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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

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

The parallel journals of two travelers, separated by more than three centuries, who crossed Asia from the west to the east, following the same route to the capital of China, offers us a human measure of the passage of time. Double photographs of the same places, even the

As I said in the above-written, the Chinese religion has three important parts, of which the most important, the philosophical one, is at the same time the oldest of all and the most respected and praised among the people. It has many followers and, instead of God, they

You do not need a passport to travel to Egypt or to any other English colony. A visit card will do. In Alexandria, I made friends with the tropical flora: date trees that bear almost 100 kg of fruit each year, bananas or the cursed fruits because they grow without any effort

*On Handak street, which meets Anastase street a few steps away from the place where I'd eaten, the bustle was at its height. Although lazy and indifferent when they have nothing to do, Arabs are very much alive and quick when there's a chance of making some money.

excerpt Big scandal occasioned by Remembrance Day and Independence Day (Yom Ha-Zikaron, Yom Ha-Hatzmaut), because the Minister of the Armed Forces ordered 40,000 Israeli flags in Taiwan instead of the domestic industry, preferring foreign silk,and this friend of mine who

The moral picturesque is associated, in Dimitrie Ralet's Travel Souvenirs and Impressions from Romania, Bulgaria, Constantinople, 1858, with the ethnographic and lexical picturesque (He was a scrawny Turk, dressed in shalwar, jelek [vest] and kebe [cloak], with a raggedy

On this clear morning destined for the departure for Delphi I am unconsoled at having to leave Athens, where everything measures up to the artistic emotion. The distance between Athens and Delphi, on a well-kept road, is 243 kilometres. The itinerary includes a halt, around

excerpts We travel leisurely. The other passengers are discreet and nice. We cross a few borders almost without knowing it. After passing through Hungary without complications, we already believe in our lucky stars. Everyone's tongue loosens, recalling an episode of