Sunbaked in Albania is the third part of a running series of recollections from adventures in the Balkans. You can read the previous update, about a Roman city that stands in ruins mere footsteps away from the modern capital of Montenegro, here. How to build a road in Albania Things just haven’t been making sense […]
adventure
Balkan Tales – An afternoon in Slapnik
This is the first in a planned series of recollections and stories from my adventure in the Balkans. I pulled the SUV onto the gravel shoulder. Across the narrow one-lane-wide strip of asphalt was sharp turnoff onto a gravel path that descended steeply into the brush below. It looked as if I would need to […]
Iceland
It was dark when we arrived in Keflavik, at ten-thirty in the morning, after a red-eye that felt twice as long as what was actually traveled. But at least I was not connecting on to Europe, another five or six hours away. Those poor bastards. Dawn came as we pulled into a hotel outside Reykjavik’s […]
The American Southwest – March 2016
There was no better place to think about life, death, and the American condition than on the roads of the great West.
The American Southwest – November 2015
For some, an American road trip is a journey down the iconic Route 66, or a pleasant drive through the countryside of the Atlantic seaboard, complete with quaint, perfect little towns and rolling hills. However, it was the desert scenery of the American Southwest that captivated my imagination. For me, the Southwest was a magical […]
Product Packaging in the DPRK
A small glimpse of the diversity of products domestically produced in the DPRK. In addition to simple food stuffs, I was able to purchase goods such as make up and other beauty products, candies, herbal products, agricultural products, pencils, pens, and other small daily goods. A few glimpses into the lackings of North Korean light […]
Faces of the DPRK
Faces of the DPRK by Yunchen Tian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
DPRK- Air Koryo
I arrived in Pyongyang on August 12th, but the story really begins a bit before that. It begins really with Air Koryo, one of the only ways to enter the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The DPRK has only one major rail artery, which crosses into China at Sinuiju/Dandong, and few road crossings along the […]
Tianjin
The Charm of Old Tianjin Recently, I went on a very impromptu trip to Tianjin, a major metropolitan area rather close to Beijing. Feeling a need to just get out of the house and do something, I left home at 4 in the morning and took the first train out. Located on the Bohai and straddling major […]