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. It was just enough time to hop a Hammersmith & City Line train at Shepherd’s Bush Market, next to our hotel, and ride it to Hammersmith, where we picked up the bus to Mortlake. I wanted to visit the grave of one of my travel heroes, the explorer Richard...
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. I’ve often wondered if I could live in London. It’s such a fascinating city, with so much history packed into every single block and alley. I’m most attracted by the overwhelming opportunity to attend literary events, to make connections in...
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. I was interested in Beckmann because of his influence on Die Brücke, that group of German Expressionist painters whose bold lines and strange colours remind me of...
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. As we entered the cavernous main hall, past the staring heads of fragmented sculptures, I learned of two special exhibitions. The first was on a German Expressionist painter I’d never heard of: Carl Lohse. His...
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. I really didn’t know much about this city before my visit, apart from the devastating Allied incendiary bombing on February 13, 1945, so vividly described in Kurt...
“It must be up here somewhere,” I said, struggling through undergrowth that clung to my knees and shins. “The satellite photos showed a path running off to the left…” I could hear Tomoko crashing through the trees somewhere behind me, her progress punctuated by the occasional pause, followed by the click of the camera’s shutter. We had just passed a cemetery where the dull clink of the...
Today marks a small anniversary in my world. It was exactly one year ago — January 8th — that I moved to Berlin and started a new life-after-Malta. Life in Malta was barely tolerable at the best of times, and at the beginning of 2017 it was spiralling down into an increasingly ugly mess of political and societal corruption. I sensed that violence wouldn’t be far off, and I didn’t want to be there...
The Christmas Market tradition goes all the way back to the Late Middle Ages in the German-speaking areas of Europe. It’s normally held during the four weeks of Advent leading up to December 25th. I’m an unapologetic Scrooge when it comes to all things Christmas — especially the overhyped North American consumer craze version. And you won’t catch me making a yearly appearance at a church just for...
“Excuse me, do you have a light?” I looked up to see a naked man towering over me, holding an unlit cigarette. He was smiling politely, but I had to crane my neck at a sharp angle to avoid speaking directly to his genitals. The waves sighed softly in the background as I told him in polite German that I don’t smoke, and he moved along down the beach to ask another bather. Such encounters were a...
This distant northern country might be the most popular tourist destination of 2017. It’s a place where the wind gusts so strong it will literally tear the door off your car. It’s a place where the landscape morphs and changes before your eyes such that you can see geological time. It’s also the country which publishes and translates the most books per capita in the world. Yes, I’m talking about...