We tried for six years to get a reservation at Tickets, the well-known (and Michelin-starred) Barcelona tapas restaurant based on molecular gastronomy. We have tended to stay in the Barcelona neighborhood named Poble Sec, where Tickets is located, and when we discovered that … the building seemed to sort of taunt us whenever we walked […]

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So, back in Barcelona. Hard to avoid the place when it remains one of the world’s great cities … and when visiting friends and family (from the U.S.) stage through the Spanish town on visits to Europe. But it also has that one major problem that has not been resolved. And this is not about […]

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Actually, I suppose the overnight air flight never really disappeared. It just seemed to, for those of us who do the majority of our flying inside the United States. (And it is called the red-eye because of how you look the morning after flying most of the night.) After what seemed years since I had […]

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What a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon in downtown Los Angeles! A great piece of piano music, arranged for orchestra by another classical-music great, played by modern virtuosos led by an inspired director in the finest venue in the western half of the United States. It was so powerful it almost knocked me […]

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Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer the pilots of my commercial flight to be friendly. With each other. They do not have to be pals swapping gossip, but they should be able to sit in the same cockpit without fighting. India’s Jet Airways was unable to clear that low bar on New Year’s Day. […]

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The Boeing 747 was the first jumbo jet, and it forever changed the experience of flying. For the better. No one under the age of 50 can have a personal recollection of this, given that the first commercial flight of a 747 was made on January 22, 1970 — from New York to London. It […]

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On the way back to Spain from Portugal, we left the little town of Luz and took a short detour through the “big city” in this part of the Algarve region — Lagos, population 30,000. What originally drew my attention was the town’s name — also the name of the biggest city (and former capital) […]

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(Above: A statue to a bullfighter, in Seville.) Passing references have been made on this site to our tour of the Iberian Peninsula. Normally, more of that would have appeared here, as we went along, but the Dodgers were in a seven-game World Series — which vied for attention on this blog — originally intended […]

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I can’t adequately explain how this happened. A couple of months ago, we finalized a commitment to an 18-day trip to and through Spain and Portugal. Not a crazy idea, considering we are already close to the former, which is attached to the latter. Also, not crazy considering that 1) we have spent little time […]

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As the capital city of Portugal, Lisbon was one of the world’s most important cities in the early days of the Age of Discovery. Portugal was, by almost a century, the first European nation to seek out trade and conquest in areas previously unfamiliar to the rest of Europe. In particular, in sub-Saharan Africa, India […]

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