Sharing London
And so....back to London. The weather’s as Mediterranean as it was when we were in the Mediterranean! Even greeted by the hottest day of the year. Following a small mishap when we arrived back in Heathrow (we had parked a suitcase several weeks earlier in the left luggage office in Terminal 5 only t...
The Honorary Consul
After at least two failed attempts going back more than 30 years - one due to a car crash in Switzerland, the other to a broken foot - we finally make it to Sardinia to visit Andrew and Marta. Fitting that the visit comes at this time in what has become the “season of reunions”, first in Oxford, the...
Buckingham Palace....Eat Your Heart Out
A long hop across the Mediterranean brought us to Madrid from Sarajevo with a brief layover in Munich. In keeping with this season of reunions, we are in Madrid to visit Janet, a long-time friend and nursing training classmate of Sandra’s and her Spanish husband Celso who had moved from Sydney to Sp...
The Jerusalem Of Europe
“The Jerusalem of Europe”....”Where East meets West”.....”The most important Ottoman Empire city in Europe, second only to Constantinople in importance to the Ottoman Empire”.....”Olympic City”......”The City where the 20th Century started and ended” - these are just some of the epithets applied to...
A Night In The Museum
Mostar’s tragedy is that it was the center of Yugoslav arms manufacturing. So when the viscous civil war broke subsequent to the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1992, Serb, Croat and Bosnian military forces all descended on Mostar in an attempt to grab the arms factories. Initially, Muslim and Croat...
Feels Like Venice....Must Be Dubrovnik!
Once part of the city state of Venice and then for several hundred years an independent trading rival of Venice (until Napoleon showed up) Dubrovnik, the jewel of Croatia, is once again rivaling Venice - this time as an Adriatic cruise ship and tourist destination. There’s a new cruise ship terminal...
It Looks Like Norway....Must be Montenegro!
Well actually the small (former Yugoslav republic) country of Montenegro isn’t much like Norway at all! But our stop in Montenegro is at the end of a 17 mile long “fjord”, the Bay of Kotor (often described as southern Europe’s most beautiful fjord, although strictly speaking a drowned river canyon)...
Nik The Fixer
Albania describes itself as the “Hidden Pearl of Europe” and for much of the 20th Century, hidden is what the country was! For several centuries, Albania was a somewhat chaotic and at times rebellious province of the Ottoman Empire. Albania declared itself independent in 1912 as the Ottoman Empire w...
The “White Legend”, A Square Rigged Soap Opera
Marjorie Merriweather Post - even her name sounds like a character from a daytime soap - was the staggeringly wealthy heiress to the General Foods breakfast cereal (Kellogg’s...) fortune. Her father, the company’s founder, had no sons so Marjorie was the sole heir. But as a woman in the early 20th C...
Don’t Mention The War
If we had any doubt that Greece is still a mess and public anger runs high, it was quickly dispelled in a talk on recent Greek history and Greece today given by our resident local guides, Stella and Smaro. The Greeks threw out their Ottoman occupiers of 400 years back in 1832 and over the next sever...
The Navel of the World: Monks & Oracles
The Anciet Greeks considered Delphi to be the “Navel of the World”. Today, Delphi is a village with a bunch of tourist-oriented businesses whose only reason for being is its closeness to the Navel - the site of the ancient complex of Delphi with its focal point, the Temple of Apollo, where for centu...
It’s All Greek To Me
It has quite literally been almost 50 years since either of us was last in Athens. Back then there were so few tourists (or perhaps the Greek colonels who ran the country as a military junta after a coup deposed the king in 1967 just didn’t care) that access to the Acropolis was easy and you could c...
50 Years On....And A Passage Back In Time
It’s the “Saturday of the Century” in England! Harry marries Meghan at Windsor Castle, Chelsea beats Manchester United in the FA Cup Final at Wembley but the “main event” is taking place in Oxford - St Mary’s Hospital Medical School class of 1968 is having its 50-year reunion! This event conceived a...
Tour’s Off To A Great Start!
The Palace of Westminster, parts of which are around 1000 years old is in bad need of repair! Much of the interior of the oldest building, Westminster Hall is shrouded in scaffolding, Elizabeth Tower home of Big Ben is invisible behind scaffolding and shrouds, and the Minton tiles which cover the fl...