The word “Brazil” has many connotations for me – world-known beaches, the best national soccer team, and 1980s telenovelas with enough twists and turns to bring the whole of the USSR to a standstill. But the most important part of Brazil is its music – samba, bossa nova, samba-reggae. While […]
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After the fire at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris earlier this year, I saw so many people on social media lamenting that they did not get to see Notre Dame before it was destroyed. The lesson, of course, is that we should live now and not put off visiting […]
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I love planning trips. Everything needs to be accounted for – which destinations to visit and for how long; the logistics of getting from one place to another; how long the days are according to sunrise and sunset and how much sightseeing can be stuffed into each day; how holidays […]
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The following is not a coherent story about a funny situation or a thought-provoking episode. It’s a mish-mash of experiences during the second day of our random and strange stumble through this city. We learned something new about Jamaica’s music and history, we got close and personal with the locals, we were startled by an unsafe situation, we were laughed at by a taxi driver and a cop within one hour. In the end, it was quite a lot of fun.
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Varanasi remains to this day one of the most surreal experiences of my life. Grief and poverty, hope of reincarnation and casual indifference to burning human corpses, all blended within a rigid structure of strict funeral customs makes for a stunning picture to an unindoctrinated Westerner. It is a city unlike any I have ever been to – a place where both live and dead are looking for their next reincarnation.
It is not a place I am likely to forget.