It was early in the morning. A black sheen glared into my eyes under the mellow lit lamps. Their yellow cast stretched over a moistened street from the evening’s dew where shadows continued to play in frozen momentum. With unseen grace, the figures within their alternate world crept infinitesimally upon the asphalt. It was an easterly direction where shops were grated and the boulangeries, patisseries and brasseries were dark with their interiors. The sun was yet to rise. Within the early hours of the city, only the busying street cleaner in baggy green jumpers with a green wiry broom stirred his [View Full Entry]

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Venice; silent but for the jabbering tourists, the water taxi and ferry engines and the timid yapping dogs trailered by a thin flora leash. Nights upon the isles were mesmerizing as the gypsy coin jinglers of Florence felt like a gossamer memory of youth. Amidst the city, some four hundred gondolas made their rounds, kicking off the enclosing walls for guidance. In their adept grace and good humor, the stillness simply added to a hypnotic state found upon the lands of the Venetian lagoon. Albeit, even the temporal state of a traveler’s enthrallment comes with a price. The fee for a [View Full Entry]

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The tracks clicked out of Roma Termini. The receding Italian capitol held our endless pace of exploration where a cocktail mixture of excitement and energy from the reunion of three traveling family members, kept us fueled. We were together again in a foreign land. From the high walls of neoclassical architecture within the heart of Rome through the suburban sprawls of modern blocks of concrete, lines of pastel clothing hung from windows. They sagged under the weight of earth, air and water, and oddly, each smiled tranquilly above the fray. Each wall wore a face. They were smiling mouths upon an [View Full Entry]

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I turned into We. One of the world’s most romantic cities in all of Europe, Rome was indeed lonely. Sights of couples and families teased my silence; smells tingled the senses. Five days and four nights with the clouds hovering low like a reflecting blanket of isolation, I wandered toward the Tiber, away from Vatican City and into the Ghetto to a marketed Campo de Fiori alone in waiting. Again, loneliness of one man, one traveler, caught in the conquest of romance upon a land dedicated to the life of comfort in sociability. In the highlights of a city without a [View Full Entry]

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Athens, like a titillating treat savored for a moment on the traveler’s cycle. It’s a city oozing with the sweets of today’s past, circumnavigating the present world; and with continuous force, persisting to inspire the evolution of mankind. Locked in a prison of Socrates’ mind, the city is that grain of rice, that morsel of bread, that last lick of ice cream to those who choose to linger and explore the many flavors of Athens. From the headaches of navigating the souvenir shops within the alleys of Plaka, through to the markets of Monastiraki and into the culture of the Athenian [View Full Entry]

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It’s past midnight, but noises of an unremitting spark in Life resound as if it were day. Yellow lights flitter on the sidewalks’ canopies streaming through to the concrete and decorative garlands strung over the traffic reach into infinity like a cosmic journey. The lines of ornamental lights pull at the city’s futuristic lever of style, traveling light-years beyond time. As Greece’s second city and home to a voluminous crowd of university students, Thessaloniki sleeps solely at the rise of dawn; it lives like a thumping jackhammer the remaining hours. The citizens roll their dice on Life’s board of backgammon. Obsessively, [View Full Entry]

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Down the cliff, a night-lit city spread before us. Above in the star-studded sky, bats swept through the spotlights. Within, there were only three of us, travelers raiding a silent fortress. We crept about the shadows, discovering the silence of an overcome fortress, and when daylight rose, we left toward a theatre; one of the largest, most grandiose and well preserved of the antiquities. Upon the very top of its limestone steps, the singular pluck of a violin reached our ears soundly while various tongues bellowed in a one-minute fame of limelight. With the days to come, we furthered ourselves across [View Full Entry]

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Figs ripe and taken to gravity remained like impermanent fossils upon coarse stone steps. Their seeds lay scattered under foot, a purple skin flattened as an insect on the windshield of a desert crossing. Leafy boughs and thick trunks rose from the neighboring courtyards. Wrought-iron fences above waist-high walls bordered the properties’ perimeters. And in the early morning, few wanderers searched for the entrance around the base of the Acropolis. There were only the slanted sun, the cool air and the stirring noises in Europe’s oldest city. Tucked through small Turkish alleys, I searched in an area of Athens known as [View Full Entry]

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A perturbed Athenian quenched his divulgence. He chose me and filled my carefree mind, causing the strange restlessness of a pilgrim whom sets his first steps upon a long, unending journey. Like Ulysses’ banishment from home by angered Poseidon, I was on another island, the island of Rhodes, and the restlessness came surging in a torrent of tides. Another languid day of exploration had passed when it struck full force, and I was then on the town beach taking my evening bath. The sun was setting, west below the island of Symi and the exotic land of Turkey. And like Ulysses, [View Full Entry]

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Night was falling. Surrounded by clothed peoples, new country and the craggy coastline I have come to familiarize with Greece, I hopped a rock-stacked wall and slipped out of sight. With the guidance of twilight casting a mellow shadow passed each stone, I tumbled down a hill and stepped onto a wind-drift patio; desolate, dirty, with piles of dried eucalyptus and bougainvillea tassels spinning round their mounds. This was it. Perfect. Soon, I watched the moon rise to shine its reflection down across the spreading Aegean Sea—the setting to an episode of Indiana Jones on the island of Karpathos. Island Bound [View Full Entry]

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