Writer, Explorer and Travel Philosopher
Bamberg: Germany’s biertown…
My friends called Bamberg “biertown”, and I would soon discover why.
We took the high speed ICE train down to this beautiful town in northern Franconia a couple weeks ago. It’s less than four hours from Berlin-Südkreuz to Bamberg, but I’d never been to Bavaria before.
Coasting by Jonathan Raban
In 1982, Jonathan Raban bought a wooden two-masted sailing boat and circumnavigated England in a slow, wandering, unhurried way.
He called this manner of travel “coasting”: moving along with the tide, letting the wind decide the direction of travel, and living “on the shifting frontier where the land meets the water and the water shades into the land.”
I always find something amazing in the travel lit section…
My last London day was a short one. We had a flight to catch that evening, but there was still time to shift the scope of my trip back to books.
The Blurred Crusade — live, electric, and in its entirety…
The centrepiece of this packed London weekend I’ve been telling you about was two days of music with The Church at Bush Hall.
I travelled by thought with The Church long before I ever set out on the road for real.
A mausoleum fit for an explorer…
We had a packed agenda on this 3-day London trip, but as luck would have it, there was a two hour window of free time on Saturday morning.
The British Museum
I flew over to London last weekend for a packed 3 days of events.
It was good to be back in one of the world’s truly great cities. My last visit was in 2016.
The Cecilienhof, site of the 1945 Potsdam Conference…
I haven’t written a new blog in ages. Working on a book has kept me close to home this past year.
But I took an afternoon away from my desk last week to check out an exhibit on the painter Max Beckmann at Potsdam’s Barberini museum.
It has been 6 months since Daphne was murdered in Malta
I still remember where I was when Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered.
A Communist mosaic on the Kulturpalast reminds us that this was East Germany
My other reason for visiting Dresden was the art.
We stopped at the Albertinum on our first day in town to immerse ourselves in contemporary art, from the Romantic period to the present.
Is that a Romantic hero from a Caspar David Friedrich painting staring pensively at the Elbe…?
I took the train down to Dresden a couple weeks ago.
It was very clean there, and at first this unnerved me. There wasn’t any litter or graffiti around the main station either, or in the old town. A very un-Berlin sense of order reigns.
