Chess Story , a 1941 novella by Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, is set on board a ship traveling from New York to Buenos Aires during World War II. Several of the passengers are escaping Nazi-occupied territories, as Zweig himself did. One of the travelers is a Czech chess grandmaster. Several others want to see him… [Read More]
Blog
Australia: Overlander
I’ve always wanted to go to Australia. Who knows if it is ever going to happen now. But I can tell you this much: I will not see Australia the way that Rupert Guinness did. In 2017, he joined a group of endurance cyclists on a trip across Australia’s southern coast. They started at Freemantle,… [Read More]
To the People of San Esteban Mártir
Are we strangers? I think we are, in large part due to our huge language barrier, although social class came into play. Mexican society is hierarchical, and I’m an upper-middle class white lady. I started visiting your parish while teaching at the Universidad de Guadalajara through the Fulbright program in the winter of 2019. My… [Read More]
Singapore: Rich People Problems
This book is a lot of fun. Singapore is out of anything remotely approaching alphabetical order on the list of nations in my pandemic armchair travel project. But I was in need of something fun to read, and this fit the bill and then some. This is the third book in Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich… [Read More]
Angola: Saudade
When I last wrote about Angola, it was about the country’s culture and customs , because why not? If I am ever able to travel there, it will be useful information. For this country-by-country challenge, I went with fiction. Saudadeis a novella by Suneeta Peres da Costa about a Goan (Indian) family living in Angola… [Read More]
