“The traveler who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.”

-- E.M. Forster (1879-1970), A Room with a View

Tags:

"I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes."

-- e.e. cummings

Tags: Thanksgiving

I love reading through old travel guides and seeing how things have changed -- or not -- in the years since their publication. I have a Baedeker's Guide to London from 1902 that claims that a frugal traveler can get by with £1.50 per day in the city, while someone who insists on the finest accommodations and dining will require twice that much.

Here's a really well-written article, based on following the world's first food critic through the streets of Paris.

Tags: Food, Paris

Traveling is not just seeing the new; it is also leaving behind. Not just opening doors; also closing them behind you, never to return. But the place you have left forever is always there for you to see whenever you shut your eyes. And the cities you see most clearly at night are the cities you have left and will never see again.

-- Jan Myrdal, Swedish essayist, The Silk Road

Tags:

Twenty years ago the Iron Curtain continued it's dramatic collapse, as students in Prague, Czechoslvakia marched on the city's famed Wenceslas Square. http://bit.ly/183N6w

Tags: Communism, Slovakia