Food and drink 
Japan: Kyoto fleamarket around a temple(1)
Voices hushed, feet in socks shuffling softly on tatami mats, sandalwood smoke from incense sticks, heads bowed in ancestral prayer … not so at the Kyoto temple fleamarket: a cacophony of voices, from shrill to shriller, boom to bass, everyone trying to overtrump the other and all with the same message: “buy me”. Hundreds of [...]
Australia: Delights of “the Hunter”
The northern Hemisphere is getting ready for the golden colors of Autumn, but in Australia, Spring is being welcomed with open arms. So, too, at the Hunter Valley Gardens. This 25 ha. (60 acre) privately owned, themed garden was created from scratch in 1998 and opened to the public in 2003. By far the most [...]
Valdivia: town of rivers, beer and chocolates
What a beautiful place this city must be during the summer months! Surrounded by three rivers and countless inlets, coves and baylets, it reminded me of the Puget Sound region around Seattle, only on a slightly smaller scale. Now, during the winter, we were lucky to get a couple of hours of sunshine (more…) But [...]
Kaffee and Kuchen with Goethe and Schiller
Weimar and Goethe are to the German speaking world what Shakespeare and Stratford-on-Avon are to the English speaking world. (more…) This city was called home by the paramount German poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Friedrich von Schiller, composers Franz Liszt and Johann Sebastian Bach, the painter Lucas Cranach the elder, the philosopher Johann [...]