I’ve been proudly aware of my Norwegian-ism since my third grade family tree project. Apparently whoever greeted my great-grandfather at Ellis Island was in too much of a hurry to ask the spelling of my last name, so from that point on Jon Wigg has been Jon Wick — which [...]

By Robin Graham In the year 711, Tariq Ibn Ziyad — a Berber general — landed near the southern tip of Spain with 7,000 men, at the burning edge of the wildfire that was the Arab Empire — the House of Islam. In just a few years they were to [...]

By Jude Polotan Poor Giordano Bruno. Ten years before Galileo would take the same stance, this former Dominican friar had the temerity to assert that the sun and not the Earth was the center of the universe, earning him a spot front and center in Rome’s Campo di’ Fiore, where [...]

As a wine enthusiast I wait anxiously for autumn to arrive. The crisp, pleasant weather slowly transforms the landscape into a magnificent palette of auburn, jade, and gold, and ripens the vines to picking perfection. Fortunately, I can spend most weekends during the season admiring these vistas while getting merry [...]

Spurred on by this month’s photo contest of “Adventure Travel” (check it out here), I was curiously flipping through the virtual pages of  The Adventure Life magazine when I came across a photo essay on the entrants in this year’s 12th annual Abenteur and Allrad Overland Festival in Belgium, what [...]

By Robin Graham I bet Washington Irving didn’t have to put up with any of this. Getting a ticket to visit that great treasure of Islamic art and culture, the Alhambra — made famous by Irving himself, among others — is no easy task. It isn’t that it’s hard to [...]

Gràcia, smack in the middle of Barcelona, wasn’t always just a district in the city, but was once its own village, and as the NY Times points out in their recent photo essay on the ‘hood, “it’s never lost that village feeling and remains a jumble of narrow streets and [...]

Phoenix is a city in Arizona, but it’s also the name of a band from Paris, and their song appears in the above video featuring shots from Seville, a city in Spain. Phoenix (the city) also has a lot of people of Spanish descent. See where I’m going with this? [...]

When most food-loving people ruminate over “meccas” of global cuisine, cities like New York, Tokyo, Singapore, and Barcelona conjure instant salivation. Being a foodie is serious business, so for most, traveling to these cities for the culinary experience is not a matter of if, but when. In a recent article [...]

If you love Paris but despise the crowds, then August may be the perfect time to travel to The City of Light. Yes, it’s true that many restaurants, businesses, and cafés shut down during this month, but with half of Parisians leaving the city for annual vacations, you may just [...]