Do you have a book addiction? I’m here to make it worse. It’s that time of year when I tempt you to obliterate what remains of your savings on an out-of -control book buying bender. What can I say? It could be worse. At least you’re not spending it on commemorative spoons. I’ve got some great reads to recommend this year. As usual, I read and re-read a lot of great travel literature to prepare...
Nothing can harm me now (except stingers) As I immersed myself in books about the island’s past, I started seeing the small events of my life as stages in a larger military campaign. Living in Malta was giving me a siege mentality. My conflicts were fought, not with Turks, but with the Genus insect. Where other places have seasons of weather, Malta had seasons of insects: enormous springtime...
I’ve read a lot of quotes from Western leaders claiming the Taliban’s rapid reconquest of Afghanistan came as some sort of surprise to them. Here in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “We misjudged the development.” Her foreign minister Heiko Maas added, “All of us – the federal government, intelligence services, the international community – misjudged the situation.”...
It’s easier to get into North Korea than it is to rent a flat in Berlin. I can say that with great confidence, having done both. In Canada, renting a flat was simply a matter of replying to a few ads, viewing a few places, and filing out an application. The landlord might ask your permission to do a credit check — at their expense — but that was it. It doesn’t work that way in Berlin. When it...
I’m not a disease expert by any stretch — though I have been sick in several third world shitholes. But it feels like anyone with any sort of public platform is expected to take a position on the COVID-19 pandemic. It certainly had a paralyzing impact on travel. In short: take it seriously. Expect it to last anywhere from several months to most of this year. And start preparing yourself for...
My proudest high school moment wasn’t an academic or sporting achievement. I failed several classes and I was never part of a team. No, my proudest achievement was a food fight. The biggest food fight in the history of my school. I wonder how many of my friends knew that me and Jim started the whole thing? There were a lot of small skirmishes leading up to it, of course. Low level food fights...
This is the eighteenth and final instalment in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here One “special request” we filed with our minders was to be permitted to walk into Pyongyang unescorted, perhaps as far as the railway station and back. Much to our surprise, they said it was possible. They had already added several of the places we asked to see–a grocery...
This is the seventeenth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here We said goodbye to our brave military escort at the DMZ, thankful that they’d protected us from the imminent danger of American attack. We made one last stop on our way back to the capital, just outside Kaesong city. It was reputedly the tomb of an early Korean king and his Mongolian wife, but as with...
This is the fifteenth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here The highlight of my time in North Korea—the moment that made all the badgering and propaganda worthwhile—was our visit to the Demilitarized Zone and the truce village of Panmunjom. This thin line bisecting two worldviews is the last Cold War frontier, and the world’s most heavily defended border. The...
This is the fourteenth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here The Arch of Triumph commemorates North Korea’s liberation from the Japanese occupation at the end of World War Two. It looks an awful lot like the Arch in Paris, but of course Pyongyang’s Arch was deliberately built to be 3 meters taller… North Korea doesn’t acknowledge the Pacific War...
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