I’ve always wished I could play a musical instrument. But I’d never thought much about how music can bridge the gaps between cultures until a friend passed along a link to this video at Global Post, an online digital news service. Reporter and accordion player Gregory Warner gets an auditorium full of Afghans clapping along…with […]

The current online issue of The Atlantic Monthly includes an article by Lisa Abend on the charms of learning Euskera, the ancient Basque language that has no apparent links to any other tongue. Whenever I read about people studying a language–any language–abroad, I’m immediately gripped by a desire to run away to another culture. I […]

“Dispatches,” one of my favourite CBC Radio programs, recently re-ran reporter Nancy Greenleese’s piece about Home Food (scroll down to “Culinary wrongs made right”). The Home Food organization, which started in Bologna and has now spread to other parts of Italy, allows travellers to enjoy a meal in an Italian home for roughly the same […]

For people who want the inside scoop on a destination, the websites of local TV stations are an often untapped source of information. For instance, my friend and fellow travel writer Katharine Fletcher was interviewed last month on “Living in Ottawa,” a local CBC-TV show, about an ecological preserve called the Mer Bleue Bog. It’s […]

As the sun came up, I peeped through the window of our guest house onto a timeless vista: fields of potatoes and other crops, rimmed by hills and mountains. In the distance, a farmer was already at work behind a horse-drawn plow. In the village of Huamacchuco in the Peruvian Andes, many people wake and […]

Amsterdam-based Like-a-Local has added an insider’s tour of New York’s indie music scene. It doesn’t come at a typical indie price–42 euros per person, plus a 15-euro reservation fee–but Manhattan isn’t cheap. Also, if the quality matches that of a design tour I took with Like-a-Local in Amsterdam this spring, it will be well worth […]

The Korea Tourism Organization is making it easier for visitors to find accommodation options beyond hotels. An easy-to-search section of the KTO website includes lots of English-language details on unusual places to lay your head. For instance, there are links to over a dozen hanok–traditional Korean homes, usually featuring wide porches and sloping roofs–where you […]

Wherever I travel, I usually make a point of going into at least one grocery store. While comparing prices and checking out the unusual items on the shelves, I always learn a lot. (In Buenos Aires, I found no starker evidence of Argentina’s currency crisis than the imported Frosted Flakes selling for three times the […]

VisitBritain is the latest tourist board to realize that many travellers are hungry to meet locals and get off the beaten path while travelling. Its Be a Brit Different website includes blog posts from enthusiastic Britons about their favourite places and activities. According to the Modern Agent website, VisitBritain also has a plan to promote […]