Recent
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The Colorado Plateau: Canyonlands
Canyonlands is a vast and vastly underrated National Park. While it doesn’t have as many iconic sights and trails like its next-door neighbor Arches, it is one of those parks, like the Grand Canyon and Crater Lake, that defy reason, its immensity reminding us of our own smallness in time and place, its wonder the reason we explore and experience the natural world around us. It is the last of the Utah Mighty Five that I visited and it is just as awe-inspiring as the others. My first foray was an afternoon visit to the Island in the Sky district,…
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The Colorado Plateau: Arches
Arches is perhaps the most appropriately named National Park in the United States given that it is home to dozens and dozens of natural arches. The natural arch is a bewildering phenomenon and one that, at least in my eyes, rarely gets old. I have seen plenty of sea-bound arches in my time but these sandstone arches are something else entirely. Created by water and ice, which are not exactly abundant in the high desert, and sculpted by wind, the bright ochre formations come in a myriad of shapes and sizes, each unique in its own way, each telling a…
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The Colorado Plateau: Mesa Verde
I visited Mesa Verde National Park on a gloomy and drizzly day as the weather took an unfortunate turn from the glorious early autumn of the day before. As I drove up the side and across the mesa, I cursed my fate. What should have been a grandiose landscape awakening to a rising sun instead was a mass of dark shapes, like slumbering giants, visible but barely through the rain pittering and pattering on my windshield. My rental car’s wiper controls added to my distress, as they worked in the complete opposite direction as every other car in existence, perhaps…
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The Colorado Plateau: The Black Canyon
In a last-minute decision, I recently decided to adventure out west again and visit a few national parks on the Colorado Plateau. I had originally planned to visit Italy as I have yet to explore Pompeii, which is somewhat peculiar given my avid interest in ancient history, and I also wanted to stop by Sicily, the land of the original Eureka, fulcrum of the Punic wars, one of the Muslim world’s bastions in Europe, the target of a lesser-known but just-as-consequential Norman invasion, and the site of one of the most active volcanoes in the world. But the planning became…
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Food and Memory
On every visit to Istanbul, I make time to have Iskender kebap at Han Restaurant. A simple but decadent concept with origins dating back to the late 19th century, the kebap is sliced doner meat spread over toasted pita pieces, covered with tomato sauce and then slathered with melted butter, typically at the moment of serving. Yogurt is common; I always get it on the side. Some people (typically hyperbolic tour guides) claim the meal is named for Alexander the Great (Iskender is the Turkish variant of Alexander) but it is actually the name of the family that created it…
