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Category / Editor’s Picks

One Village, 150 Street Artists: A Sleepy Tunisian Town turned Vibrant Open Air Museum

Everywhere you turn in Er-Riadh, there’s art. It’s everywhere. The ancient village on the Tunisian island of Djerba, has spent the last several months of high summer being slowly transformed from a sleepy, traditional little corner of North Africa that has never heard of street art, into a world stage for one of the most vibrant and ambitious…

Fake Chalets: Unmasking the Bunkers disguised as Quaint Swiss Villas

Traditional wood green shutters, lace curtains, Swiss chalet beams; all the makings of a quaint little villa in the woods. But strangely, the windowpanes don’t reflect the sunlight and on closer approach, the house looks impossibly narrow. Because this is no quaint Swiss chalet but rather a military bunker in disguise. Architectural fakery is one of…

Palestine’s Paradise: A Mediterranean Valley of Vines

These are not the rolling hills of Tuscany. This is the Palestinian village of Battir in the West Bank hills near Bethlehem; a land of olive groves, grape vines, fig trees and seven natural springs that feed ancient agricultural terraces of rich soil planted with green beans, zucchini and eggplant so sweet you can eat it like a cucumber.…

Hundreds of Awesome Vintage Sea Flags hidden away in a Museum

It’s amazing what secret treasures museums don’t display. Hidden away in the back rooms of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England are 1000’s of flags used to identify navy vessels and shipping lines throughout history. The museum is constrained by conservation and space resources but they’ve done a very good job of documenting most of them in an…

For Sale! Former Methodist Church, complete with Spacious Graveyard

So you’d have to share your backyard with a few dozen other souls resting (or not resting) under the ground– minor details! Check out this church up for sale as a home/ retreat in the Catskills, just 90 miles from New York city. With a roomy 2,500 square feet including a working bell tower and organ, it’s…

The Cliff-hanging Castle at the Mouth of a Hidden Cave Network

Riddled with secret passageways and narrow shafts into the mountainous cave network of south Slovenia, Predjama Castle is what legends are made of. Built in the 11th century, it made a name for itself when a rebellious knight, a real-life Robin Hood of sorts, locked himself inside the fortress at the mouth of a cave for a year and…

Lost & Found: A Dad’s Dos & Don’ts for his American Girl in Paris

I was walking around Marie Antoinette’s gardens this weekend in Versailles when I spotted a folded white piece of paper on the ground. No one else was in sight in the frosty orchard to claim it, so I picked it up and continued on our brisk walk, not thinking much of it until we returned home that evening. What…

Surfing in a Concrete Jungle: Munich’s Gnarly Subculture

Since the late 1960s, surfers have been gathering by the shallow banks of a small and cold river that flows through a local park in downtown Munich. A city better known for its beer drinking and pretzels has become the unlikely home of a surfing mecca for urban individualists riding a river wave far from the ocean……

Sunset Snooping in an Abandoned Roadside Chateau

So I’ll pick up where I left off yesterday. We were taking the scenic route back to Paris via bumpy country roads and soaking up the last of the Sunday sun, when we rolled through a tiny village called Bréau… Without a soul in sight, the village seemed forgotten by the rest of the world. Even McDonalds hasn’t…

The Met Museum has a Serious Shoe Fetish

If you think you or a girlfriend have an out of control shoe collection, check out the Museum of Metropolitan Art and think again. Comprised of more than 5,000 examples, the Met’s permanent collection of shoes should probably have their own museum. Boasting some incredibly rare and unusual styles from around the world and dating from the fourteenth…

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