Travel

Growing up as a youngster in Germany I vividly remember being dragged to castle after boring castle without relief in sight. A kids’ break would have been a welcome detour from adult culture appreciation time.

Shanghai is a city tagged with many names: “The Paris of the East,” “The Pearl of the Orient” and my personal favorite, “The Whore of the Orient” (the East India Company found the city to be very helpful in satisfying both their tea needs and their burgeoning taste for opium).

Rainbow Weekly Monthly Mansion

Here is a souvenir idea from Japan that is not plastic sushi or a Hello Kitty rice cooker. The Japanese temple red-stamp notebook is a small book that you can bring to the thousands of shrines and temples around Japan. It is called the "Goshuin chou”. Its literal translation is the "Honorable red-stamp notebook".

SULAWESI, Indonesia -- My eyebrows barely had time to fall back to their normal position when I asked an excitable local to repeat himself. “I ate bats with Bill Bailey!” he repeated, referring, presumably, to the British comedian. But how? Why?
Allow me to rewind the story a bit.