Between the 4th and 13th centuries a unique culture which owed its spiritual origins to Indian Hinduism developed on the coast of contemporary Viet Nam. This is graphically illustrated by the remains of a series of impressive tower-temples located in a dramatic site that was the religious and political capital of the Champa Kingdom for…
Category: route
West of the Pecos
Zane Gray – West of the PecosPecos Smith is the best horseman, the best shot, the best man with a rope who ever rode out of southwest Texas. That is all anyone really knows about him. But in six-gun country, west of the Pecos, people figure he will be useful to have around. This is…
Tuscan-style Chicken Fillet
Tuscany.One of the most photogenic landscapes in the world. The land of delicious food and pleasant wines.Lines of cypress trees on the horizon, lonely trees, blooming poppy fields. Vineyards, sunflower fields.Medici family, Dante Alighieri, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Galileo Galilei and more and more.The medieval towns are perched on top of the hills.Florence, San Giminiano,…
Sleeping in Austin, TX
How much of our lives is spent sleeping? The average person spends about 26 years sleeping in their life, which equates to 9,490 days or 227,760 hours. That’s one third of our entire lives spent asleep in bed! Wait! In bed? Where I didn’t sleep at all, on trains, in ship cabins, on the Greyhound,…
Night Adventure in New York
Night from Saturday to Sunday in the last week of February 1982.The night after spending the day in foggy and slightly rainy Washington D.C. When I inadvertently came across the back door of the White House, without a line, and I walked through the corridors and halls where decisions are made about the destiny of…
The Mulberries in Brooklyn
Morus nigra, called black mulberry is a species of flowering plant in the family Moraceae that is native to southwestern Asia, where it has been cultivated for so long that its precise natural range is unknown. The black mulberry is known for its large number of chromosomes.Morus nigra is a deciduous tree growing to 12…
With Alamut on Alamut
“I wrote for a modern audience, and yet! I had the feeling that I was simultaneously writing for an audience that will live fifty years from now, and almost also for an audience that lived fifty years ago.” – Vladimir Bartol about his novel Alamut Alamut is a novel by Vladimir Bartol, first published in…
Having Capuccino in New York
New York in the Gay Eighteen Nineties had almost everything, except for a place where an opera lover, after a night of Verdi or Puccini, could relax, play a Neapolitan card game called “Scopa” and drink a cup or two of espresso.The story behind the opening of the oldest paticceria in the U.S. in 1892…
Samarkand Bread
One hot July in 2015, on the way from Andijan to Tashkent, I came across a roadside bread stand.What a wealth of smell, shape, taste…Samarkand non or “Samarkand bread” is a traditional bread from Uzbekistan. It is a very popular bread that accompanies the numerous dishes of the traditional Uzbek cuisine.It differs in its sizes,…
How I Swallowed the Beating Heart of a Cobra
What can we say about eating cobra meat?A particularly high content of linoleic acid in snake meat has a certain effect on the prevention and treatment of vascular sclerosis. Snake meat is rich in calcium, magnesium and other elements. It exists in the form of protein fusion, so it can be well absorbed and utilized…