Travel
How Fez Is Keeping Traditional Architecture and Craftsmanship Alive
Fez, Morocco, is home to some of the finest design and architecture in the world, but most of it is hidden from the street. It’s behind the imposing doors of madrassas and riads, where carved cedar encompasses courtyards and ceramic mosaics pop like a kaleidoscope. Yet in the ancient medina east of the Quaraouiyine Mosque, a new complex dubbed Place Lalla Yeddouna puts craftsmanship in full view in the once dilapidated neighborhood. Colorful tiles cover the sides of new buildings along the Bou Khrarab River, their fractal geometric designs riffing on traditional zellige patterns. In a city where donkeys still roam the mazelike streets, it’s a bold modern statement that seems to say: Our work deserves to be seen.
Afar.com, October 2019
5 New Bike Routes Through America’s Offbeat Locales
Biking reveals the texture of the United States. Off the highway, cyclists discover the small towns, uncrowded parks, and rolling hills that cars speed right past. The fast-growing U.S. Bicycle Route (USBR) system, which points cyclists to low-traffic paths throughout 26 states and Washington D.C., makes it easy to hit the road.
AFAR, March/April 2019
In Search of Tranquility, a Solo Cycler Travels Nova Scotia
Waking just after sunrise, I slipped out of the rustic old house where I’d spent the night, rolled my bike down a dirt driveway, and pedaled east. It was a cool, bright morning on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. The empty road curved idly along Dublin Bay; Queen Anne’s Lace and goldenrod billowed over the guardrails. It was noiseless save the chatter of chickadees and the hum of coasting tires.
I had traveled from New York City to Nova Scotia for exactly this sort of ride, drawn by the promise of crisp air, little traffic, and coastal cycling. When I stopped at the LaHave Bakery for breakfast that day, the vignette was complete: wooden cases stocked scones and oatcakes, and coffee was served in mismatched mugs.
The Boston Globe, June 2017
The Best Jazz Clubs in Paris
Listening to jazz in Paris isn’t like ordering a Big Mac, or picking up some other American import. It’s experiencing a century-old part of French culture. “For me, jazz is very much linked to France, and France is linked to jazz,” says Lucie Buathier, who organizes concerts with Paris Jazz Club, a promotional group. Jazz is a vibrant part of the city’s nightlife, evidenced by some 600 concerts each month, far more than anywhere besides New York.
.“There’s a demand, a hunger for new stuff, for culture,” says Yaron Herman, a stellar Israeli pianist who settled here in 2002. He was living in New York when he had a layover in Paris and ended up staying. France had never been part of his plans, but when he met people in Paris he found that “jazz was still a living music for them . . . it had this freshness and vitality.”
The Washington Post, March 2015
The Magnificent Churches of Peru’s Colca Valley
Inca and Catholic influences mix in many Peruvian churches, which were often built on older sacred sites and hold services in the indigenous Quechua language. Carvings and murals incorporate elements of nature, such as the flowers that embellish the doorway in Sibayo. Looking for these Baroque Andean elements becomes a sort of scavenger hunt: a sun and moon in the ceiling, corn carved on an altar or a mountain-shaped robe for the Virgin Mary.
It’s hard to imagine that the valley once needed such large churches, or so many of them. The roughly 70,000 people who lived here at the time of the Spanish conquest could have filled them, but the structures clearly demonstrated power as much as religion. Initially covered with murals, they grew almost oppressively Baroque as the empire became richer. In the restored church in Maca, for instance, a massive gold altar glints with mirrors. To Inca farmers, the churches must have looked like spaceships.
The Washington Post, September 2011
Hidden Delhi
From the back of a honking autorickshaw on Press Enclave Road, Delhi feels nothing like Rome.
The rutted thoroughfare passes construction sites and the shiny Select City Mall and is jammed with cars, rusty bicycles hauling bananas and sari-clad women dashing from one side to the other. But if you get out across the street from the mall and walk up a short path through a cluster of trees, you'll discover a building as monumental as any on the Palatine Hill: the 14th-century Khirki Mosque.
Though it's the size of a city block, the mosque, hidden behind tall apartment buildings, is invisible from the surrounding streets. No signs point the way to it. Walking through the dusty, labyrinthine alleys of Malviya Nagar, in South Delhi, in search of it, you can easily take a few wrong turns before coming upon it suddenly around a corner. With three-story sandstone walls, tapering turrets and latticed windows, it towers like a fortress. A chain-link fence encircles the site, the long grass around it strewn with trash tossed from the garish pink and yellow balconies above.
The Washington Post, February 2011