It was 3 o’clock in the morning just North of Skopje, when the door to the compartment was pulled open and my girlfriend and I, together with an American couple, were told to step outside immediately. Still half asleep we looked at each other when one of the police officers jumped onto the seats of …
Category Archives: Travel
Seven guitars
There are seven guitars hanging off the wall in Alistair’s living room and a couple of microphones are lying on the breakfast table – signs of a monastic life dedicated to music and lyrics….. Born and bred just around the corner and living here ever since, Alistair is my perfect host in Manchester, this archetypal …
Morning run in Marseille
There are these irritating first five minutes that are hurting when going for a run in the morning. The whole body has to follow the mind, accepting that from a state of total rest and immobility all systems have to be activated to reach three times the previous heart rate, to adapt the body to …
The German Veterinary Clinic in Abu Dhabi
Rashid’s Lexus had just left Dubai’s alley of skyscrapers and while the silently running air conditioning was keeping an ambient temperature inside the car, we were driving through the desert with the blue water of the Persian Gulf on our right side. About 100 km South of us in Abu Dhabi I was planning to …
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A Museum of the Future
(or when the fine line between architecture and jewellery becomes blured……..) Entering the center of Dubai coming from the international airport, you can’t fail to notice a structure that appears to originate from out of this world and that resembles more an alien spaceship or an oversized piece of beautifully crafted jewellery, rather than a …
Dubai
“Wolfgang, you have to come to Dubai !” Sitting at a table at the historic fortress of Vysehrad overlooking Prague last June and looking into the dark eyes of Vassiliki Stathopoulou, one of Europe’s foremost veterinary gastro-enterologists and daughter of a Greek business man, I realised that resistance was futile…… Six months later, just 36 …
Tiramisu at Cafe Tortoni
It doesn’t happen very often in these days of conveyor belt serving multinational coffee chains that people are happy to queue in front of a cafe and wait for the best part of an hour before claiming their seat. This however is not an uncommon sight at 825 Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires where …
Teeth and Tegus at the Rio Plata
In front of me, on a blue table top, I am looking at a syringe, three vials of local anaesthetic and the skull of a dog…… Sucking gently through a silver bombilla on his maté, Juan Jose Krauss, the man who introduced veterinary dentistry to Argentina and in fact to many other countries in Latin …
El Chalten and Mt Fitzroy
Oh the wind, the relentless wind of El Chalten!….. If I talk about wind, then I mean the sort of wind like you haven’t witnessed it before: constant, gusting, merciless, unforgiving wind that knocks you off your feet, wind that after a while becomes irritating. Wind that can make a fairly undemanding hike in the …
The street dogs of Puerto Natales
Returning from my hiking trip in the Torres del Paine National Park, I am once again strolling pass the World’s End Bar in Puerto Natales and notice that the dog with the suspected ruptured cruciate ligament hasn’t made a lot of progress. Spending most of the day lying in front of the Bar and checking …
The Blue Vet Diary 