Landschlacht, Switzerland, 12 March 2017 I like Facebook. There I said it. I like the variety of news items that appear, the exchange of ideas, the casual contact with friends and family close or far away, and I find Facebook gives me a forum to share my thoughts. But a few days ago I began to notice… Continue reading Slave to the Machine / One Flew Over the Internet
Tag: travel
Bleeding Beautiful
Landschlacht, Switzerland, 28 February 2017 There are friends and stories that remain in the back of your mind that sometimes require some dramatic moment to have their memory come rushing to your forethoughts. Such is the case of my Indian friend Sumit, originally of Orissa Province, India, and now Canadian resident of Ontario. I have known… Continue reading Bleeding Beautiful
The fashionable dead
Landschlacht, Switzerland, 3 January 2017 The scene outside my window seems worlds apart and away for the world I am about to describe…for the streets here in this wee Swiss hamlet by the Lake of Constance are covered in snow both magical and mysterious. You could spend days explaining to me the science behind snowfall… Continue reading The fashionable dead
Take me back to Constantinople
Romanshorn, Switzerland, 2 January 2017 Slow start to the day and to the week finds us, the wife and I, having a late breakfast, then walking along the shores of the Lake of Constance. Here at least it has been a green Christmas season. In fact, yesterday´s Sonntag Zeitung remarks that Switzerland had never seen a… Continue reading Take me back to Constantinople
Walks of Life: The Apple and the Grape
Landschlacht, Canton Thurgau, Switzerland, 6 November 2016 It is true. I often feel quite critical of this country in which I have resided in these past six years. I criticize its government and its xenophobic policies. I criticize its people and their parochial ways. I criticize its economy with its soulless greed. But what I cannot find… Continue reading Walks of Life: The Apple and the Grape
Canada Slim behind bars 2: Punishment preserved
Landschlacht, Switzerland, 2 July 2016 Brexit and the European Championship seem all anyone can talk about these days, whether in the classes where I teach or at the Starbucks stores where I work as a barista. As I don´t have a stake in either event, my thoughts are more preoccupied with my duties at hand, plans… Continue reading Canada Slim behind bars 2: Punishment preserved
The Backyard Tourist
“A desk is no place to think on a large scale”. (Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking) “An absolute new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours´walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had… Continue reading The Backyard Tourist
A scent of Indian pine
Landschlacht, Switzerland: 30 January 2016 As I age I am beginning to notice my mind functioning increasingly odd. I can be at home or work and be walking from one room to another and forget why I made that decision to change rooms. Yet I can be doing a normal, average activity and something or… Continue reading A scent of Indian pine
Canada Slim and The Poet´s Path
“Insidious forces are marshalled against the time, space and will to walk and against the version of humanity that act embodies. One force is the filling-up…”the time in between”, the time of walking to or from a place, of meandering, of running errands. That time has been deplored as a waste, reduced and its remainder… Continue reading Canada Slim and The Poet´s Path
For God, Prince and Fatherland: The Principality of Liechtenstein
Today I was truly a stranger in a strange land… I visited, for the purpose of finding work, the Principality of Liechtenstein, only two hours’ distance by train from my own wee village by the Lake of Constance. Liechtenstein is a landlocked German-speaking constitutional microstate monarchy sandwiched between the Rhine River and the Alps, between… Continue reading For God, Prince and Fatherland: The Principality of Liechtenstein