My endless folders of photos from my trips show up a common theme: I love meeting animals on my travels! Perhaps it's a variation on meeting the locals. After my recent heavy post on the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, I felt the need to get a bit more light-hearted and remember some of …
Lithuania
Picture pirouette: Sailing ship near Nida, Lithuania
I had a magical day on the Curonian Spit in Lithuania a few years back. Perhaps you've never heard of the Curonian Spit - I certainly hadn't - but it's a funny skinny bit of land running through the Baltic Sea, half of it belongs to Lithuania, and half of it is Kaliningrad, a tiny piece of Russia …
Passport pirouette: Hopping through the Baltic States
When I was a kid in school, nobody mentioned Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania in geography classes - they were simply a part of the Soviet Union then, and it never really occurred to me that there were such distinct countries tied up in it. But when I backpacked through eastern Europe a few years ago, I …