I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this. It was fun because it was a mystery and a romance, and also pretty funny. Easy and entertaining. (That's what I've been in the mood for lately.)
We took a train from Rome to Ancona, Italy, where we had a one-day stop. Ancona is about ¾ of the way up the east coast, on the Adriatic Sea. The next evening we planned to take an overnight ferry to Split, Croatia, so this seemed like a simple transfer place, but Ancona is a really neat city itself! At night I wandered around and ended up hiking to a functioning lighthouse. The stone sign is at 104 meters above sea level, about 341 feet. Our neighborhood had some nice murals / graffiti: Here is a view out over a pentagonal building formerly used as a quarantine colony, a little island right by the city, open to the public: There are quite a few drinking fountains scattered all over, and all the ones we tried worked! This is the correct way for a city to be. It is very hilly, with stairs and steep roads all over. Many narrow little alleys between buildings, and connecting passages and staircases up and down hills, between houses, churches, and pa...
Malta’s long history is very interesting, including what is widely thought to be the shipwreck by the apostle Paul in AD 60 described in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles chapter 28 , the last chapter in Acts. Later there was a period where the inhabitants were killed and it was mostly unpopulated, then was resettled around AD 1049 by a Muslim community and their slaves, who rebuilt a ruined city and called it Mdina after the Arabian Madīnah / Medina. Eventually Christians reconquered the island, yet the Arabic dialect spoken by the population remained, with new Christian faith. Here is one example, a guest house called Dar is-Sliem, “house of peace” in Maltese, similar to Dar es Salaam in Arabic, the largest city in Tanzania: Nowadays Malta is a strongly Catholic country. This is evident in many ways. Visually it is obvious in the large in the many, many churches on the islands. In the small, see the very common house devotional niċċa (niches) and shrines that are al...
About a month ago I went on a day trip with my friend Иван Чакаров (Ivan Chakarov) to the south-central Bulgarian city Кърджали (Kardzhali) , which is about a 95 km bus ride from Plovdiv and which lies about 60 km north of the border with Greece. I was on a quest to find another Bulgarian friend I knew from my mission in Germany who I'd lost contact with. (Keeping in touch with people who moved around in the pre-Internet era was not easy!) This friend had long lived in Kardzhali and said it was a beautiful place he planned to go back to. The chance we would find him 22 years later was small, but it was worth a try and was a good reason to go see a different part of Bulgaria in the Rhodope mountains. We came close to finding him. We found his old apartment and people who knew him, and he supposedly still lives in Kardzhali. But after much trying, we were not able to find him. The journey was interesting and mostly fun, and we got to see the river, city, suburbs, memorials, fores...
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