Wine Tours in Hungary

Ask me where you should go for a really great glass of wine and Hungary probably wouldn't be the first country out of my mouth.

But maybe I should rethink that.

According to Jamison Bachrach, owner of Wandering Puffin, a travel provider specializing in Eastern Europe, Hungary is a wine-lovers paradise.

Check out his suggested nine-day food and wine travel itinerary for Hungary.

Postcards from Pamplona

After reading When Wanders Cease to Roam, I got a bit nostalgic about my own past trips.

So much so that I dug out my box of travel souvenirs and started rifling through them.

I came across a whole stack of postcards addressed to my parents. I had written them all while a student abroad in Pamplona, Spain.

The postcards caught my eye for a couple of reasons:

First, they were addressed to my mom and dad. Had I stolen them back upon my return home or had my mom given them back to me, figuring I might want them as keepsakes?

I don't know. I don't remember anymore.

Secondly, check out my itsy-bitsy print!

How did I manage to write this small?

And not once, but on postcard after postcard.

I don't know who I feel more sorry for: My parents for having to read this or the postman for having to figure out the mailing address amidst all these words!

These postcards were all sent pre-the-dawn of email. And even though they are a pain in the butt to read, I'm glad I have them.

I wonder if these mailbox missives of mine would have survived this long if they'd been sent over the computer.

Prague Pic from the Past

I've always loved this picture I snapped in Prague many summers ago. The image is nearly eight years old and it's never been in a photo album page. Instead, it hops about my desk, moving from paper pile to paper pile. Whenever I happen upon it, I stop and smile. I've never been able to pin point exactly what it is about this orange-haired China doll that makes me smile so.

I've long since lost the negative. I probably threw it away. So this morning, when the little China girl again popped up on my desk, I decided to scan her into my computer and immortalize her in a digital way.

Kindness and Compassion, Dutch Style

I've been working on this article about an American soldier who was killed in action. He died in Germany in 1945 on the front lines of World War II.

The article I'm assigned to write isn't all that long and it's pretty tightly focused. I can't use even half the information I've gathered about him. I've interviewed his sister, daughter and wife. All of whom were so happy to speak about their lost loved one that I didn't have the heart to break them off when I had the information I needed. I let them talk and I learned something that touched my heart.

There is an American cemetery outside the village of Margraten, which is in the Netherlands, where 8,301 American soldiers are buried. Because the soldiers were buried on foreign soil and their families couldn't be there to tend the graves, ordinary Dutch citizens adopted them.

It was a system that sounds much like the adopt-a-child programs that you see advertised on TV. The Dutch families were assigned an American grave and a pen-pal exchange was set up. The Dutch visited the graves on a regular basis, brought fresh flowers, took photos of the markers and mailed letters and pictures back to the American families, who then wrote back, and so on.

The sister, daughter and wife of the fallen American soldier I spoke to couldn't say enough good things about the Dutch family that adopted the man who was their brother/father/husband. Their correspondence lasted for years and from the way they spoke about the experience, I could tell the relationship had affected them deeply.

The American family has never been to Europe, never met their assigned Dutch family. And yet.

And yet they are filled with gratitude and wonderment, even still after all these years, for the kindness and compassion paid to them by strangers.