Tag: Travel
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A Bigger Safari: Nakusp Hot Springs, the Kootenays, and a Weekend With No Wifi
Earlier I wrote about our small Kamloops safari to Isobel Lake, where the big game was a herd of cattle and the gentle residents were a goose family on the water. The weekend before I fly to Nairobi, we went on a bigger safari still. Mama, Oksana, and Svitlana and I packed up and drove…
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From a Stockholm Visa to a Nairobi eTA: What Commitment to Social Work and Social Development Looks Like
On my bed this week, laid out on a checkered cloth, sit the small documents that make a big journey possible: a Canadian passport, a Republic of Kenya eTA, a TMVC International Certificate of Vaccinations, and the familiar yellow International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Looked at one way, it is just paperwork. Looked at…
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He Was Already There. A Pilgrimage to Lisbon, Portugal. Shevchenko, March 16 Story
Day Eight. The same poet. At the edge of Europe, above the river that flows to the ocean. Lisbon, and the People Who Made It Home I came to Lisbon twice, in the autumn of 2022 and again in the autumn of 2023, and both times the city gave me more than I had arrived…
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He Was Already There. A Pilgrimage to Paris, France. Shevchenko, March 15 Story
Day Seven. The same poet. The city that gave him a square. The Long Way to Paris I did not plan Paris. Paris arrived the way certain gifts arrive, sideways, through the logic of a schedule that was already full, through an itinerary that had been built around something else entirely and then suddenly, improbably,…
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He Was Already There. A Pilgrimage to Prague, Czech Republic. Shevchenko, March 14 Story
Day Six. The same poet. The city that printed his words when his empire banned them. The 6 A.M. Train There is a particular discipline to the early morning train. Not the romantic kind of early, not the pre-dawn departure into mystery, but the practical kind: the alarm at five, the dark streets, the station…
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He Was Already There. A Pilgrimage to Zagreb, Croatia. Shevchenko, March 13 Story
Day Five. The same poet. The golden hour found him first. The Night Train from Split There is a particular quality to arriving somewhere by night train that no other form of travel replicates. You board in one world, surrender to motion and darkness and the rhythm of wheels on track, and when you wake,…
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He Was Already There. A Pilgrimage to Bratislava, Slovakia. Shevchenko, March 12 Story
Day Four. The same poet, a different logic of arrival. The Detour That Was Not Optional There is a particular kind of decision that does not feel like a decision at all. It arrives fully formed, already made, and all you are doing is catching up to what you already know you will do. Standing…
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He Was Already There. A Pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. Shevchenko, March 11 Story
The Weekend That Should Not Have Been Possible In 2007, Air Canada did something it has never done again and probably will never do again for such a low price. For a brief, improbable window, it offered a pass, an all-you-can-fly arrangement over weekends in low season that let you board any available seat on…
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He Was Already There. A Pilgrimage to Vienna, Austria. Shevchenko, March 10 Story
Day Two. The same poet, a different city, a different kind of finding. The City I Lived In Without Exploring For one month, Vienna was my address. I had an Airbnb there, a base, a place to return to between trains and planes, the kind of temporary home that a certain kind of traveller accumulates…
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He Was Already There. A Pilgrimage to Kranj, Slovenia. Shevchenko Day, March 9
Today is March 9. Shevchenko Day. The birthday of Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko, born in 1814 in the village of Moryntsi, Kyiv region, into serfdom, into an empire that did not believe he had the right to a language, and who became, against every odds, the voice that gave that language back to an entire people.…
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From Delft Boots to Transcona Rails: A Marketplace Journey of Memory, Community, and Home
One evening, while gently scrolling through Marketplace with no particular plan, a small image caught my eye, a pair of tiny Delft-blue wooden boots. It was one of those moments when memory moves faster than thought. Instantly, I was back in the Netherlands, walking through Delft in November, admiring the delicate blue ceramics in shop…
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Why I Sometimes Post About Beautiful Sunsets Instead of the War
When I travelled through Europe this year, the contrast broke something in me. When I spoke at the conferences with social workers from Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, people are preparing. Not loudly. Not dramatically. But you see it in how they talk, in what they’re building, in how they look east. In Prague, the awareness is…