Here’s what it’s like to Spend the Night in Chernobyl

Look online and the Hotel Desyatka appears on booking sites like most other hotels. A quick Google search will tell you that it consists of, “Basic lodging on leafy grounds, offering a cozy restaurant/pub, plus free parking and breakfast.” There’s even a Trip Advisor entry complete with favourable customer reviews and its own website that…

Korean Cowboys of the Old World

Wisemen, dapper dudes, cowboys of the far east– I’m not really sure what to call them, I just know I’ve been charmed by these old world photographs of Korean style captured by visiting foreigners before the country was torn in half. It all started with this photograph from the Cornell University Library, of a Korean boatman…

Curiosity du Jour: Antique Intaglio Seals

When we stopped writing letters, it wasn’t just our penmanship that went down the toilet, but the entire art of letter-writing, and all the romance and ceremony that came with it. Arguably the loveliest victim to have disappeared from our desks in the wake of its decline? The intaglio seal. Intaglio seals, essentially engraved gems,…

Little Tuscany in the Heart of Paris

As if plucked from a 17th century Mediterranean estate waiting to transport Parisians to the hills of Florence; tucked away in a corner of Paris’ Luxembourg gardens is one of the city’s most underrated beauty spots. The Medici Fountain, crowned with an Italian grotto and flanked by ivy drapes, is an impossibly romantic place alluding…

All the Clichés of Paris Tourism in one Delightful 1950s Cartoon

Feeling down about the prospect of another summer without Paris? We have something from the archives that might cheer your up. Made in 1958 by French cartoonist Albert Champeaux, “Paris Flash” is a satirical cartoon about Parisian life and tourism of the era. This would have been shown to audiences in Parisian cinemas, just before the film. It’s all…

The Place Where World War One Planes Still Fly

Wander through the quaint, old fashioned town of Rhinebeck in New York’s Hudson Valley, and you may feel as though you’ve stepped back to another era. Especially when you look up into the sky: for its quite common to see vintage airplanes circling high above all day long, the distinctive sound of old, single propeller…

Behind the Barbed Wire Mansion of a Fallen City’s Millionaire Row

The once ornate staircase that leads to the crumbling mansion, is cracked and falling apart. The old, sculpted gardens have been over run with weeds, surrounded by fences of razor sharp barbed wire. Its once grand spires and turrets overlook a landscape of forbidding housing projects and the desolate lots of one of America’s most…

The Mysterious Chapel of Prosthetic Limbs

New Orleans is a city blessed with many beguiling and beautiful cemeteries. From the celebrated, above ground crumbling mausoleums of St. Louis No.1, the faded gothic grandeur of the walled-in Lafayette, to the curious secret society graveyards of the Metarie. But by far the most enchanting, and by equal measures, peculiar, is the St. Roch… The…

The Last Great Dive Bar of Old Times Square

Ask any New Yorker how they feel about a visit to Times Square, and most likely you will be met with a withering stare, if not an audible and inward groan. With good reason; for despite being packed with millions of selfie stick brandishing visitors every year, coming to a New York landmark as iconic…

The Vault

The Mysterious Murder of the Beautiful Cigar Girl

High on a hilltop in Brooklyn’s historic Greenwood cemetery, is an imposing mausoleum. Written large on the granite stone lintel is the name John Anderson. He was once the owner of an upscale tobacconist’s in Lower Manhattanm but one hundred and seventy six years ago, he was also at the centre of one of the…

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