Travel

Vitoshka lies in the sun

A day of catching up with a long walk along the promenade with the rest of Sofia on a Sunday afternoon. Mount Vitoshka, a big slumbering blue ahead of me as I go in search of the 13 Hundred Years Monument. it also fell victim to badly mixed concrete and is mainly armature now and …

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Travel

The theater and its double

Saturday in Plovdiv: art festival, cobblestones, Armenian food, churches, mosque, cats, stray dog, and brides everywhere. In the ancient Roman theater a bride poses both for camera and video, her image enlarged and projected in the center screen like an enormous gladiator queen.      

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Travel

Kievski Kotlet on Solaris

Verlangerter, a long coffee, with Milena at the cafe at the Red House Center for Culture and Debate. Talk of authors, New York, Archipelago, artists, spoke of a painter now using urine instead of paint. Noon at the Sofia City Art Gallery with Maria. Sitting in the City Garden behind the hotel drinking tonic water …

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Travel

Here there be dragons

In the entrance a banshee screams into her cell phone. Her cries echo down the stone staircase and through the catacombs where the eyes of stoic saints stare out sadly from under their heavy lids. With bags and circles under dark eyes, they look as if they have stared for ages and that they long …

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Travel

Mixed metaphors at a reading

After two introductions, the poet at last stands at the podium. The literati mostly listen, sometimes whisper, while others trace illuminati in the dust of the marble windowsills. His voice echoes down the long hall of the National Library, each phrase runs downhill, poetry is partially music after all, so that much I get out …

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Travel

When the sun shone brightest

“Traveling is real. Opening the door to all fears is real, even if what comes before and what comes after, the motives and the consequences, are not. To tell the truth I can’t figure out how it is that people can make the decision to travel. Maybe it would be helpful to to study the …

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Travel

Postcard from Florence

For a tourist, Italy can seem as overexposed as a sunset; every view recognized in postcard after postcard. Writing seems as redundant as any visual document.  Others have described these narrow streets, these views, the moods, the weather, as well or better.  The Brownings lived here amongst others, but perhaps more familiar to me is …

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Travel

Postcard from Venice

I had meant to write. I have a whole stack of postcards – even a pack I bought at a church that had obviously been taken in the early 1950’s – full of strong jawed gondoliers assertively clutching their oars and gazing over the Grand Canal like the early explorers must have looked out over the Grand Canyon…

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