In Which I Whine About the Rain

As I stepped out of Ghent Sint-Pieters Station, I pulled my rain jacket close about me and the hood down low over my head. The rain wasn’t coming down heavily and the wind wasn’t gusty, just a steady light drizzle and a light breeze, but I wanted to try and stay warm and dry. I […]

Walking Around Chocolate

There’s something about the air here. It’s not the golden light (when the sun comes out) and it’s not the rain (it did that all morning today). It the sound of Bruges – the bells that chime all day here, whose music echos through the streets in peals of little bells with high-pitched rings, and […]

Back in Time to Bruges

I stepped off of the train in Bruges and began the walk to my hotel. I had no sense of direction, but followed the crowds across the street from the train station, and my phone confirmed my routing. Here, the road bent gently to the left, and my path ahead was speckled with the brilliant […]

In Which I Know Nothing About Belgium

When I’ve thought about visiting Belgium … well, I guess that’s the problem with this trip. Until this year I’ve never thought about visiting Belgium. Truthfully it’s not a country that has caught my imagination or even entered my consciousness much beyond its mere existence. Yes I knew it was its own country but wasn’t […]

Something New and Something Old

The taxi driver who picked me up at the Venezia Mestre train station was stuff of legend. I told him where we were going, and he sped off into the drizzly night, driving at whiplash speeds down dark unlit streets and ignoring the GPS, carving a zigzag line into the landscape that crossed the direct […]

An Easy Day in Bologna

What do you do when you take one of your favorite people to one of your favorite places in the world? What do you do when you’re taking them to a place that maybe isn’t overwhelming for its sites, but moreso for it’s foods. Maybe the biggest draw for me is the atmosphere of this […]