Travel

On the road, and discovering the joys of connectivity in various places, one thing puzzles me. How come Google can remember what language I want my searches in, but not the language in which I want Reader to deal with me? In Italy, Reader’s gone all Italian on me, while in Belgium it veered randomly [...]

Yesterday was full-on tourist travel day. Summer Palace first thing in the morning. Then the Great Wall. Then lunch in an authentically exotic restaurant hard by the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park. Then the Forbidden City and finally Tiananmen Square. Nothing I could say about any of those places would be both good and original, so [...]

This always happens. One busy day and all thoughts of keeping on top of the blogging vanish. So yesterday was the first full day of exposure to Chinese food (in between work). And I have not yet processed or uploaded the photographs. Nor, actually, do I have anything like a full list of everything we [...]

Markets are fascinating. Wherever I go in the world, I consider it a real treat to be able to wander very slowly through the markets, seeing what there is, seeing whether I can identify things I’ve only read about, just soaking it up. Kunming is no exception and I spent a very happy hour this [...]

Golly it is hard to blog when you can’t connect to some of your favourite sites. First, the NYT. Now Wikipedia. I promise to add the links when I get back to the land of unfettered access. When I was young, we didn’t have English gooseberries (Ribes uva-crispa). We had Cape Gooseberries (Physalis peruviana) although [...]

We’ve been reading bits of Elias Canetti’s Voices of Marrakech. In one of them he talks about the importance of a room of one’s own to the full enjoyment of the city around. How right, even if the room is one’s own only for the night. So different today, our last night, from our first [...]

Last night, after the Berber drumming, we had magic tricks and puzzles. I managed to solve one (and almost solved another) so that this morning at breakfast a young father pointed me out to his children in awed tones as the man who had divined the solution. Which was nice.

The alone-in-a-crowd bit doesn’t work for The Squeeze if there are local children around. They are too curious and she is too generous and the end result is expensive water colours being daubed on expensive paper to the amusement of all concerned. Yesterday it was Mohamed and his pal Moustafa at the ouad in front [...]

On the way here to the Gorges du Dadès we had two good stops and a detour. At the first stop, the Cafe du Pont on the way in to El-Kelaa M’Gouna, The Squeeze ordered saffron tea. There was a moment’s consternation, then off went the young man to prepare it. While we waited a [...]

It happens every journal on every trip: out of synch. Sitting at the very top of the kasbah at Ait Ben Haddou, overwhelmed by the land all around, and I have not got us here yet. But I can always go back to how we came. The town is spread out below along the river [...]