In September and October 2019, I travelled with family members to Lisbon and Porto in Portugal and to the Spanish and French Basque Country in the northeastern part of the Iberian Peninsula. These four essays are my attempt to capture some aspects of the cultures we observed.
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Of Goddesses, Homeric Heroes, Maltese Falcons, and Ancient Mariners I’m sitting on a rooftop patio listening to church bells chime amidst the ceaseless scream of scooters on the narrow streets below. It’s late morning here in Malta, a tiny three-island archipelago in the middle of the vast Mediterranean Sea. My ostensible quest: to find...
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It’s pouring a hard, unforgiving Balkan rain that threatens to scupper my plans to visit Lukovdol, a small village in Croatia where I hope to find the ancestral home of my grandfather Francisus Verzuh. We are in the mountainous region of Gorski Kotar, a county near the Slovenian border. Wikipedia dubs it Croatia’s Switzerland....
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She is “like many a beautiful mistress and a strong dark wine, never entirely frank with you . . . . Her past is enigmatic, her present contradictory, her future hazed in uncertainties.” – Jan Morris in The World of Venice Why Venice? That’s what some of our friends asked when we announced that...
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Novelist Thomas Mann once described Venice as a “flattering and suspect beauty.” That enigmatic comment and others pushed me to learn more. So in September 2017 Leola and I spent three weeks immersed in the City of Islands, with daughter Alex joining us for one week. This photo essay attempts to capture what we...
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The images in this photo essay are presented randomly beginning with the streets of “The City of Light” and skipping to the South of France (Le Midi) where Leola and I spent time exploring the hilltop villages of Provence, the chateaux of the Dordogne, and the markets of Nice. What we saw through our...
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KLCC radio interview – aired Nov. 25, 2015 Street Rhythms – Register-Guard – Dec. 3, 2015 My show “Street Rhythms ­– A Photographic Journey” opened on Nov. 8, 2016, for a two-month exhibition at the Eugene Public Library. The 27 photographs in the collection are images of people from around the world that were...
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Sometime in the early 2000, my daughter Alex and I travelled to Paris from Neuchatel, Switzerland, where she was studying to complete her high school diploma. I had been to Paris three or four times before, but she had not visited. For three days we roamed the great city, seeing the grand sites, searching...
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We have immersed ourselves in the poetry of Yannis Ritsos, acknowledged as one of the great Grecian poets of the last century, and are reliving our recent trip to Peloponnesian towns in Greece through him. “Time” is taken from his collection of 36 poems in the book Monovasia which has been published with the...
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After making Down by Law, film director Jim Jarmusch said New Orleans was a nation in itself , and after a Christmas week of exploring I tend to agree. N’Awlins aka Crescent City aka the Big Easy is like no other American city I’ve ever visited. A few observations about what makes it different:...
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