As I travel the globe, there is one thought I have most every place I go: “My mother would have loved this.” I felt it palpably last Saturday night as I sat in Lisbon and listened to the old men of the neighborhood sing Fado music. I felt it on the first leg of […]
OFF-SEASON TRAVELERS
There’s high season. There’s low season. Then there’s January 27th. One of the great joys of traveling for a whole year is that for large swaths of time, you get the world to yourself.
AN ARTIST IN BARCELONA
As we explore the planet, one of our favorite things is getting up in other people’s business. Our M.O. is “Shoot first and ask questions later.” At El Ingenio, a shop dedicated to papier-mâché costumes, puppets and carnival masks since 1830, we slipped quietly into the back room and filmed the artist in his workshop. He […]
FOUR FAVORITE FILMS (SO FAR)
As of this writing — at the unofficial halfway point of our journey — we have made 68 short films. We make these “souvenir films” for two main reasons: To share our experiences with our friends and virtual travel companions around the world — and ultimately for ourselves, so one day when our memory fails […]
THIS IS WHAT 10 LOOKS LIKE
Today we celebrate the first decade of Finn. Happy birthday to a remarkable kid — philosopher, writer, muse, pool shark, geography expert, the original Optimistic Eye, our travel companion and guide. He surely has more stamps in his passport than most ten years olds on the planet — and he even knows how especially lucky […]
KERALA SUNSET
We’ve seen a lot of sunsets on our journey — but only one worth making a movie about. They call Kerala “God’s Own Country.” Maybe these images help explain why. With this short film, we bid farewell (namaskār) to India. When we arrived in this country, the kids were a little afraid to step out […]
FINN REPORTS: OUR (YOUNG) MAN IN INDIA
In Varanasi, we spent a day visiting the 18-year old son of our close friends. Willy Gansa has been living there since September, participating in the Bridge Year Program before he begins his freshman year at Princeton University next fall. We asked our own young cub reporter Finn Flackett-Levin to write about Willy and our […]
NOW WE’VE SEEN EVERYTHING!
We thought we knew India — until we traveled south to Kerala. Kerala is a land that seems almost more like Southeast Asia than the India of our imaginations. The region is tropical, one hundred percent of the people there have at least a high school degree, and the region retains a strong colonial influence. While […]
LAUNDRY DAY
When we set out, we knew laundry management would be one of the big challenges of the trip. In general, it’s been easier than we expected and we’ve only gotten down to our emergency underwear supply on a couple occasions. More often than not, we find a place that will wash our clothes for us […]
THIS IS WHAT IT IS
This is the Samrat Yantra, which means the Supreme Instrument. It stands 27 meters tall with its shadow moving visibly at 1mm per second making it the world’s largest sundial. Checking it against the clock on our phones, the time on this sundial is remarkably exact — and it’s so large that you can literally […]