A recent testament to the healthy properties of the Mediterranean Diet, specifically the Greek diet, has inspired us here at UnTours. (Read the entire article in last week’s NY TImes magazine here: The Island Where People Forget to Die) This article profiles a Greek WWII veteran, Stamatis Moraitis, who came to the US in 1943,…
This is post number 1 of 6 in a series covering my 5 weeks in Greece, Istanbul and Italy. The other posts are linked at the bottom of this post. What is an Italo-phile like me to do when planning a vacation outside of Italy? Go to Greece! Prior to my overseas work assignment (more…
Have you ever seen a face more likely to be someone you could make friends with? This is Christos, and Enid and Bob happily got the chance to see just how handy a friend can be. 1. Our most recent UnTour was two weeks of hiking, sightseeing and immersing ourselves in the beauty of…
A good bag, water bottle, wipes and snacks are essentials for travel. OK, so he is a big boy preschooler now. But my son was a toddler when I took him and his daddy to Italy with me for a work trip. And in getting ready for the journey, I felt my travel systems were…
Photo by Maryland GovPics Brooklyn-based IceStone, the producers of countertops and flooring made out of recycled glass, was under 5 feet of water from Sandy. Here is a news story about that. They are still without most of their power. Several other foundation loan recipients, like Cheryl Stevens, who normally work 16-hour days, lost business…
UnTourists & Christos’s family, at their home for a dinner. (that’s me on the far right) Many of our Greek UnTourists comment on the extraordinary warmth of the Greek people they meet. (To be clear, many UnTourists comment on the warmth and friendliness of the people they meet on all their UnTours. We try to…
Michele & John Bohannon, our UnTourists of the week, went on their Greece UnTour in 2010 (November is Greece month here at the Blog) and here are their answers…..sometime you don’t need a lot of words to say exactly what you think. 1. Tell us about your most recent UnTour: We spent 14 days in…
I stumbled upon a film trailer about four young US men, who spent a summer in Guatemala trying to live on a dollar a day. At first I thought, “Well, that doesn’t really count. They knew their situation was only temporary.” Then, Hurricane Sandy took out the power in my neighborhood, and most of my…
One of my favorite definitions of culture is “Groups of people solving problems over time.”. It’s an interesting puzzle to take a glance at Dutch ‘problems’ throughout their history, and deduce from the solutions they found, what sort of culture is the result. Wikipedia, described the Dutch, in its first paragraph as ‘a seafaring people…
A Leiden canal under Holland’s ever-changing skies (Photo by Daniel Yett) This Monday, the UnTour bloggers (here in our suburban Philadelphia offices) have a certain lady in mind…..Sandy. As in Hurricane Sandy. We hope everyone is battened down properly, if you are in the large lady’s path. If by some chance, you find our…