Archive for the 'Travel' Category
Climbing down a coal shaft and up a castle keep in Wales
Seeing how both halves lived
We were descending a into 300-foot-deep Welsh coal mine, hard hats firmly in place, watches and anything else with batteries removed because the law requires it to prevent a spark that could set off flammable methane gas. 
Our guide, a former miner, grinned and joked. We laughed nervously. If you want a memorable experience, visiting “The Big Pit,” an hour’s drive north of Cardiff, is high on the agenda!
Berlin sculptures tell of women who defied Nazis
Protest at Rosenstrasse by non-Jewish women saved their Jewish husbands and sons
In a small park just off Karl Liebnechtstrasse in former East Berlin stands an extraordinary group of reddish pink sculptures called “Block der Frauen,” the block of women. German sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger, an artistic refugee from the Nazis, chiseled them to commemorate an extraordinary event that occurred at that site in February 1943. 
The Nazis had rounded up some 2500 Jewish men and boys, the husbands and sons of non-Jewish women, and imprisoned them at Rosenstrasse 2-4, the Jewish Community Center to gather them for deportation to death. The women found out where the men had been taken and converged there. From 600 the protests grew to 6,000. The guards pointed machine guns at them and threatened to open fire. The women held their ground.
After a week, propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who indicated in his diary that he was worried about the protest’s public relations impact in Germany and abroad, ordered that the Jews with Aryan spouses or parents be released. And then the event seemed to vanish from history.
Why didn’t we know about this? Why is it still generally believed that no one could challenge the Nazis and live?
A visit to the KGB: Spy agency opens the door to a world of secrets
I was having dinner at the Moscow apartment of Tatiana Kudryavtseva, the Russian translator for books by Graham Greene, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, John Updike and William Styron, among others. But it wasn’t a literary evening. The other guest was Rufina 
Philby, widow of the British spy. Tatiana knew her through Greene, who had written a preface to Philby’s memoir.
Rufina, or Rutchka, as Tatiana called her, was disarming, referring to Kim as “the spy” and recounting how they’d met in Moscow when a friend couldn’t use a ticket to the U.S. Ice Capades. The couple going with her invited Kim. She recalled how depressed he’d been in his Russian exile until the KGB finally gave him a job–training spies to behave as proper Brits so they’d pass easily in England.
I asked if she’d been to the KGB Museum I’d heard about.
“I’ve never been there,” she said. “I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t know there was one.”
That turned out to be far from the truth.
Where to Stay in London
Planning a visit to our cousins, the Brits? In London, there are several main areas best to stay in. Most convenient is the West End — known as “Theatreland.” You can move further west and live near one of the big parks or squares — Green Park or Grosvenor.
Here is the majestic Millennium Britannia in Grosvenor Square. 
Or you can choose to be in Knightsbridge, Chelsea or Kensington, the trendy areas that are minutes from downtown by tube and have the flavor of an upscale Greenwich Village and Upper West Side. I checked out hotels in each of those neighborhoods.
Venice’s elegant Bauer and boutique 18th-century Il Palazzo
Sitting on the “Bar Canale” terrace for breakfast, gazing at the 17th century Church of Santa Maria della Salute across the Grand Canal, I could imagine the lazy mornings of the Venice nobles who once owned the Bauer Il Palazzo.
They might have finished their coffees and walked the five minutes to the Palace of the Doges, where government business was carried out.
BCCI and the Bushes
Lucy Komisar writes about the criminal offshore bank BCCI and the way it connected the Bushes, the Saudis, Saddam and Osama bin Laden 
in her chapter, “BCCI’s Double Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad,” in ”A Game As Old As Empire.”
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