Don Pogreba is a current writer and retired teacher of English, Social Studies and Debate, and a loyal, if often sad, fan of the San Diego Padres and Portland Timbers. When he is not traveling, he is working on his classroom web site or dreaming about another adventure.
While this was the year I finally read the Harry Potter series and revisited some old favorites like Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, I also managed to read a collection of surprising and interesting titles that were neither about wizards and witches nor books I had read and loved before. Of the 80 or so...
The rich have always lived differently than the poor. What is new is that globalization speeds up the economy, magnifying the chasm between them. Both at home and abroad, the extremes of wealth and deprivation have become so great that the stability of the global system is threatened. Indeed, the very existence of individual freedom and...
There are a dozen things that could have gone better with this trip: Delta could have cared about me getting on a flight out of Montana in time to see Istanbul, my not unreasonable fears about the dangers in Turkey could have abated, and I could have planned better than to be in Athens for two nights when the archaeological sites and...
My second (and last) day in Cappadocia ended with a visit to a carpet collective, where women are trained to produce Turkish rugs and tourists like me are shown the process before watching a salesman and his staff throw down a couple of dozen rugs to entice us to buy. Once the assembled group realized that I was unlikely to throw down...
I have to admit that my first impressions of Cappadocia were not that positive. After an excellent hour-long flight from Istanbul which teased with sunny and clear skies, we landed at the Nevşehir Airport, which makes the airport in Helena seem both large and crowded. There was some snow on the ground, and a gray pall in the sky, neither...
I have always dreamed of visiting New England in the fall, and while I was apparently a bit late for the maples to be “blowing up,” I couldn’t have been happier with my short trip.
The end of the trip has been filled with a bit of medical adventure, as I seem to have actually sprained my ankle in that scrum to get on a shuttle bus from the train station to my stop in Almere, Netherlands, but it didn’t stop me from hobbling around Bruges for five hours yesterday and the Van Gogh Museum for two today. Bruges was...
A brief guide to one of the most wonderful cities in the world.
