Paris has two major American churches and, curiously, they are only about 800 yards apart, with the Seine River filling much of the gap. We checked out the American Cathedral on a Sunday evening back in 2011, and today we had a look at the American Church in Paris — and the experiences were markedly […]

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A curious reality concerning the 11th arrondissement, where we are staying: It is the most densely populated quartier in Paris but it has very few major … anythings. Landmarks, stores, parks. So, if you want a bit of greenery on a cool cloud-covered afternoon, you very likely will make a zig-zagging trek up into the […]

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So, here we are again, in the City of Light, nearly all of that light generated by electricity, given that Paris has been sunk in a not-atypical late-October cloud of gloom. But, still … We landed at gray Orly, after taking the Transavia flight from sunny Valencia. Transavia is one of Europe’s dozens of budget […]

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Altea is amazing. Benidorm is appalling. Altea is a few blocks of 19th-century charm crowned by a 115-year-old church atop a hill. Benidorm is miles of urban sprawl built around “the most high-rise buildings per capita in the world”. And the amazing thing about this … is that these two cities are about five miles […]

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One of those random things that happen when traveling: An unpredictable intersection of simpatico people. In this case, nine Americans meeting at a mojito bar early in the evening in the Old City of a small Spanish seaside town in the autonomous region of Valencia. When the whole of the city of Altea may not, […]

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Seems like the older a town is, the more likely it is to have been founded on a hill. Such is the case for Altea, a city of 25,000 between Valencia and Alicante on Spain’s Costa Blanca. People have been living here for 2,000 years or more, and eventually they gravitated to the hill near […]

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How many consecutive days of eating plates of tapas (Spanish for snack) for dinner would a person need before he or she became tired of it? A week of it? A month of it? Ten years of it? We have had tapas on consecutive nights here in the Valencia region of Spain, buying seven or […]

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So, some time off, and we wanted to go to Europe and be somewhere with a bit of light and sun, and here we are on the coast of Spain. It may not be the smartest choice, this time of year, given that the UAE finally is cooling off. But everyone in Abu Dhabi knows […]

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Jennifer Aniston, still a celebrity after all these years, has been paid $5 million to be part of an advertising campaign for the Dubai-owned carrier Emirates, the New York Post has reported. The first ad came out this week, a piece of video that shows Aniston caught in the nightmare that is flying without a […]

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It is surprising how many people living in the UAE are eager to visit Las Vegas. No need to make that 20-hour trip. All the locals need do is check in to Atlantis The Palm in Dubai, and they can enjoy the whole of the mainstream Las Vegas experience — aside from the gambling, that […]

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