Perhaps you meant to spend a little more time studying Spanish before your trip, or if you did, your mind just happened to draw a blank the second you got yourself and your bags into the taxi. ¿A dónde quieres ir? Uh… where’s that phrasebook? Nothing’s better than speaking the language—even if you can’t do...

Until I visited Colombia, I thought that my favorite hot chocolate was from Mexico. The dose of cinnamon (and sometimes, chile) has caused me to squirrel away a box of Ibarra or Abuelita for those moments when I crave it. But then, in Bogotá, I found something that was even better. Chocolate Santafereño is, at...

Damascus, Syria "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," wrote Charles Dickens in the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities . He was referring to life in an area of Europe in the late 1700s, but one could also feasibly slap this line into a book about overnights...