Tag Archives: architecture

Vienna. City of Mozart. And waltzes. And that other Strauss: Richard – known for his operas, and familiar to my generation thanks to his fanfare from Thus Spake Zarathustra that was used in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But when I think of Vienna, I always think of Billy Joel, or of Leonard Cohen’s melancholy three-quarter time […]

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Pashupatinath, three kilometres northwest of Kathmandu on the Bagmati River, is home to one of the most sacred of Nepal’s Hindu temples and cremation sites. One of the “seven groups of monuments and buildings” that make up the UNESCO-listed Kathmandu Valley, Pashupatinath Temple and the Bagmati Cremation Ghats are also on just about every tourist’s itinerary while in the city. So, the site hosts a mix […]

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Travelling around Switzerland is like luxuriating in a box of the rich, truffle-filled chocolates that the country is famous for. Everywhere you go, picture-postcard scenes meet you. And, if you have Swiss friends to guide you and a Swiss Travel Pass in hand, you don’t even have to work hard: accessing these magic places is easy. […]

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If you want to be a successful traveler, it pays to do your homework. For example, checking the expected temperatures all around a region – not just on the coast – and packing accordingly! This was not the first time I’d been caught out by weather in Asia: last year, my husband and I “forgot” […]

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Oh, Saigon! It was a name familiar to those of us who grew up in the West: first as an exotic part of France’s colonial empire, until – as Saïgon – it achieved a hard-won independence in 1955, and then as a component of the evening news for its pivotal role in the Vietnam War; the city now known as Ho Chi Minh (HCM) has been at a […]

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