PLURAL MAGAZINE

Friday, December 10, 1897We leave at 1 o'clock in the morning. Description of the Toro. The fat captain and his unremitting thirst. I go to sleep in the mechanic's cabin (or room, or whatever). Wine and alcohol on the table. The first mechanic is drunk all the

When I set out to New Zealand, I had a tape recorder and a tape with the bells from Putna monastery. And during the long flight, from Bucharest to Wellington – approximately 30 hours on the plane, plus two stopovers – I would listen to the bells from Putna and to the

excerpt The first encounter with the coral reefs occurred near the island of Pari, by the northwestern coast of Java, on the 12th of March 1991, a memorable day as, in the morning, we had also captured, in the shallow waters of the lagoon, a beautiful Python reticulates

The theatre is a rather faithful reflection of a people's mores. The Japanese theatre is superior to and different from the Chinese one, in which neither the art, nor the artistic appreciation or the realism of the Japanese theatre can be found. Heightened to the status

You will be totally shocked! You will live a unique experience! You will have nothing to regret! Japan is not like other countries. These are not just some sentences whispered by friends or statements made by colleagues. They were my suppositions before leaving for Japan.

For centuries now, every once in three years, The Feast of Immortality – Kumbh Mela, takes place alternatively in four Indian centers : Allahabad and Hardwar (Uttar Pradesh state), Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh) and Nasik (Maharashtra). Descending from Vedic mythology, the feast

Journeying to people instead of places is the reverse of the current, holiday-bound view on travels. Indeed, the projected picturesque of the surprising landscapes is the main constituent mesmerizing people into moving at great distances, sometimes despite the difficulties

excerptI will never forget the nights spent with Bogdanof and Van Manen around Calcutta, in Serampore and Titagarh. Bogdanof, who had been the consul of the Tsarist Empire to Teheran and Kabul for ten years, was at the time my teacher of Persian. He had made friends with

C. H. R. – I was telling myself: how can a man like Mircea Eliade experience the diversity of idioms, cultures, fatherlands, abodes, countries? I begin to understand this now and yet would like to ask you how fatherland and the world interrelate in your inner self?M. E.

Sometime in April the old and refined Victorianist Robert Langbaum came to Virginia in order to hold a conference at our university. Going out for a meal, I mentioned that I was going to spend a week in Hong Kong at the beginning of May for professional purposes. He answered

A visit which lasts barely a week, spent most of the time in meeting and conference rooms or on the plane, cannot possibly be conclusive. You are astonished by the gentle, harmonious and calming lines of the roofs in the beautiful Forbidden City of the former emperors. You

excerptsAlthough if you observe it partially and with amusement the Chinese landscape may look like any other landscape, the fundamental impression is of being on another planet. The soil suggests here that the matter froze quickly while boiling and it stood still in dramatic