Part I Summer is here, and for me, that means one thing – baseball. In my view, nothing beats spending a couple of hours on a warm summer afternoon at a ballpark watching a game and connecting with friends over beer, peanuts, and crackerjack. In our U.S. travels, we love […]
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El Salvador, a small and beautiful country in Latin America, is still largely ignored and avoided by international travelers. The country that was torn apart by a civil war in the 1980s and, until recently, experienced pervasive gang violence, still regrettably suffers from a negative image. Right now, the only […]
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I am sitting on a stony curbside in complete darkness. My head hurts. Dogs bark in the distance. The sweet darkness of Albanian night is hugging me gently as I rub my temples, trying not to throw up. That’s not how I envisioned our first meeting, Gjirokaster. Last summer, we […]
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The train arrived at 3 a.m. We descended from the passenger railroad car, groggy and disheveled, into a dimly lit platform, the edges of which were swallowed by the night. Kolya, our team captain, silently motioned, and we marched down the platform behind him. I was 19 years old, and […]
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The world is shocked by the unprecedented Russian aggression in Ukraine. But the sad truth is that it was very much precedented, by Russian aggression in Georgia in 2008. Much like Ukraine, Georgia began eyeing integration into NATO, which led to a deteriorated relationship with Russia and eventually to the […]
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