There were bull-frogs in the creek on the other side of Wilson Heights, Jackie told us: monstrous bull-frogs, the biggest he had ever seen. He had brought one home like a warrior returning from battle with a spoil. But he said the granddaddy of them all, the Moby Dick of bull-frogs, was still in the…
Situated in the Caribbean some 63 kilometres from Venezuela, the Dutch island of Curacao is a rugged, hilly outcropping with some 160,000 inhabitants. Although most are Catholic, they represent about 80 nationalities and speak four official tongues: English, Dutch, Spanish and Papiamentu, the native lingo that is a smorgasbord of Old Dutch, Portuguese and African…
Sam Cohen, a petroleum geologist from Calgary, left Canada to work on a large oil field in the Gulf of Thailand about 1983. When his contract expired during an industry slowdown several years later, he chose to remain in the bustling capital city of Bangkok, where a forest of cranes along the skyline suggests an…
This obituary appeared in the Toronto Evening Telegram, November 2, 1925. Many at funeral of Mrs. Draimin Deceased Was One of First Jewish Citizens of Toronto In the death of Mrs. Flora Draimin, aged 83 years, wife of the late Jacob Draimin, who died at the home of her son, Archie Draimin, at 80 Beverley…
A few paces over the line between east and west, the American Colony is reputedly the finest hotel in Arab East Jerusalem, and no less steeped in legend and lore than its more famous counterpart, the King David Hotel, in the western, more prosperous section of the city. Part of the exclusive Relais & Chateaux…
Inside a large public room at Sotheby’s, the famous auction house on New Bond Street in Central London, workers are painstakingly reconstructing another room: an Islamic-style chamber that has been disassembled and shipped here from an Arabian palace. Having once graced the ancestral home of an anonymous sheik, the wood-carved ceiling, walls and floor of…
The play is again the thing in the Southwark district of London as a newly-built replica of the Globe Theatre, where some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays debuted almost 400 years ago, is set to open in late August (1997) for a three-week dramatic season. Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear,…
The town of Isfiya, in the Carmel Mountains of Israel, is so close to Haifa as to be considered almost a suburb. Yet it is markedly different. Built on the site of an ancient Jewish village, Isfiya is a Druze village, and 80 per cent of its 9,000 inhabitants are followers of the secretive, mystical…
The Biblical account of the creation of the universe is in “complete and remarkable agreement” with the latest findings of modern cosmology, notes a leading Israeli physicist who has written a book on the subject. “At least regarding the first chapter of Genesis, the era of contradiction between Torah and science is over,” says Professor…
Our first day in St. Petersburg, Russia, we took a tour that showed off the magnificence of this city of exquisite palaces, cathedrals, prospekts and Venetian-style canals. We saw the Peter and Paul Fortress, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Admiralty, the Church of the Resurrection, Nevsky Prospekt, Smolny Cathedral, miscellaneous grand palaces, Palace Square and the…
