flickering pictures

June 26
We meet up again with Hafsa and Zainab, who are dressed even more liberally than before — who cross the road with us to an another touristy shop, and through a mixture of browbeating and flirtation, haggle the poor confused shopkeeper down to about a fifth of his asking price for our faux-bijoux […]

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June 24
As no taxi driver wanted to take us the apparently tiny distance from our hotel to the Tunis bus station, we set out on foot in more or less the right direction. As it turns out, what should have been a 30-minute stroll turned into a sweltering 90-minute hike with our big packs […]

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June 22
So we landed in Tunis around 10am, surrounded by French, German and Italian vacationers. The very few clothes they were wearing were all Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, and I got the distinct feeling they were headed straight for one of Tunisia’s many coastal resort towns, which was just fine with us.
We’re just […]

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Hello from Tunisia!
I’d meant to do some fairly frequent posting from Tunisia, but I may have to go for a series of little posts, at least until I can figure out how to type on this thing without finger-pecking at two words per minute. This place is beautiful though, and from what I can […]

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A tiny island chain, isolated and all but forgotten off the coast of Yemen, is home to one of the most fascinating and unique ecosystems on Earth. It also looks like something Lewis Carroll might have dreamed up after way, way too much absinthe.
I have to go there.
From the New York Times:
Some 250 million […]

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The very neat Guide to Sleeping in Airports provides detailed info on the varying levels of comfort, cleanliness and security guard grumpiness at airports around the world, as well as tips for hassle-free napping.
The Guide also ranks the airports for hospitality, and there seems to be a distinct leaning in favour of Asian airports over […]

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From Harper’s Weekly

A six-year-old boy and a five-year-old-girl were detained in Germany, on a train to the airport; they explained to police that they planned to fly to Africa to be married. The couple, disguised in sunglasses, had brought along several suitcases, a pink blow-up doll, swim fins, and the boy’s seven-year-old sister, who planned […]

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Strange Maps, a delightful little site that has quickly become one of my favourites, tells the story of the “Routefinder,” a dapper-looking set of wrist-mounted scrolls that provided step-by-step directions for British intercity travel in the roaring 20’s:

The technology - a curious cross between the space age and the stone age - consisted of a […]

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Husain Amer, a photographer, filmmaker, modelling agent, erstwhile English teacher and good friend of mine has been tromping through China for the last year and is recording his exploits as he goes. Recently he documented a trip from Beijing to Xi’an via the ancient trading city of Pingyao, in China’s northeast.
And for all you […]

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I’m not usually this philosophical in the morning, but watching this video I kept thinking about how incredibly neat it is that humans have created a new circulatory system for the Earth, with ebbs and flows regulated by the planet’s rotation. There’s something beautiful about this.
It’s also instructive to see that Africa, with its […]

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