Baltic Sea.
Visby: The Floating City
Traipsing through the medieval city of Visby during Sweden’s annual political convention reveals something about the soul of the country.
The Many Faces of an Antique Mall
At a small-town Midwestern antique mall, faces from the past peer at you from every shelf.
Vanished Chesterfield
I spent most of the first decade of my life in a relatively new development in a then-exurban part of Richmond, Virginia, called Midlothian. Midlothian as a community dates back a couple hundred years and was, for a long time, known for coal mining. If my elementary school teachers told the truth, it was the […]
The Old Man and the Sea: My Great-Grandfather, from Latvia to Key West
The way I understand it, Key West, way back when – way back before the spring breakers and Girls Gone Wild, back before the pride parades, back before Jimmy Buffett and Margaritaville, back before the leather shops on Duval Street, back before the Conch Republic, back before Tennessee Williams, back even before Papa Hemingway and his […]
The 8 Weirdest Museums I’ve Ever Visited
As humans, we like to amass stuff. Personally, I’ve collected Pez dispensers, keychains, Troll dolls, and, as true child of the 90s, had a unfortunate collection of Beanie Babies. Since childhood, I’ve moved onto collections that take up no space: states, countries, even counties and state capitals for a brief period. But, thankfully, others have […]
Memories of a SoHo I Never Knew
When I was maybe twelve or thirteen, weaned on Simon & Garfunkel’s hymnal “Bleecker Street” and a healthy mid-90s diet of Friends, with some nebulous notion of someday running back to the Big Apple, the city of my birth, my parents sat me down and made me watch After Hours, Martin Scorsese’ brilliant nightmare of […]
Cave Art of the Stockholm Metro
Stockholm has one of the most spectacular subway systems in the world, the T-Bana, which is quite saying something when you consider the marble palaces of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the concrete cathedrals of Washington, and the archaeological ruins of Athens and Mexico City. The system is billed as the longest art gallery in the […]
How to Eat a Hamburger in Sweden
The first meal we had in Stockholm – no, not at Ikea – was Swedish meatballs with mashed potatoes and lingonberries. The second was Max at T-Centralen. Founded in Northern Sweden in the late 1960s, Max is Sweden’s answer to McDonald’s. The name even sounds suspiciously similar. The chain hasn’t spread much beyond Sweden, with […]
A Tale of Two Markets
A photo tour of gentrification and redevelopment in Washington’s old central wholesale market. If you follow food culture in Washington, you’ve probably seen this place: Like the sign says, it’s called Union Market. Union Market was developed by Edens, a multibillion-dollar developer and property owner based in Columbia, South Carolina. Edens holds over 100 shopping […]
Good Fortune at Best Fortune: Dim Sum at 10AM Sharp
Dim sum is a frenzied, fast-paced way to start your Sunday. But when you’re the first to arrive, it’s an altogether different experience. My first memory of dim sum is Chinatown in downtown Washington in the early 1990s. I remember staring through the ornate Friendship Archway – blue and red and gold with unfurling dragons […]
