Hiss. Chirrup. I’m standing knee-deep in a thick carpet of heather on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere — and my brain is trying to escape through my ears. Rrrrribbit. If you’ve ever been to a rock concert where you hit the interval and suddenly there’s nothing squeezing your head in a …
Okay, I admit it. I hate beer. Always have and probably always will. So why did I go to Oktoberfest? Well, it’s just one of those things you HAVE to do if you’re in Germany (during Oktoberfest, obviously). It’s a requirement, or something. My husband and I had already lived in Germany for four years …
A few years ago when I was in Perugia attending the Università per Stranieri, my host family invited me to go mushroom hunting. Nothing heralds the arrival of Fall in Italy more than a trip to the bosco (the woods) to gather chestnuts or mushrooms. That, and the sound of gunfire are leading indicators summer …
In 2003, my husband and I were in the process of adopting our two sons from Russia. During our first visit to Vladivostok in December, we stayed at the Acfes Seiyo Hotel. From our point of view, it was a somewhat upscale hotel and catered more to business travelers rather than adoptive parents like ourselves. …
Once upon a time, there was a girl who grew up in a tiny little town in North Dakota. (She’ll laugh at all of you who think your towns of 5,000 or 10,000 or 15,000 people are “small,” as her hometown had a mere 76 residents, all of whom she could list on a map …
In the early 1970s, I had an acquaintance who was a tour bus driver for San Francisco’s Grey Line Tours. He liked to embellish the script with some of his own ‘information, telling his riders that Angel Island was once one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, and was towed to …