Stop: Ortomare Restaurant, Mano-Shinmachi, Sado The town and village streets in Sado are a random assortment of inhabited houses and shops, vacant akiya, and blown out long strips of vacant lots. Structures are built in the machiya style, often about 4 to 6 meters wide, but extending back as far as they can in a…
I went to a conference at Hofstra six years ago and along the way stopped in at MOMA for a really cool exhibition–Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980. This was one of the seeds for this leg of the trip. It was a heckuva lot of Brutalism, spomeniks, and some Japanese Metabolism to…
Stops: Galle Face Hotel, Pettah Market, Number 11 (Days 61-64) A couple of days before heading out to Sri Lanka I started reading “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” by Shehan Karunatilaka and finished it just as we flew into Bandaranaike International Airport outside Colombo. A taxi from the hotel was waiting to take us…
First stop in Medan: Grand Mosque of Medan (Day 11) The evening of my arrival, as I wandered about looking for something to eat and just checking out the city, I just barely caught a glimpse of the spire atop the minaret. First, first stop. I have not had a chance to visit many mosques–before…
