Some hotels and resorts throughout the world make a big deal out of their collections of painting and sculpture. But leave it to the Japanese to go all the way and actually build a hotel around an art museum. The wee island of Naoshima, in Japan's Inland Sea off the Honshu coast between Osaka and Hiroshima, has gotten quite the elegant little rep in recent years for its modern art museums, of all things, thanks to a local textbook publisher called Benesse. That includes the Chichu…

The crew of Christopher Columbus first discovered tobacco on the island of Hispaniola (today shared by the  Dominican Republic and Haiti), then encountered it again once they got to Cuba. And over the…

You’ve no doubt been to or at least have heard about the Yucatan Peninsula’s wondrous Maya archaeological sites like Tulum, Chichen Itza, and Uxmal. But did you know that Mexico’s most famous beach…

Few cultural forms are more associated with the Dominican Republic than merengue music and the brisk, shuffling, hip-wagging dance that goes with it (no one’s exactly sure where the name comes from – sweet,…

Just the other day I had the chance to get an all-too-brief taste of Norway’s second city before boarding a weeklong Hurtigruten cruise up the coast, and OMG what a right little gem I found Bergen to be. Well, if you can call a city of 266,000 “little” – but honestly, how the locals describe it really does feel totally true: essentially,you could think of it as the world’s…

Apologies to my friends and colleagues in the cruise industry or who are cruise fans, but I’m just not that into cruising –  I’d much rather spend my time and money actually experiencing destinations rather than spending most of my trip on a ship (no matter how tricked out), with just…

On June 12 one of the planet’s most anticipated sporting events kicks off in Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo. And over the course of the following 30 days, 64 World Cup matches among 31 teams will rotate among a dozen of this country’s other cities. Rio de Janeiro totally.…

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Croatia’s Dalmatian…

Oy vey, olé! Everyone knows that most Jews in Spain were given the royal boot back in 1492, the same year Chris Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue, right? Well, yes and no. Some managed to hang on, and the story of how they did so in secret constitutes a fascinating slice of Jewish history.



But first, a little background: During…

“Ve vere bored in Hamburg,” Eva Kafsack mused to me as I had at a plateful of her divinely creamy chevre. Had I made a wrong turn at the sugarcane factory and ended up in a Monty Python sketch (“blessed are the cheesemakers…”)? Nein, mein Schatz, this very German-looking retired teacher sitting across from me, along with her former software entrepreneur husband Thomas, was the real deal: a goat farmer in the fertile “upcountry” of Maui. Sugar may once have been king hereabouts, but no…

I have to admit, I’m not real big on bling – aka precious metals and stones. I recognize their beauty and value, but it’s just not me.  For my taste, I prefer materials such as, say, turquoise, jade, and amber, which share a singular earthy beauty no matter how they’re cut.



Amber, in particular, is a fascinating substance. The ancient Greeks…

I was at a Mexican restaurant recently, and its colorful assortment of piñatas reminded me of all my trips to Mexico - not to mention one of my oldest childhood memories. You know that car commercial that’s been all over the tube recently, the one with a kid whaling away at a piñata that stubbornly refuses to break – a…

While in Mexico City on business, my partner and I were looking for a little badly needed R&R, and interested in an out-of-town excursion that was interesting but not too obvious or a cliché, so we asked our local employees their opinion, and they were in pretty much unanimous agreement: Tepoztlán. A little town in the dusty hills of the…

Once again, Diego was right. Actually, Jake thought blearily, these days Diego seemed elevated to frickin' oracle. Who knew? When they were at NYU together, the doofus was far less into books than pranks, from cute-but-harmless to dangerously dumbass. Like the time - a decade pre-Occupy - he'd sent out a press release from “the Coalition to Arm the Homeless” and the resulting…

It's apple harvest time, and it's another crisp Saturday night on Calle Gascona (below right) in downtown Oviedo, an old university city that's the genteel, postcard-pretty capital of emerald-green Asturias in north Spain, with happy-faced students and snazzy locals of all ages roaming the sloping three-block stretch and jamming the…

¡Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay! Guitars, violins, colorful spangled costumes and big mariachi hats have become an indelible symbol of Mexico throughout the world (believe it or not, I once even spotted mariachi hats on sale at souvenir stands right outside Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa).



There are conflicting stories about the origin of this distinctive form of…

Due at least in part, no doubt, to the modest size of most Caribbean islands, “mega” structures are fairly few and far between. But one of them is here on the eastern outskirts of the Dominican Republic's capital: the massive (if not downright bombastic) Faro a…

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Ah, Christmas – for many people, there’s no more magical time of the year. But celebrating this holiday extravagantly goes back only to the 19th century, and in many countries the festivities didn’t take place on December 25 at all, but rather…