Solo travel — curating a vacation perfectly suited to you and no one else — is the ultimate idiosyncratic experience. For some, the goal is to fully test their limits and develop confidence. Others say the allure of traveling alone lies in wholly embracing their desires and their own pace. It can also be about…
A couple of days later, I drank kava with the owners of Mana Coffee Kava Bar. Kava is a root that is dried, pounded and then soaked in water to produce a ritual beverage typically drunk on special occasions but also consumed more frequently by those who enjoy its mellowing effects. Most kava bars are…
Like rumbling thunderclouds or far-off explosions, the muffled booms broke the silence as we reclined on a slope of pulverized lava beads in a small passage near the top of a volcano in East Africa, nearly two miles up into the night sky. It was 5 a.m., and for six hours we had been scaling…
In honor of this year’s 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso, museums and other cultural institutions are pulling out all the stops, with about 50 exhibitions and events in the United States and Europe. Some offer novel perspectives on the celebrated artist’s seven-decade career: At the Cincinnati Art Museum, “Picasso Landscapes: Out of…
By Lindsey Tramuta The creative director Ramdane Touhami, co-founder of the beauty brand Officine Universelle Buly, is venturing into the literary world with his new Parisian bookstore, La Pharmacie des Âmes. Translating to “the pharmacy of souls,” the shop occupies a former 19th-century pharmacy — with all the original cabinetry preserved — in the Seventh…
Every wedding comes with a flurry of last-minute arrangements, but Sunil Dhar has an unusual task on his to-do list when his younger son gets married this June: make sure everyone is in the right country. The Dhars are from the San Francisco Bay Area. But the wedding is set to take place nearly a…
In 2021, when pandemic restrictions curtailed travel, occupancy at Getaway — a collection of 30 forested properties around the country, with tiny cabins renting from $109 a night — surged above 99 percent. “The pandemic was the perfect storm for people to get away in the woods in their own cabins, immerse in nature and…
It’s a long-haul traveler’s dream: Tired and facing a flight of 10-plus hours in the back of the plane, you watch as, one by one, passengers walk by and no one sits next to you. The cabin doors close, and that’s when it hits you: You’ve got the row to yourself. Jackpot! Now, some airlines…
When the Philippine island of Boracay was in the rogues’ gallery of destinations marred by overtourism, large sections of its 2.5-mile main White Beach were jammed with thousands of visitors and long trains of beach beds and umbrellas. Fleets of boats motored up to the sand’s edge, and multitudes of peddlers sold trips and trinkets…
The story of England’s medieval Jewish communities, she said, has “never been thought ‘important’ enough by mainstream academia, if you like, to be included as part of that narrative.” This galls her: “You cannot talk about the medieval English economy without talking about the Jewish community,” she said. “It’s ludicrous to have them excluded from…