Returning to the city of my youth always feels like slipping into a comfortable pair of jeans – familiar yet somehow different each time. Christchurch has transformed dramatically since the devastatin...
Last autumn, during a brief teaching sabbatical, I found myself wandering the rain-slicked streets of Paris's 16th arrondissement, deliberately avoiding the tourist throngs queuing outside the Louvre....
The first time I stepped into Shinjuku Station after a twelve-year absence from my father's homeland, I felt simultaneously at home and utterly bewildered. The station—handling over two million passen...
The first time I visited Avignon, I made the classic tourist mistake. Armed with my ##AFFILIATE##Lonely Planet France|Lonely Planet France##/AFFILIATE## and a checklist mentality, I spent an entire da...
Paris has long been synonymous with world-class museums, elegant boulevards, and café culture. But as someone who's spent countless hours in saddles of various kinds—from racehorses in New Zealand to...
As I stood watching the Atlantic waves crash against the seawall near Hassan II Mosque, I couldn't help but think of my mother's restoration work on historic buildings back in Auckland. She would have...
Paris and I have a complicated relationship. Like many travelers, I initially fell for her grand monuments—the Eiffel Tower's iron elegance, Notre-Dame's Gothic splendor, the Louvre's artistic abundan...