Hello friends and neighbors. We are on the last leg of our 5 week travels in Africa. Our organized tour ended in Cape Town, where we stayed with friends and friends of friends. Cape Town reminds us so much of San Francisco, because of the Mediterranean climate, landscape, and trendy life style. Of all South Africa, Cape Town is the most modern, first worldly, cosmopolitan in style. After about a week of Cape Town, we still had over one week left before our necessary return to the northern hemisphere winter, so we decided to take a trip up to see Victoria [View Full Entry]

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Hello, since we spoke to you last we ended our two week guided tour through this most interesting and beautiful country. We've spent the past week in Cape Town, which reminds us of the landscape and climate of the San Francisco Bay Area. We've also been staying with friends, in their homes, so don't feel so much like outsiders or tourists, and we've met so many nice people! During the dark days of Apartheid, South Africa was one of the world's most despised countries, boycotted by the world. In the 90's when racial segregation was ended, Nelson Mandela urged the majority [View Full Entry]

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Hello Friends. Since last speaking with you we visited the St. Lucia wildlife water system, fed by 5 rivers which flow into the Indian Ocean, causing a great meeting ground for wildlife: birds, hippos, crocodiles, and humans all converge to create this World Heritage site. Then we went to Durban, a beautifully located city with waterside attractions, and high rise hotels along the beach, with a large Indian population, as well as black and white. Then we traveled through the rolling hills of the KwaZulu-Natal African countryside, seeing dozens of villages and small towns. The people li [View Full Entry]

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After 2 months of pure winter in Evi's home country, we experienced a magic conversion: winter to summer in 11 hours. We left Switzerland for London, spent 3 days with Melanie who is exhilarated by her new job, house, roommates, and lifestyle, then flew to South Africa in 11 hours, arriving in the middle of summer! We stayed in Johannesburg with a lovely family, both parents are artists, who live in a garden-like environment in a lovely section of town. We took a tour of Jo-burg and Soweto, with a black driver who had experienced life under Apartheit and shared them [View Full Entry]

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Around December 25, on the first day of Chanukah and Christmas, God's gift to the inhabitants of Switzerland was a big dusting of snow, opening all the ski lifts in the country, giving us the opportunity to travel down to Leysin, where we lived in the 70's when I taught at the Leysin American School and Evi worked as assistant to the registrar of the American College. Although Leysin has only about 2500 inhabitants, we managed to run into a dozen people we knew back then... Melanie flew from London to Basel for the weekend, then we all bundled into our [View Full Entry]

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So we took off for a few days, taking advantage of EasyJet's easy web booking system and inexpensive flights, from Basel - within 2 hours we were in the beautiful, laid back, elegant, artistic, musical, tasty, well-dressed city of Barcelona. Because of our Servas contacts we stayed in the home of a woman about Evi's age who teaches French to adults, sponsored by the government. Barcelona is a walking city, and even though it was "winter" there (about 5-10 degrees C), streets were packed - especially around dinner time, about midnight, when night life begins. The city is full of beauty: [View Full Entry]

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Hello everybody, The falling temperatures have announced the arrival of winter. Average temps 0 degrees C (32 F) for the past week, but lately it has warmed up to 10 degrees (50 F). It's often been cloudy, so when it's sunny we like to take a walk, all over this interesting town of Basel. Yesterday we walked to France (just across the border, 30 minutes on foot, to St. Louis). Basel is an underrated city, one of the most beautiful in Europe in my opinion, but such a modest city also, that they don't blow their own horn in pursuit of [View Full Entry]

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It's been slowly and gracefully turning from autumn to winter. Since we've lived in California so long, we were not really used to the cold weather. Now it's 0 degrees Centigrade (32 Fahrenheit), and really feels like winter. We are living in a small, cozy, comfortable apartment in the center of downtown Basel. We step outside of our building into the midst of shoppers, restaurants, cafes, bookstores, antique shops, bookstores. Now they are also putting up the Christmas lights, and the first snow fell (about 2 cm). In fact, next door to our residence is an English bookstore, and I wi [View Full Entry]

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OK so Evi and I flew from Basel to Nice on EasyJet, 100 Swiss Francs round trip per person ($75), a 50 minute flight (compared with 250 Francs and 8 hours by train). We went to visit Howie's high school friend, Terri Isaacman from Harrisburg, who lives with her husband Brian in a house in Trans-En-Provence, which serves also as a bed and breakfast, about 30 miles north of San Tropez. The weather was pleasant and warm, around 21 degrees centigrade each day (70 Fahrenheit). We spent one day in Nice, had a bus tour to see the beautiful city, then [View Full Entry]

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Dear Friends, After flying on October 11 from San Francisco to Zurich, we spent two weeks with Evi's parents, Nelly and Edi, in Basel, and also brother Jean-Claude, plus cousins and friends in Zurich. Evi and I flew from Basel on October 23 from Basel to Tel Aviv, arriving at 2:45 in the morning. The airport was bustling like it was mid-day. Israel is a 24-hour country. People, dogs, car alarms can be seen and heard any time of day. Israel has a brand new, expanded airport, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. We took the taxi to [View Full Entry]

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