Memories… is a random series of memories of my trips to Asia in the late 80s and early 90s. I’d been trying to go to Hangzhou not too far from Shanghai for several years, but had always been deflected by inconvenient bus or train connections. In the summer of 1993 I finally managed to make [...]
This will be a random series of memories of my trips to Asia in the late 80s and early 90s. Here’s a first installment…. In the early nineties it was still very common in China to see steam engines pulling freight trains. I vividly remember the first time I saw these huge, smoke-black trains lumbering [...]
China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups in the country, a fact that is easy to overlook when one travels through the major population centers which look dominantly Han. A trip into the countryside very often reveals a different picture, with smaller villages sporting very different faces and sometimes also different attire from the typical Chinese [...]
Friday morning while I was getting ready to move my bike out for the ride to work, I heard on the radio that there are two men in a boat coming in under the Golden Gate Bridge… from Japan! My first thought was – “Well, that makes my commute look insignificant!” and the second thought [...]
After visiting my family in Germany we tacked on a few days for ourselves in Italy – we have been there together before maybe five or six years ago and it felt great to go back for a little bit more time in that wonderful country. We traveled by sleeper train across the Alps and [...]
While walking through Chinatown a couple of days ago, I had this intense flashback – suddenly I was back in Shanghai… in May 1989. Memories just came flooding back, the smells, the sounds… the view along the Bund through the hazy air, heavy with thick smoke from the ships. There were the banners, held high. [...]
Japanese restaurants traditionally display artificial menu items in their shop windows, and every visitor to Japan has been dazzled by the amazing quality and realism of the plastic models for every conceivable food item that can be found in restaurant windows. Sooner or later it dawns on the visitor that there must be a massive [...]
Richard Howe spent much of 2006 walking the streets of Manhattan, taking photos of ALL the street corners in town. I love these kinds of projects that take on a mysterious life of their own. On first thought it sounds like a ridiculous idea. A photo of every street corner? But once you click your [...]
Thanks to MapSkip it’s not really much of a secret anymore that I am permanently fascinated by maps. I always loved to look at maps, trace routes across them, read the foreign-sounding place names… As a young boy I spent many hours traveling across the beautiful, large maps in my parent’s world atlas, imagining myself [...]
“A World Of Sounds” is the title of a sidebar article that appears in this month’s Travel + Leisure magazine’s online feature about the Top 25 Travel Websites. The sidebar article features ten audio recordings from places around the world, including my Competing Chinese Operas, that has before been listed on the Quiet American. I’m [...]