Five years ago, I was walking on the paredão from Monte Estoril towards São Joao do Estoril when right after the entrance by the station, I saw big black letters on the wall, announcing: 28 July 1914 AUSTRIA-HUNGARY DECLARES WAR ON SERBIA. I paused. Of course! […]
The tram from Geneva winds slowly with the contour of Carouge’s terraced tenements, into a sweeping bend.
Brewed with boiling water from the silver samovar, the tea was brought at any time of day by the provodnitsa assigned to our carriage. We called her the tea lady and admired her brightly colored Russian scarf. Everyone drank the tea, including my three-year-old sister and […]
Sarajevo has survived its 42-month siege. And to many citizens here, it is the return of the coffee cafes, of their smells and sounds, that says peace has arrived.
It was April, 2002. I contemplated my impending flight to Zagreb with Croatian Airlines with a sense of foreboding. Would I speak English, which I tentatively think of as my native language, or the language we routinely referred to as “BCS” (Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian—a […]
You sit in the cab of a dump truck heading through a pass in the Anti-Atlas Mountains. An American of Irish-German descent, you are 100 miles from the northern edge of the Sahara Desert, and 4,000 miles from the Connecticut suburbs where you grew up. […]
