I had six hours in Zurich Airport once and I did not leave the terminal. This was a deliberate choice. Everyone told me to go into the city. It is only twenty minutes on the train. You can see the lake. You would regret it otherwise. I did not go. I stayed in the terminal, […]
Browse the journal
Tag: cities
Solo travel in your twenties is a story you are collecting. Solo travel in your thirties is something quieter. Harder to explain at dinner parties. Less photogenic. Significantly better. I did not fully understand this until I was sitting in a small restaurant in Lyon, eating alone at a table set for two, and realized […]
Vienna is the only city I have visited where I felt underdressed inside a café. Not a restaurant. Not an opera house. A café. At eleven in the morning. Ordering coffee. The man at the table next to me was wearing a full three-piece suit and reading a physical newspaper with the patience of someone […]
Most people use a hotel room the way they use a waiting room. A place to leave the bags. A place to sleep. A place to charge everything before going back out into the city. I have stayed in enough rooms in enough cities to think about this differently. The hotel room is not a […]
At some point I took a photograph of a plate of pasta and thought: what am I going to do with this. Not in an existential way. Practically. I had two thousand photographs from that trip. The pasta was photograph one thousand and forty-seven. I had never looked at photograph one thousand and forty-six and […]
The first time I ate alone in Rome I almost did not. It was early evening and the city was still figuring out what it wanted to be that night. Not quite golden hour, not quite dinner time. The streets near my guesthouse were full of that restless energy that comes when people are done […]
The Amalfi Coast demands attention. The road from Sorrento to Salerno curves through mountains and cliffs that plunge straight into the Mediterranean. Lemon trees line the terraces, domes shimmer in the light, and every turn reveals another view that seems painted rather than built. Positano is the poster child, a vertical town of pink and […]
Mont Saint Michel rises from the tidal flats of Normandy like a dream that refuses to fade. At high tide it seems to hover above the sea, its abbey spire piercing the clouds. When the water retreats, the causeway reappears, and you can walk across a landscape that looks half real, half imagined. The abbey […]
At the southern tip of Attica, Cape Sunion stands above the Aegean, its cliffs crowned by the Temple of Poseidon. Built in the fifth century BCE, the marble columns still face the open sea like guardians of an ancient world. For sailors returning to Athens, this temple was the first sign of home. The setting […]
Sirmione sits like a finger pointing into Lake Garda, narrow and bright, surrounded on both sides by water that shifts from turquoise to deep blue with the wind. Visitors arrive across a small bridge that feels more like a threshold than a crossing. Once inside, the noise fades. The old town unfolds in cobbled lanes, […]