“Kyrgyzstan” is derived from old Turkish and means 40 tribes, but it has been posited that it also means 40 girls. In any case the flag has a 40-ray sun. End of history lesson. I’ve been gone over five months … Continue reading
Tag Archives: food
I left sweet California sunshine exactly 300 days ago. Tomorrow, Day 301, I fly back to USA and a couple of days later, back to the Golden State. The end is within sight. I am what we in the travelling … Continue reading
Question of the Day: Are there more barber shops in Turkey or pharmacies in the Philippines or stray cats in Egypt? As I showed in the previous blog post, Turkish buses can be state-of-the-art amazing, but I had an itch … Continue reading
Turkey was a last-minute impulsion. I bought a ticket to Izmir on the Aegean Coast only the day before I flew out. I figured I would visit Ephesus and then improvise everything else, which is my modus operandi anyway. My … Continue reading
Before we get started: NEWS OF THE YEAR I READ THREE TIMES TO MAKE SURE I WASN’T IMAGINING THINGS “…tiny Djibouti said this month it would revamp its previously bankrupt national carrier. The new Air Djibouti will be managed by … Continue reading
MEMORY LANE The bad old days. It was bread and cheese all the time. It was hard to find anything else. I would go into the small stores, get my bread and cheese, maybe some sunflower seeds, gamble on something … Continue reading
To go the approximately 300km from Novgorod to St. Petersburg I took a very nice, 400-ruble (US$6.20) train called “The Swallow”. I arrived in St. Petersburg at night on the main drag, Nevsky Prospekt—fun to say in Russian—and I was … Continue reading
NOTE: I flew out from Nepal twelve hours before the big earthquake and I left the Langtang area about three days earlier. I started three blog posts before I left: this fluffy one about Kathmandu, a big one about my … Continue reading
My last time in Sri Lanka there weren’t many places you could safely travel as it was still in the depths of the civil war. The entire northern half of the country was strictly no-go. Only last month was it … Continue reading
Hello from Jordan! This is my third time here. My last visit was four years ago when I spent a week here and then a month in Syria just before it all went to hell. Almost nothing in Amman has … Continue reading
