This last June and July, my wife and I spent a month in Paris, based in a charming apartment located in the 16th arrondissement in the Passy neighborhood on the west side of the city. We dined out daily, were visited by friends, shopped like locals, and in general tried to get a feel for […]
Herewith, an unvarnished diary of the Spoiled Guest’s 12-day trip to the Maldives, via Istanbul, late last year: October 30 -31, 2024 The Turkish Airlines check-in desks at JFK Terminal 1 are unmanned when we arrive in late afternoon. (turns out they only open 4 hours before the next flight, note to self), so we […]
Samuel Johnson is widely misquoted as observing that when a man is tired of Paris, he is tired of life (he was actually talking about London). I have happily misquoted him every time I visited Paris over the last 30 or so years, because the essence of the observation seemed irrefutable: there is so much […]
Last Spring, the Spoiled Guest toured several favorite spots in Europe — Paris, Lake Garda in Italy, Vienna, Saltzburg, and Munich. There follows an unvarnished, essentially verbatim diary of the trip, with an emphasis on hotels and restaurants that we hope fellow travelers will find useful and entertaining! Thurs. 5/24 Arrive Paris around 6:30 am […]
Travel in the current age has become more of an inward journey than a geographical or cultural one. The lobby of every urban hotel now resembles the airport one left to get to it, and all airports are in the end the same. Cities borrow ceaselessly from one another’s cuisines, architectures, and entertainments, until only […]
Spoiled Guest 