There is a morning each year when the winter starts to shift gears out of the cold and the barometric pressure starts to change: birds begin singing, and if you look closely, buds start to form on the end of the branches. It is the rebirth, the beginning, and after a two-year winter it is […]

  I like to dig, search, and poke around, and to stir up different ways to connect with a place. How to look at a city or a region with a different set of eyes, or better yet, with a different approach, like the way a pilot gauges the wind direction to land correctly on […]

All languages are affected by the environment they are born from, they carry the landscape and temperature with them. Each particular language has variations, and through these variations a culture is expressed. We have all heard about instances of this, how there are multiple words for snow in northern climes, or how some places have […]

When I lived in China there were days where I would become overwhelmed by numbers. Numbers of people around me, numbers of buildings in cities, astronomical numbers and metrics of a scale so grand I thought could only be science fiction. I would become overwhelmed with culture shock, a stranger in an unknown land. Not […]

There are secret languages in the streets of the cities we live in.  Signs and notes meant to be read by folks who know the neighbourhood, ways of doing things, a whole subtext of unwritten laws to live by and understand. When the trash is taken out, whom to avoid, which shops sell quality and […]

August 24th 2008, the day after my 29th birthday, my mind was tattooed with an image. It was the closing ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing and I had spent the past 30 days guiding a family all over China, intermixed with gold medal event tickets for the two weeks of the games. It […]

I like maps. I like how they help me understand large swathes of land that I am unable to see with my eyes and feel with my senses.  I can picture a planet whole. It’s reduced to a handful of parts, for sure, but a picture is formed that helps in understanding. I will never […]

In 1977, NASA launched two probes into space, Voyager 1 and 2. Hurtling at 35,000 miles an hour, they are still exploring and sending back photos from the outer limits of what we have seen and known from our pale blue dot Earth.  It was decided that it would be a missed opportunity if we […]

I spent a lot of time in China in the early 2000’s, trying to make up for an overly euro-centric upbringing. I knew there was a world I’d overlooked, and hadn’t been taught about in school, a missing hemisphere. I’d read books like Ernst Gombrich’s History of Art which ignored the “East” side of the […]

Over the past few years a symbol has made the leap from movie into life. It is a salute with three fingers held high: pointer-middle-ring.  It came from The Hunger Games, the series written by Suzanne Collins.  Both a book and movie franchise, it is a tale following the life of Katniss Everdeen. Her name […]

WPIG #6: Why we Travel Edition Be it escape, education, entrapment, euphoria, there are a plethora of reasons to take to the road, to be on the lamb.  This episode of WPIG explores a few of these streams while leaving room for more with some help (and stolen clips) from Pico Ayer and Wade Davis.

There is a noise I associate with heat and fever, and I am not sure if it’s real or from distortions of memory.  It could be from something as simple as the cicada, that strange beast that emerges from the ground, periodically, in the hot humid months, and rages against the known world with its […]

Anticipation – that mixture of stress and excitement, with a dash of trepidation. The rush that comes from thinking on what’s to come next. It’s that magic ingredient that keeps you watching a play performed, a sport in action. And it’s the sine qua non of electronic music.  Today we are talking about anticipation, and […]

Castro and the revolution reached Havana on 9 January 1959.  Two years later to the month, while reducing the US embassy and stoking the early embers of the Bay of Pigs, he and Ernesto “Che” Guevara went golfing at the Havana Country Club Park, a sprawling chunk of the city, rolling hills, manicured greens.  It […]

That small chunk of rock in the North Atlantic…..no, not Iceland, the O.G. Iceland, home of a slew of folks who went out into the world to make a mark, and make it loud. Ireland. It is on all the lists, we all want to go there but we all tend to wait until we […]

Sidewalks and the paved parts of the urban landscape have a funny definition in some Asian cities.  On the Silk Road after midnight, the roads and sidewalks become the communal domicile, as beds are dragged out into the streets to enjoy the cool breeze of the desert nights. Hanoi and Bangkok are two cities so […]