Beirut- The last part of the Cyprus segment of my Fabled City video series is now up. I take the viewer along the ethnic-Greek side of the UN buffer zone, the ‘Green Line’ that cuts the Cypriot capital of Nicosia…
Fabled City Episode 6 Dropped
Category: Travel
Fabled City Episode 5 Is Now Live!
Beirut- The 2nd segment of my Cyprus series is up on my Fabled City channel is online . If I do say so, I’m really happy with how this is going so far despite it not taking off like a…
Fabled City Larnaca Episode Is Up!
Beirut- Just dropped the early part of my Cypriot adventure on my Fabled City channel I’m trying to get going. So episode 4 is done and episode 6 is in the can ready to go but I still have to…
Fabled City Episode 2 Now Up!
Beirut- I’m starting to speed up my Youtube creator workflow here a bit to where I can hopefully start cranking out episodes for my Fabled City channel faster/more efficiently. I’ve come up with a nutty little workaround to make the…
A Passage to Arabia Begins
Beirut- I’ve finally got my first (official video up on my new Fabled City Youtube channel. I set up the channel before I left NYC but didn’t fully realise how much work it was going to be. And I at…
From Stoicism to Cynicism on Cyprus
Larnaca- I have a new piece out this week on The Redline Podcast site on the election of Nikos Christodoulides as the republic’s new president, it’s youngest and therefore first post-1974 generation leader. This island has long fascinated the hell…
Binge and Purge
Larnaca- Making use of my time between rounds of the Cypriot presidential election , I’m doing a major, vastly time consuming purge of “big tech” that clouds (pun intended) my small world. It all started with me hastily buying a…
From Rome to Ruins
Nicosia- After exhausting myself in the best possible way covering the presidential election here, I was back at the hotel up very late merely thinking about the story I was planning to write the next day ie today for Australia-based…
Landed and Lost in Larnaca
Larnaca- After my hyper brief visit to Athens described in the previous post, I landed in the EU’s southeastern extremity and eastern Mediterranean’s closest thing to stability. In the damp, cold night I somehow found the apartments I had stayed…
An Athenian Whirlwind
Athens- I had a slightly longer than expected layover than expected in the modern Greek capital yesterday and made a mad dash into the city centre to try and visit the Acropolis before racing back to my onward flight to…
Return to Orwell’s Catalonia
Barcelona- After a series of difficult decisions and taking an unusual amount of personal risk, I’ve finally escaped from my going-nowhere existence in NYC brought on by what has seemed like (some of which is pure clickbait e.g. “The Case…
The Corona Incident
Corona- This escape from the the most dense, dithering, and deadly area hit by the pandemic came about as I pieced together imaginative fragments of mind and memory. For years I’d kept New Mexico in my back pocket as not…
Rock Me Amarillo
Amarillo- After exploring the history of terrorism in OKC and Norman, I headed for the principal city in the Texas panhandle. I didn’t plan this leg of the journey very well, or at all really. Amarillo was the last stop…
Stormin’ Norman
Norman- Heading west out of Joplin I quickly crossed into Oklahoma and towards its eponymous state capitol oft abbreviated locally as OKC. I steered straight for the city’s elegant memorial plaza commemorating those killed in the 19 April 1995 truck…
All Joplin, No Janis
Joplin- After back to back Coronas, I posted up in southwestern Missouri for a few nights to gather my thoughts before heading further south and west. My night drive from Springfield, “Queen City of the Ozarks,” was a white knuckle affair.…
Crown of the Ozarks
Corona- I departed Memphis toward West Memphis once again to find Corona, this time in southern Missouri’s green, quiet Ozarks region, A convoluted series of rural roadways led me to yet another back of beyond situated in Oregon County that…
Coronita (Little Corona)
Corona- As mentioned in the previous post, I realised it made way more sense to go to Corona, Tennessee as a stand alone day trip from Memphis mostly based on that virtually no data existed on Google about the place…
Driving in Memphis
Memphis- After the family Civil War bucket list adventure in Chattanooga, I began my westward journey in earnest. My next planned stop was Corona but I decided to cool down in Memphis for a few days after so much relentless…
“No Mask, No Gas”
Moorestown- Finally venturing outside New York since the crisis began in earnest (which I’m dating as 16 March when at 20h (8pm) when non-essential businesses were forced to shutter) my friend and I stopped for fuel in southern New Jersey…
A Ukrainian Night
Kyiv- Spent a whirlwind less-than-24-hours in the much talked about of late Ukrainian capital the other night. Kyiv. or Kiev is you prefer the Russophone transliteration more common to Westerners, struck me as a magnificent city. Walking around town is…
The Heartbeat of the World
Thera- Having come to Greece, or the Hellenic Republic as it’s actually called in English or Hellas more colloquially, for over two decades, I have a deep attachment to the place. But my personal history and relationship is a very…
The Island of the Unfinished Temple
Naxos- I’ve just spent the last ten days on an island in the heart of the Cyclades that for decades I’d either passed by or stopped briefly to change ferries. I hadn’t intended on visiting this splendid place at all…
A Secure Place
Dubai- After a somewhat tense month in Iraq and Syria, I popped down the the UAE for a few days before making my next move. So here I am for the moment in a spotlessly clean, efficient, authoritarian, stable monarchy.…
Stepping Into the Mosaic
Beirut- It had been twelve and a half years since I’d last set foot into Lebanon’s cacophonous seaside capital. In July of 2006 I arrived here to cover the war that had suddenly erupted between a troika of war fighting…
A Stoic Island In the Middle
Larnaca- I spent three very tranquil days on the southern Cypriot coast where I didn’t do much other than walk around in the rain and sample savoury vegan cuisine as the hours rolled by. I’d longed for years to visit…
A Freudian Slip
Vienna- I went through the former multi-imperial capital at the crossroads of central Europe as part of this gradual journey eastward toward the orchestrated chaos playing out in the Levant. Part of why I chose to visit the Austrian capital…
Along the Bosphorus
Istanbul- I realised upon arriving in Turkey’s commercial capital tonight this visit marks twenty years of my coming here. I first came to Turkey in the middle of a EU to MENA backpacking trip in 1998 between semesters. I’ve been back…
Santoriniana
“A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time”-Homer, The Odyssey Thira- Back on Santorini after two months in Barcelona doing some long form writing and not near the bustle of any…
Moldova Navigating Between East And West
New York- I recently interviewed Ambassador Vlad Lupan, Moldova’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, here in his Manhattan office for IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review (subscription required). Though the finished product was a succinct summary of the present day challenges…
A Decade of War and Peace
Barcelona- Partly out of boredom and partly out of the itch to simply create something new out of old, I threw together this photo montage over the weekend. In this era of digital photography where one shoots thousands of frames…