There’s something about mountains, and mountain towns. Natural places to stop, they attract all sorts of runaways and misfits, and people nursing broken hearts. The proximity to nature can be a powerful healer; the sense of lejanía can provide a sense of...
I fell for Medellín pretty fast, on the bus in from Manizales. It was the balance it strikes with nature: the way it sits in its ample valley, the buildings climbing the hills to meet the forests and pastures on either side; the parks and tree-lined streets; the...
Seoul is like an equation with all the messy working out left in, the false starts, crossed out, taking up half the page. And so, despite the many surface similarities to Tokyo – the organic wend of its streets; the shops and restaurants that reproduce, perfectly,...
I wondered if going from Tokyo to Kyoto would be like going from Hanoi to Hoi An: from a working city that pays visitors no special attention to a place, with all the historical trimmings, that exists mainly for tourists. We’ve found that Kyoto has its own...
Tokyo makes me question some of my assumptions, my likes and dislikes. At home, I’d avoid malls and railway concourses as impersonal, artificial; here, where the smog is often so heavy that people go about in masks, malls are clean, controlled spaces. Often we...
When Lee Kuan Yew died recently, part of his legacy was a new form of government. Long before China adopted free market reforms, Lee was the first to demonstrate that capitalism and democracy do not necessarily go hand in hand. In Singapore he created a state in which...
