Another year, not enough travel! I’d hit the road all the time if my checkbook would let me. But I am grateful for all of the places I have been so far and to have goals about where I want…
Category: Russia
Traveling to Remember
Watch the Latest Anna Karenina for the Mood, Not the Views
What I Learned at Doctor Zhivago’s Revolution
It took me a half a dozen tries to get all the way through the three-hour-long 1965 film Doctor Zhivago, a love story set amid the backdrop of the Russian revolution but filmed elsewhere. Starring Omar Sharif as a doctor-poet,…
Our Perestroika
What’s engaging about the 2010 documentary, My Perestroika, and that was largely absent from my own visit to Russia isn’t so much the views of Moscow but the captured moments of real Russians, those not selling anything to tourists or…
Roads through Russia
The story in the film Roads to Koktebel, that of a widower trekking to the Black Sea with his young son in the hope of starting a new life, seems emblematic of the Russian experience. The characters are resolute, obdurate.…
Bosco Cafe: Chewing It Up in Red Square
The Kremlin: Napoleon Was Here
Russia, Contrariwise
Five months back from Russia, I am still challenged to write about my trip, still trying to even begin understanding this vast country. Russia seems to me to be a nation of contradictions, the brute of a country cousin to…