Budapest: good food and good times
I was excited to explore this city after having heard so much about Budapest from my Grandmother, Pempe Aitken, who once joined Queen Juliana of Holland on her honeymoon here. It was the celebratory...
Category: Europe
Geert Wilders, “Fitna,” and the last refuge of the bigoted
Fitna (the Arabic word for ‘dissension’), a new film by Geert Wilders, a rightwing Dutch parliamentarian, should not be suppressed. This isn't because it has anything valuable or insightful to...
48 hours in Warsaw
I arrived in Warsaw by train from Krakow. I forgot to take a book for my train ride, but this was a blessing in disguise, because Polish people have devised a wonderful system for book promotion:...
Journey to Istanbul
“Is Turkey a part of Europe or the Middle East?” I asked my fellow passengers as we waited for the plane to Istanbul. Two of them, Turks who graduated from Germany with degrees in Engineering,...
Krakow: from communist chic to copernicus
The fifth most visited city in Europe is the dragon city, otherwise known as beautiful Krakow. Its name dates back to a legend of a terrible dragon, defeated when a simple shoemaker named Krak...
Today, the Washington Post made me gnash my teeth
Sweet Jesus, Anne Applebaum, stereotype much? Of course there were many very famous "sultry" women in the USSR - things did not begin, and end, with Stalin and Liubov Orlova (an actress from the...
Holidays in the Carpathians: Bukovel
It seems that everyone with wheels in Kyiv went up the Carpathian mountains to celebrate the New Year. Sitting by the fireplace in a log cabin at the ski resort this season would have been something,...
An Inconvenient Princess
There is a strange truism at work in modern society: people who are capable of instigating real change, those who possess intellect and charisma as well as the circumstantial power to influence and...
From Prostitution To Geneva’s Parliament
I first met Nicole Castioni at the International Book Fair in Geneva, Switzerland. She was signing copies of her bestseller, Le Soleil Au Bout De La Nuit (The Sun at the End of the Night) - ed. Albin...