The day before was spent mostly in the country near St. Petersburg, green and a bit soggy but well-tended and open. Today, we stayed in the city, taking in three of the major cultural sites, along with what must have been every other tourist from the six major cruise ships docked in the port. All […]

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For decades, I thought I was meant never to see Russia. In 1980, I was to have been part of a three-man Gannett News Service team covering the Moscow Summer Games. But the Soviets went over the border into Afghanistan and President Jimmy Carter leaned on the U.S. Olympic Committee to boycott the Moscow Games, […]

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This is one of the main reasons you do a Baltic tour. To see the capital of Estonia. When is anyone not from this part of the world going to be in Estonia? Exactly. Sadly, we did not catch Tallinn at its best.

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A cruise in the Baltic, in the first half of May, is a crap shoot. Investigate the average temperatures in May for cities such as Helsinki, Stockholm and St. Petersburg, and numbers like “high of 62, low of 48” will come up. The first few days of the Celebrity Constellation’s lap of the Baltic came […]

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At 9:30 in the morning, we glided into the port at Warnemunde, at the mouth of the Warne river, just downstream from the Hanseatic city of Rostock, and by 10 or so several hundred passengers had left the boat and got into buses. Their plan? To take a three-hour bus ride to Berlin … and […]

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Gliding along, hour after hour, seemingly to nowhere … water, water everywhere, and little of it choppy … would not be such a bad way to spend a day, if it weren’t for the other 2,100 people on board a cruise ship. A sail day, in cruising parlance, is one in which you do not […]

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Of all possible datelines, the “aboard the” something or other is one of the most treasured by journalists. The connotation being the author is on the move, and out of reach of dreary, land-based forms of communication, even when it is as insignificant as a blog post. Being aboard the Celebrity Constellation (above, circa 2008) […]

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This was not the first place in the city we visited. Nor was it the second or third or fourth. And we came close to not visiting at all. But the reality, at least among English speakers, is that one of the first questions we would be asked about Amsterdam, when back in Abu Dhabi, […]

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This was one of those days that seemed overly ambitious, afterwards. From Abu Dhabi to Amsterdam. Via cab, plane, train and tram. Ending with a “slow food” dinner in the suburbs of the capital of the Netherlands.

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When we arrived in the UAE, in 2009, the concept of the Louvre Abu Dhabi had been approved, but its opening seemed remote. Distant in time. Well, not anymore. The Louvre, one of the world’s great art museums, tomorrow will open the Birth of a Museum exhibition in Paris — featuring art works that have […]

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