Back in 2013 I did a list of 10 Movies I would watch today, tomorrow and next week. May of these films, thankfully, seem to be in heavy rotation among long-haul airways, so you can see them without commercial interruption if you are crossing an ocean. However, I left out one movie that has to […]

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The French are not a religious people, but they continue to celebrate religious holidays most of the Christian world no longer sees as days off. Which helps explain why France has 11 national holidays this year, to eight in the United States. Ascension is one of the French religious holidays (as are Assumption and the […]

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A advantage of living in the south of France is that you are never far from the north of Spain. From the Beziers area, one can reach the border in about 90 minutes. Another half hour or so puts you near Girona as well as the Costa Brava vacation sites. Which is a nice place […]

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France has lots of exotic landscapes. People from outside the country tend to think of the mostly flat region, around Paris, when they think of France geography. Because that is what they have seen. Or maybe the hilly fields of Normandy. But a sprawling mass of land in the center of the country, known as […]

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It can be jarring or amusing to do a bit of investigation on the “flavor” of potato chips, while traveling the world. In the U.S., “original”, barbecue and sour cream-and-onion flavors probably cover about 90 percent of the chips sold. Not so in the rest of the world. In Hong Kong, shrimp-flavored potato chips are […]

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Gulf airlines always are looking for new ways to gild the lily. First class? Not good enough, for the mega-rich. Kind of down-market, really. So we have something better for you, at Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways. This is on the mammoth A380 only, for those who like to spend $20,000 on themselves to fly — […]

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After six consecutive Easter weeks in Abu Dhabi, the first in 2010, the 2016 Easter season finds me in the south of France, and attending a Maundy Thursday service in a tiny chapel in a village a half-hour drive from where we live. Again, the first big surprise is that the area has any English-language […]

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If you are interested in brand-name entertainment in this part of southern France you pretty much have to go to Montpellier, the region’s big-ish (270,000 people) city. For example, want to see a touring group from the Cirque du Soleil acrobatics/circus company? Montpellier is for you. One Cirque group played the city this weekend, bringing […]

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Consider this another example of the widely held notion that the French will eat anything. In the seaside city of Sete, near to where we are staying, the town put on a two-day event called L’oursinade — which roughly translates as the Sea Urchin Festival. The notion that a person would want to eat the […]

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Ghost towns fascinate us. The notion of a place, sinking into decrepitude but still clearly recognizable as a town or city, produces a sort of magnetic force upon tourists and others with a little extra time on their schedule. Which explains as well as anything how it was we happened to go out of our […]

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