September 2014 Kota Station was completed in 1929. It represented an era where the Dutch were finally starting to take their colonial...

June 2019 Transformation of meanings A word I came to know while working in the Middle East was "corniche". Clearly a French word, I...

Bazaar June 2016 A very strange set of circumstances led me to As Salt. It all started in Diriyah, Riyadh on a visit with AQ when we...

January 2020 over-renovated On my trip to Valencia, one of the day trips planned was to Sagunto to see its Roman amphitheatre. The trip...

July 2017 I was day tripping into Amsterdam from Amersfoort, seeing chunks of the city as time and weather permitted. The day I was in...

December 2016 evolution I had been in Abha for two and a half years. I was getting used to Saudi Arabia, but also tired of how...

December 2003 saved by colonialism Brian and I had come out of the misty tea mountains of Sri Lanka and headed toward beautiful Galle, a...

July 2016 perseverance pays off The idea of a national garden in Singapore started in 1822 when Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of...

May 2019 In my search for good coffee in Duhok, I eventually ended up at Cafe au Lait. Among all the coffee shops I had tried, it became...

July 2019 On my last home leave from Iraq, I was staying with family at my address of record enjoying a little bit of calm and normalcy. ...

October 2021 After I moved to the safe house on Perry Place, NE in Washington yet AGAIN with the ever forbearing PM and DV at the end of...

August 2007 Luang Prabang. The only thing we knew about it was that it had a lot of old temples. That would have been the...

July 2019 I decided to explore Pilsen after my delicious beer and lunch on the town square [see: Plzeň]. The old city center was not...

City Hall Bridge over the Danube to Komárom, Hungary Nádvorie Európy. July 2019 vestiges of an empire Komárno was an easy day trip by...

June 2018 [from FB post: June 22, 2016] Hope At the beach on the Dead Sea. Everyone is wearing what they want, doing what they like, and...

Darsait Viewpoint Qurm Beach Qurm Natural Park Qurm Natural Park Qurm Natural Park. March 2016 [from FB post: March 11, 2016] Muscat...

April 2012 Pastéis de nata Pastéis de nata were created before the 18th century by Catholic monks at the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos in the...

November 2004 My final visit to Australia was to the rarely visited "top end". We were exploring Kakadu National Park and other famous...

December 2013 I had only been at King Khalid University for a semester. I barely traveled outside of my neighborhood by that point. ...

jungle trek Rafflesia. February 1997 We were actually staying at the swank 5-star Tanjung Aru Resort when we visited Kota Kinabalu. The...