Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Iron Curtain, Germans celebrate. Travelers may explore old lives, chills, and fears Berlin, Germany Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was back in the city again, timed to see what had changed since I watched a defining…
Gleeful Morgan Freeman and sidekick Jack Nicholson zipping along the Great Wall of China on a motorcycle: The image was playing, rewinding, and playing again in my mind as a tour guide and I headed by car northeast through the suburbs of Beijing toward the mountains and world's largest cemetery. Like Freeman and Nicholson in…
Charleston, S.C., is one of America's favorite cities for travelers. It's a city you can walk with wonder at the historic architecture of its houses and storefronts, listen to the clip-clop of horses pulling carriages full of happy tourists, sit for a spell in shady waterfront parks, stroll the neighborhoods for an understanding of the southern…
My table was in High Cotton. That's a southern phrase that means the best of times, which these are not. But on a vacation night in Charleston, South Carolina, High Cotton, the restaurant, was standing tall. Charleston has become a foody city, a vacation destination for folks who like to eat. At High cotton, my meal was…
On a Sunday afternoon in Shanghai, I began a search for dental floss. It turns out that my roll of floss ran out in a country that doesn’t seem to use it. My exploration reached a climax at Shanghai's largest pharmacy, or so the sign reported in front of a building…
A few blocks from Shanghai's upscale shops and commercial zone, on the sidewalks of Old Town, street lights are dimmer and life is more Chinese. You will see bicycles instead of cars, goods for sale from bins and wooden display carts, as well as laundry hung to dry from every available line and tree branch.…
Shanghai, China's bustling world center of finance, is an easy city for walking downtown, shopping and sightseeing and gazing at throngs of passersby. Pay attention to the army of men in khaki uniforms, with hats that read in English: "Traffic Assistant" — perhaps from a stash of baseball caps, made of course in China, that…
When i was growing up, Beijing was known in the United States as Peking, which is a more English version of the name. In junior high school, I suffered a teacher who called the city Beiping and spelled it Peiping. All of these names have some legitimacy, but the city is now Beijing, capital of…
On the road, driving from Ohio to Florida, I experienced some of the strange pricing that travelers talk about in these difficult financial times. Some prices have dropped; others are same as usual. For instance, I could have taken a cruise out of Miami for the average cost of my motel rooms on the way south. Even with…