The days are cooler and shorter and the nights are colder and longer. There is a nip and a chill in the air. The clouds are leaden and the sun emits relatively little heat. The rains come down more frequently. Autumn has arrived in Toronto in earnest. It’s not my favorite season. I’m a summer […]
I was fortunate enough to visit Vancouver earlier this month, but there was a problem: I had less than 24 hours to explore this gorgeous city on Canada’s west coast. Unlike my friends who’d recently bought a lovely little condo through Eddie Yan, my time was very limited. What could I possibly see in so […]
Norman Bethune is Canada’s gift to China. A physician who devoted body and soul to the cause of Chinese independence, Bethune is probably the most famous Canadian ever to set foot in China. A veteran of World War I and the Spanish Civil War, he volunteered his services to China in 1938 as it struggled […]
With a deafening blast from its foghorn, the R.M.S. Segwun, North America’s oldest operating steamship, set off from its base in Gravenhurst, Ontario, for a serene two-hour cruise of Muskoka Bay and the broader expanses of Lake Muskoka. My wife and I were aboard as it left Gravenhurst’s historic Wharf district on a pleasant sunny […]
When I was five or six years old, my mother — an immigrant from postwar Poland whose appreciation of nature seemed boundless — introduced me to the glories of Montreal’s great urban forest, Mount Royal Park, which is still the most dominant landmark in a city filled with stately landmarks. My love affair with this […]
Weimar, a pleasant city in the eastern state of Thuringia, is where the tangled and irreconcilable strands of Germany’s history meet abruptly. Although Weimar was the birthplace of the short-lived Weimar Republic, Thuringia was a bastion of the Nazi movement, having been the first state in Germany where two Nazi officials, Wilhelm Frick and Fritz […]
Visitors to Israel usually spend their time touring cities such as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Nazareth and tend to overlook off-the-beaten-track destinations further afield. I didn’t want to make that mistake. So on one of my trips to Israel, I made a point of visiting several of the natural wonders in the Galilee: Mount […]
Bad Reichenhall, a neat and attractive town in southern Germany, is ringed by the crystalline Bavarian Alps. It’s surely one of the most beautiful places in Europe. I was born here after the most destructive war in history. A destination which attracted more than one million visitors last year, it draws nature buffs, mountain climbers, […]
Splendidly sylvan Vermont is seemingly timeless, a tableaux of gently rolling hills, accessibly high mountains, serene pastures, dense woods, placid lakes, bubbling streams and quaint towns. It’s the kind of a place, I suspect, where the iconic American painter, Norman Rockwell, would have felt at home. Whenever I’ve driven through Vermont, I have never ceased […]
Egypt is synonymous with the pyramids, the tombs of the pharoahs, the ruins of ancient temples and the artifacts of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. But even discerning travellers often overlook one of Egypt’s most unforgettable attractions — the remote oases of the Western Desert, the eastern extension of the Sahara Desert. Far from Egypt’s […]