Ibn Ibn Battuta

Aveiro: the 'Portuguese Venice' Proves a Good Catch

All on its own, the town of Aveiro might have justified our entire road trip through Portugal and southern Spain.

On the Atlantic coast halfway between Lisbon and Porto, a wide expanse of salt marshes surrounds Aveiro. They begin at the town's edge, and stretch to the horizon in a geometric array of shallow ponds and grassy dikes. This patchwork, and the occasional ramshackle pump house, are the relics of Aveiro's once famous but now fading saltworks.

The town itself - perfectly quaint like every other settlement in Portugal - straddles a series of canals plied by brightly painted gondolas. In this

Paris: A Week of Living Right in the City of Lights

After four months in Fes – a medieval city in every possible sense – Jacqueline and I needed a break. Over New Year’s, we spent a week in Paris, reconnecting with Western civilization through a seven-day hedonistic binge (well-deserved, we felt) of gastronomic delights, French wines, and – most exciting of all – bicycling.

Vélib’, Paris’s citywide bike sharing system, has reinvented the city with a simple model: pick out a bicycle from one of the 1,450 stations (roughly one every 300 meters throughout the city), ride anywhere you please, and return it

The Birds and the Bees, the Flowers and the Trees

Tanzania map

Our ecology class enjoyed an exciting first week. Each morning a few of us joined Dino on an optional morning walk, which consisted of us walking for an hour or two down one of the dirt roads around the university, pointing to birds, bugs and plants and making Dino tell us the fascinating story of each one.

Early on we spotted red-breasted sunbirds, black kites, pied kingfishers, mousebirds with their long, flowing tails, red-cheeked cordon bleus and numerous other birds.

Later we happened upon a colony of Safari Ants, known as siafu in Swahili, and learned from Dino that this dangerous species has been known to occasionally eat babies, and is even capable of significantly harming adult humans – particularly drunk ones who pass out along the roadside late at night and wake

Mwanza: Back to School in Hyena Country

Tanzania map

Though not the smallest puddlejumper in Africa, the plane we took from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza last Saturday still looked to me like a small-scale model of a real airplane. Nonetheless, it shuttled us from the metropolis of Dar on the Indian Ocean coast to the rock-strewn shores of Lake Victoria without incident. We passed above the plains of central Tanzania and descended toward Mwanza in late afternoon as the sun illuminated the region's unusual, gravity-defying rock formations and corn fields. The lake sparkled, dotted with islands and the day's last fishing boats.

The one-room airport, wholly devoid of any security apparatus, would later prove an apt representation of the laid-back small-town atmosphere of Mwanza, Tanzania's second-largest city after Dar es Salaam - and a distant second to be sure.