Tehran — It’s a shame that all this time we forgot about Iran as a tourist destination, as it has so much to offer. One may think it’s a dangerous country, but compare to other countries in the Middle East, cu...
Istanbul — The moment I set my feet in Istanbul I fall in love with it, I want to return to Istanbul, I need to make another visit to Istanbul, another month maybe, as July and August is too hot to be out and a...
Antipolo — I realize this as we sit by the garden, making a mess. This is our second attempt at finger painting and this time I’m not as clumsy. I let her watch—strapped into her high chair a risk-free distance ...
New delhi — Nobody knows it, but you’ve got a secret smile and you use it only for me. Know that song? I’m in love with a boy but also with a dog. I think right now this song applied more to the dog, Ajibo. My s...
Carballo — I love storms. I love rain. I think a lot of people sweating it out in 48 degress centigrade in northern India share this love for rain, clouds and stormy weather with me. In my first sketch for the s...
Santa fe — A small exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe thoughtfully raises this question of human compassion for those refugees (from violence, political persecution and poverty) who d...
Kathmandu — Mes premiers jours de retraites étaient surtout faits de combats particuliers contre des idées et des concepts mentaux qui ne s’émancipaient guère : une innombrable foule de pensées que je regarde ave...
London — Postman’s Park, a bit of green space nestled between St Martin’s-Le-Grand and King Edward Street in the City of London, is home to the famous Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-sacrifice, created by the ar...
Doha — The day was slow and things went at a nice pace, all projects on track, then at 5pm it exploded with a map with wrong borders, next 3 hours were a hell of geoJson, topoJson and QGis.
Bangalore — Indigo is India’s largest airline by passengers flown and more and more people are attracted towards it because of its impeccable timing and integrity on its core competency which is flying. The new b...
Tokyo — The owner of Coffee Amp, the best roaster/cafe in Tokyo, once told me that too many Japanese believe in the myth of dark roast. That’s why most coffee in Japan is just bitter like charcoal, lacking de...
Mandaluyong — You remind me of wonderful childhood memories. Of bathing in the rain, running around and jumping on puddles, gloriying in the splashes of water I make. Of paper boats I let drift along the gutter, ho...
Los angeles — You held on when I insisted on disappearing. Your friendship came out of nowhere, most unexpectedly. You held my hand via emails and texts and became my secret keeper. Your eyes saw the first draft of...
Chicago — This is a huge windows separating the pub from the brewery at Goose Island Brew Pub in Chicago. The lights got to me and I was happy.
Milton keynes — Well it would seem churlish not to post this here…
Davis — The past two years I decided to timeblock my work and life activities on Google Calendar. Every single activity when I wanted to learn a new language, engage in artistic outlets (writing, sound produc...
Louisville — 21C, the downtown art museum/hotel/restaurant, has traditionally put some kind of art outside of its building downtown. For the last couple years, it’s been a replica of Michelangelo’s David, twice th...
Accra — Skies. Paths leading where we know not. Sometimes when I wake up. I walk. I just take a path without really worrying about where exactly it leads. The purpose of the walk is to walk; feeling the eart...
Accra — I recently saw the movie, Wings of Desire… and I can’t seem to get this poem of my head… When the child was a child, It walked with its arms swinging. It wanted the stream to be a river, the rive...
Oslo — I went to a jazz show at the club Blå the other night. Blå was packed, perhaps because they were the only place in Oslo that actually offered something to do on a Sunday night. The band’s called the F...
Pokhara — The monsoon is on a schedule. The downpour starts at 4pm everyday. First heavy rain, then the sky opens even wider and its a deluge. It starts to ease off about 45 minutes in, tricking you into thinki...
Louisville — I walk in the park and I notice the statue for the first time in six years. I look at for the first time in seven. I appreciate it in a way I never appreciated it before. Everything in town is this wa...
Lauterbrunnen — Every year, the farmers bring the cows down from the mountains for winter. These were the last stragglers. We thought we’d missed them. The tradition of the cow parade led to the hats and to the tour...
Saint-denis — Mardi 29 juillet 2014. Photo d’un balcon en Sicile. On y voit une chaise encore a l’ombre. A coté, une table avec un livre dessus. Et le soleil commence à éclairer le muret qui soutient la grille du ...
Portland — “We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air” —Evangelista Torricelli, 1644 I. the moon slips through a keyhole insinuating home where the nearness of you seems very faraway from what the tan...
San francisco — Life is about finding many Golden Tickets, the many lucky opportunities that catch you unaware, all in the beauty of serving your and others’ growth and fostering your awareness. The idea of the Golde...
London — Having been relieved of one or more parts, they rest still locked to poles, fences, and racks, their owners too disheartened or disgusted to even bother removing them or buying a replacement wheel, an...
Duluth — This Monday an elusive synthesis of Heimweh and Fernweh, homesickness and wanderlust - I can’t find the word - affects me. What a weekend! It demands some writing to sort out. First, the pride of wa...
Lahaina — Thought it would be an ordinary extraordinary sunset this evening. As, the last thing I expected out of this Honokowai lightshow was an audible echo of the literary giants who have defined a meaningf...
Seattle — If you’ve considered seeing Boyhood, please don’t miss this piece of cinematic art. Pushing the boundaries of what we call ‘commitment to the craft,’ this movie is that one possible summer sleeper Aca...
St kilda — Reflect on a recent time when you went outside into the sunshine and noticed the light on your skin. It didn’t take a lot of effort for you to notice the warmth right? Practicing mindfulness is famil...
Örebro — The sky is beautiful tonight. In the language of water colours I’d describe it as ultramarine going over in pthalo turquoise and prussian blue. If you look to the west, it lightens up in a faint cobal...
Null — Mis pesadillas eran sobre perderte, alejarme y olvidarte, lo más irónico es que ni un sueño se me ha cumplido, pero esta rara pesadilla se ha tornado en mi realidad. Una lágrima desperdiciada, una fan...
Kirchheim unter teck — Look at that shit. No, really, take a closer look please. Rejoice in the manifold retro-pleasures provided by this display. The colors. The typographies involved. The neon sign advertises a cinema (“K...
Bhubaneshwar — It’s raining outside and i don’t feel like studying. The campus recruitment would be starting soon in our college and i have a lot of preparations to do. But i feel lazy when the weather’s such, and c...
Santa cruz — I once had a friend who I cared very much about. She was my “Fairy God Mother” and “Once upon a time…” was a story she shared with me about a man I was creating a life with. It was a beautiful tale ...
Vienna — This week I have been spending a good portion of my free time culling my ebook collection and using calibre to catalog and convert books to ePub format. I’ve come across a bunch of classic hard SF boo...
Duluth — The gent I call “The Goose Chaser” at the Yacht Club shooed grazing geese from the Yacht Club lawn again this morning as he does most every day the geese come to nibble on Yacht Club grass. ( Both goo...
København k — It is interesting how geographical journeys can also take you to other types of journeys that force you to look at things differently. I’m in a summer school with people from the humanities and comput...
Antipolo — You see, today, on this rainy ripe-for-boredom day, I vowed we’d try finger painting. It seemed easy enough—the blogs promised it would be. Ella came in from her outdoor playtime and found me with my ...
Portland — I realized an incontrovertible fact recently: by watching the civic parades of Portland that I will always be an irreverent spy from that mysterious, boisterous symbolic, Dionysian life of New Orleans...
Santa fe — I don’t want to lower the tone of Adrian Tribe’s entertaining series on London’s “Bloomsbury benches”. And I quickly concede that Daffy Duck isn’t even a character from a book. Still, he is a belove...
Duluth — We north-country folk have finally untangled ourselves from winter. I bicycle by a couple outdoor weddings every weekend now. Sweltering visitors from the big cities: Minneapolis and St. Paul come up...
Reykjavik — When I want to compare it to another city, I have to say, “Well, it’s like Monterey and Oslo and Portland and Oakland and the Central Valley all mixed together.” Which is to say, Reykjavik is not like...
London — Almost my final moment about The Bloomsbury Book Benches (they added an outlier to this group very late in the day!), this bench represents what must be Oscar Wilde’s most well-known play, The Importa...
Curitiba — That day I was awakened before my normal schedule, and my first thought was “gosh, I still have more time to sleep.” But then I went to the window and I saw the sky before sunrise, and any semblance o...
Putrajaya — Snapped last year during my trip to Putrajaya, I still remember how this intricate ceiling made me feel. The gentle hue strokes and skillful etching made my eyes water. Up there, it was achingly prett...
Tokyo — And then you walk into a lobby so aggressively chilled that it feels like being dunked in milk, icepacks pressed to your kidneys.
Hanoi — There is a place in between… In between the tangled sheets of one night stands and meeting someone who is it; a place between the thrill of the chase and creating a life with him. I’ve just arrived...
Santa cruz — Someone asked me, why don’t you defend yourself? I wondered what I have to defend. Fighting back is not grace. Shielding invokes participation into a war. What is defense? If I utter one word or thoug...
New york — There is an inexorable force that pulls me into the oval. Placed here in 1866 by Calvert Vaux, before the memorial arch of soldiers and sailors crowned with Lady Columbia on her chariot, before the Ar...
Saint-mard — Jeudi 24 juillet 2014 Quand je fais des cauchemars d’araignée, je suis dans mon lit et la toile est a mi chemin du plafond, et je ne peux pas bouger. Je sais que l’araignée va venir. ou que la toile v...
Bloomington — My boyfriend, his best friend and I designed, built and hosted a three night party based on the last 3 chapters of my novel. It went over smashingly well. We used quite literally a ton of metal to bui...
Hanoi — This is going to be easy. I mean, how hard could it be? Renting a motorbike while I’m tucked away in Hanoi for a self imposed writer’s residency seems like a sensible thing. I’m a good walker. I can w...
London — I’m almost at the end of my series of moments on The Bloomsbury Book Benches. And this one is one of the best, IMHO, the intricate and bold design being the work of Thomas Dowdeswell and representing...
Accra — Edem. A beautiful tender soul. Her face has never appeared to me so clearly before; and she is smiling. Sometimes we totally forget but these beautiful people always remain with you; even when memorie...
Hakodate — Only this old school shop didn’t participate in it. We visited an old colonial-style assembly house on a hill where we saw a fantastic view of Hakodate Bay. While Tokyo was in the middle of the rainy...
Duluth — A fine summer day wild blueberry heals the memories of many a blue Minnesota January day. The berry crop is fair to middling this season in my picking patches. Some years, a day’s picking yielded ga...
Portland — People often ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” which is always an impossible question to untangle the threads of what personal tectonic shifts happen within my spheres that cause an eruption...
Null — So you think you have something - an idea - something to start. you think you have a timeline - you think you know when its going to finish and be ready. Hahaha, always starts the same way. So ready s...
Boston — The Charles W. Morgan is the oldest surviving whaling ship in the world, and this summer it’s set sail again, after a lengthy restoration process and much work on the part of the folks at Mystic Seapo...
Grand rapids — Cascading from its concrete plaza, La Grande Vitesse is a bright red tumble. It eludes the mind’s grasp. Hulking and slippery, there’s no angle from which it feels like it’s contained. The Grand River...
Jenner — So of course, I question everything when I’m standing in front of it. I’m worried about a lot of things right now, the stress of starting a new job, of getting through school and graduating, of being...
Hemet — In the summer of 2011, my application was approved by the Adventist College Abroad to go to Athens, Greece. In Glyfada, Greece at a nice Hotel I would learn ancient Hebrew for 6 weeks. Adventist Col...
Antipolo — I started with Duncan Sheik only because he was just a few artists down from Disneyland Children’s Sing-Along Chorus, which had been on repeat ever since my daughter decided that Mommy’s Office was mo...
San francisco — ****updated**** The other day I posted an article about the perils of shopping at Safeway. It made me happy to see how supportive people were, but it got me thinking about a younger version of myself...
London — It has taken me quite a while to be able to get a photograph of this particular Bloomsbury Book Bench in the right light! Its positioning means that in the hot sunny weather we’ve been having over th...
Curitiba — We have a street here in my town, which is closed to cars. So only pedestrians can walk on it. Actually, it’s the main place to walk in downtown. In this street, there are a lot of clothes stores, as...
Schwäbisch gmünd — This remarkable structure can currently be found at a horticultural exhibition in Schwäbisch Gmünd/Germany. Made almost exclusively from wood panels shaped by algorithms, it is the most distinguishing...
Cholargos — I almost never hear music issuing from the flats around me, below me or above me. But today out of nowhere from the building in the adjacent block I heard “La Traviata.” Someone was actually listening...
Othis — Lundi 21 juillet 2014 Et moi qui me disait que ça faisait longtemps que je n’avais pas écrit. Bizarre. Comme en démultiplié. Je dois surement un peu m’ennuyer. Ou un peu trop attendre. Je passe auss...
Pokhara — A venir.
Aptos — Newspaper rubber bands smudged with black ink. Five fit tightly on his wrist. Snapping the green first red, blue, and then the nude. What does he think about? He snaps each waiting 7 seconds. Repet...
London — This bench, the next in my series on The Bloomsbury Book Benches, can be found at the southern end of Gordon Square. The painting, by Fiona and Neil Osborne (known collectively as One Red Shoe), illu...
Lewes — On Saturday I had the delightful privilege of teaching in the middle of this field, off the beaten track in deepest East Sussex, with the only real downside being that it was a rather exposed location...
San francisco — The first incident involved a guy in an electric wheelchair who kept following me around the grocery store, materializing like a ninja in frozen food aisles. “Now that I’ve seen you more than once, y...
Edmonton — These lilies sit in a small maintained garden located just north of the Muttart Conservatory in Edmonton. The garden is set in a nondescript park across the river from downtown, and you are as likely ...
Santa fe — When I started this little series of sketches on Santa Fe, New Mexico, I forgot to mention that we are renting a casita near the Plaza called Casa Las Rosas. And since today, for me, everything is co...
Santa cruz — Everything starts here. All the beauty and the wretched stumbling. Yet there is nothing that lets love shine more brilliantly than the vulnerability of being alive. One more step into the unknown. You...
Pont-scorff — Arrivée le mardi 15 juillet sous le soleil… La route a été dégagée mais quelque peu longue. Le chat a beaucoup miaulé au départ de Bergerac… une couverture sur la cage nous a permis de retrouver ...
Prescott — I can’t breathe. I should be able to. Behind me, Scott is walking at a steady pace. I have to force myself to trudge up the incline, and my heart feels like it might explode out of my chest. I have ...
Wenshan district — I walked into my grandfather’s room and look around. This is the first time in all my life where I’ve been in this room by myself. Grandfather would never leave us alone in the room when we were young...
Kinsarvik — This is a long post, be prepared: I am back in Oslo, after having spent seven days backpacking from hut-to-hut in the Hardangervidda with the DNT. I should note that I have never backpacked before—sa...
Santa fe — By coincidence the birth of modern European opera coincides perfectly with the coming of Europeans to Pueblo country.. Indeed, Santa Fe was founded in 1607, the same year that Monteverdi composed his...
Örebro — I’m sitting in that café again, same place. Through the glass wall I see summer dwellers passing by, sometimes throwing a glance my way, almost flinching when they see someone looking out as they look...
Toronto — Sadly, they took a giant jackhammer to their pet rock. It is no more. Then they drilled a lot of holes in the concrete, installed clusters of rebar, and welded braces into place. Now they’re finally g...
Antipolo — Some divine force stops me from shouting, “Ella! You’re going to fall! Get down from there!” and I’m able to walk (quickly but outwardly calmly) over and say, “You’re up really high. Are you trying to...
Dana point — Fog crawled from the ocean up to where she stood, eagerly lapping at her bare feet. She scanned the moon with its ominous ring and back again to her own reflection in the mirror she held in trembling ...
Santa fe — We had a wonderful night at the Ballet recently. The dancing was inspired; the choreography (by Jiri Kylian and 2 others) was riveting; and I was especially impressed by how much the lighting and bac...
Stirling — Remember that time it was my birthday in March and you sent a tweet about being disappointed, and I replied that it could be worse. That you could be me, shopping in Sainsbury’s at 9.30pm on your birt...
Curitiba — This building is what we call here in Curitiba as “The Eye Museum”. Actually, its real name is Oscar Niemeyer Museum, and it is the principal museum in my city. Not to mention that this museum is not ...
Cologne — Da wollte ich einen Tag später das Pendant mit dem Frauenmotiv und der Headline “Abenteuer? Reicht mir nicht” posten, da hängen die Plakate nicht mehr.
Pune — On my return to Pune from Baramati a few years back, I noticed a fort that was turned into a hotel. Initially thought this chould be an import from Rajasthan where the second and third commanders of t...
Philadelphia — around 1100: along the schuykill river park and vine street bridge (highway 676), philadelphia. oil on linen on panel, 6 x 8 inches. it was fun to receive compliments, but more fun when they were fro...
Berlin — One of those nights when you pass a car parked on a bridge and a couple sits inside, kissing. On any other day you might call them old, but tonight no-one is, because it’s one of those nights. One of...
Santa fe — In this municipal courtroom, anyone can get married, even gay people. And Paul and I just did!
London — The seventh in my series on the Bloomsbury Book Benches, which can be found in Woburn Square Gardens, is a showcase for the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Created by the artist Va...
Leuven — It was a rare sweltering day here in Belgium and the restaurant was a hotbox— but it’s one of my favorites, so I took a deep breath and plunged in. It was empty, save a small side table hosting a pai...
Wellington — The exercise for this month’s writing group came from this small, super-thick, square-shaped book (such that it was the shape of a cube) called, The Writer’s Block. (See what they did there?) In thi...
Palo alto — A few years back, I watched a movie called Yes Man, in which the main character challenges himself to say “yes” to everything for a whole year. To say the least, his life gets a whole lot better a who...