Posts by Rick Juliusson
For Americans Wearing Canadian Flags
At a bar the other night I met yet another three Americans who laughingly admitted to wearing a Canadian flag when travelling. Here’s what I wish I’d said to them. What part of you can possibly think that’s okay?! “People treat us better,” is inevitably your reason. Sometimes hiding behind a “We don’t like our…
Read MoreYou Can’t Paint Over Poverty
Everything I wrote in my “Extreme Makeover Tirana” post was true – for me. The murals and painted buildings make every walk an adventure, and the brave new architecture is literally fantastic. But fading rainbows and optimistic green arrows can’t mask the continued hard times for the average Albanian. The young woman in the photo…
Read MoreExtreme Makeover – Tirana, Albania
Grey – I couldn’t imagine any colour but grey. We have come to Albania because the only image I could conjure was rows of bleak featureless communist-era cement buildings. Populated by grey, emotionally-flattened post-Communist-era people. My Western cold-war propaganda indoctrination sunk in deep. Antiquated propaganda-based assumptions are inevitably wrong, as they thankfully are here. The…
Read MoreCold ASS, Warm Quakers and a Hot Vicar – Alderney
Our first exposure to Alderney’s ASS occurs at the Nunnery. The venerable Alderney Swim & Soup club has kindly invited us for a polar plunge that they do every morning. Though not every morning has 30mph winds blowing the 4 degrees air over the 6 degrees water. And no-one told us that they all wear…
Read MoreHike Around Alderney (all 10 miles of it)
The sweet and salty are swirled together. Beauty framed by tragedy, today’s Peace tinged by yesterday’s war, carefree days more poignant after last night’s nightmares. Alderney is a yin-yang paradise of light layered over a heavy, dark past. On a warm (10 degrees) sunny (ish) February morn we set out to walk around the entire…
Read MoreWalking with Jane Austen
North Waltham is “a village and civil parish in the borough of Basingstoke and Deane in Hampshire, England.” With one school, one store, one church and two pubs, it is a very ordinary and properly-proportioned English town (except that neither of the pubs show live soccer matches!) What distinguishes North Waltham is that one of…
Read MoreSpeaking English in London
For the past 6 months we’ve been functioning primarily in French & Spanish while trying to decipher Turkish and Arabic. Does that sign say Open or Closed, Push or Pull? Is this baking powder or baking soda? Is the yoga teacher telling us to lock our knees or clench our bums? It’s been exciting to…
Read MoreFeelin’ Easy-ahh in Tunisia
We chose Tunisia rather randomly – the cheapest nearby country to fill 2 weeks before our upcoming UK housesit – and very ignorantly worried that it might just be a continuation of our Moroccan experience. More mosques, more North African landscape and culture, more medina market peddlers and walled old cities and offers of camel…
Read More2024 – A Review and a Rewrite
When it came time to write the traditional Family Christmas letter, I was stuck. After 61 blog posts, was there anything new to say? So I took a deep breath and re-read every post, beginning to end, Minnesota to Morocco. While there wasn’t much to be added, there was an arc, a development or evolution…
Read MoreMorocco through fresh eyes (and professional lens)
One of the most humbling and joyous achievements of parenthood is watching your children get better than you. I have been quite good at lot of things, then watched my own flesh and blood do them even better. Zekiah blasts past me in soccer, logical thinking, even professional networking these days. Galen’s fingers dance beyond…
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