a-ztravelsnapshots.blogspot.com
A-Z TRavel Snapshots: AACHEN to AVEIRO
http://a-ztravelsnapshots.blogspot.com/2009/03/achen-to-aveiro.html
Monday, 16 March 2009. When I saw the road sign – Achen/Aix-La-Chapelle – I immediately wanted to pull off the motorway and go in search of Charlemagne’s city. But it was dark, it was late, and I was on my way somewhere else. For so long it was a forbidden place, just a purple stripe, like dawn on the horizon, seen on the ferry from Italy to Greece. Ismail Kadare is one of my favourite writers: a paragraph about a boy smoking his first cigar in Chronicle in Stone. Here, for the first time, I learned you ...
travelsnapshotse.blogspot.com
A–Z Travel Snapshots [E]: EAST TIMOR to EVIA
http://travelsnapshotse.blogspot.com/2009/12/east-timor-to-evia.html
A–Z Travel Snapshots [E]. Monday, 21 December 2009. EAST TIMOR to EVIA. I imagined a green land of dense forest where guerrillas hid, but a woman who has just come back from filming the “cetacean soup” of whales and dolphins that gathers in a global hotspot beside the island tells me it is dry and dusty and has never recovered from the vicious occupation. Christ stopped here. We kept driving. It looked like a sorry southern Italian industrial town. No other Greek site gives such a good idea about day-to-...
travelsnapshotsd.blogspot.com
A-Z Travel Snapshots [D]: DANUBE to DUBROVNIK
http://travelsnapshotsd.blogspot.com/2009/11/danube-to-dubrovnik.html
A-Z Travel Snapshots [D]. Monday, 30 November 2009. An abiding image of Europe’s greatest river is the mass emigrations devised under the Empress Maria Teresa in the 18th century to populate the eastern end of the Habsburg empire. Families were put aboard rafts at Ulm in Germany and, without any means of propulsion, they simply floated off down river, unable to turn back. We have some red wooden horses from here, a gift from a Swedish lodger who was a little spooky. Nowhere is more mellow in October, the...
