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Muscat Is the Middle East You Didn’t Know You Were Looking For
Muscat sits between the Hajar Mountains and the Gulf of Oman in a series of bays and inlets that give the city a coastline of…
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Seoul: The City That Does Everything at Maximum Volume and Somehow Makes It Work
Seoul is a city of ten million people operating at an intensity that makes Tokyo feel relaxed by comparison, which is a sentence that requires…
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Zanzibar Is Not Just a Beach. Stop Going There Like It Is.
Zanzibar is consistently ranked among the world’s top beach destinations, which is accurate and almost entirely beside the point. The beaches of Nungwi and Kendwa…
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Kathmandu: The City That Lives at the Intersection of the Sacred and the Chaotic
I arrived in Kathmandu on a Tuesday afternoon and spent the first hour convinced that the taxi driver was attempting to lose me in the…
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Cinque Terre: Five Villages, One Coastline, Infinite Excuses to Stay Longer
The Cinque Terre — Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, Riomaggiore — cling to the Ligurian cliffs above the Mediterranean in a configuration that looks, from the…
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Buenos Aires: The Most European City in South America and Proud of Every Contradiction
Buenos Aires has been having an identity crisis for two hundred years and has wisely decided to embrace it. The boulevards of Palermo resemble Paris,…
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Tbilisi: The City That Pours You Wine Before It Shows You Its Architecture
The Georgian tradition of hospitality has a name — mkurnaloba — and a form, and the form is this: you do not enter a Georgian…
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Greek Street Food Has Been Making the Rest of Europe Look Bad for Centuries
The souvlaki is one of the great street foods in the world — the considered verdict of anyone who has eaten a properly made one,…
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Burmese Food: The Last Great Undiscovered Cuisine in Asia
The first time I encountered Burmese food properly was at a tea shop in Yangon at seven in the morning — the kind that has…
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A Night in a Japanese Ryokan Is the Most Complete Experience Travel Has to Offer
A ryokan is a traditional Japanese inn, and staying in one is the experience most completely expressing omotenashi — the concept of anticipating the guest’s…
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Cape Town Gave Me More Than I Had Any Right to Expect
I arrived with reasonable expectations — a famous mountain, good wine, the ocean. What I hadn’t accounted for was the combination Cape Town assembles: two…
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North Indian Food: Stop Ordering Butter Chicken and Start Eating Properly
Butter chicken has done more for the global spread of North Indian food and more damage to the global understanding of it than any other…