Writing Through the Fog

I’ve been in Istanbul for a week and have neglected my Canon G11, which has taken 95 percent of the photos you see on this blog. (A handful have been shot with my Nikon, which I rarely use.) I’ve mainly used my new iPhone to take photographs here. I was a (mostly disgruntled) BlackBerry user [...]

When I roamed the streets of Berlin earlier this year, I kept returning to Prenzlauer Berg, a neighborhood in the Pankow district in northeast Berlin—I was drawn to the cute boutiques of local designers, the vintage and secondhand markets, the bars and cafés, and the street art and graffiti. It’s leafy. Quiet. But edgy and urban. [...]

Cheers to my 300+ new followers, who stumbled upon Writing Through the Fog via Where Neon Signs Go to Die, my post on the Neon Boneyard in Las Vegas. Thanks for following along. Some of you may not know, then, that a few days before I went to Las Vegas, I was in Egypt. I’d been in [...]

Audio for the first half of this post. My feet. Always dirty. And my soles? Cracked. They have turned hard from being exposed each day. My nose is overloaded: traffic fumes, cigarette smoke, cherry-flavored shisha tobacco, incense. I hear sounds in the middle of the night: the prayer on a loudspeaker, the voice haunting and [...]

The final post of photo selects from Egypt, focusing again on Cairo: mainly scattered sightings of street art on Gezira, the island west of downtown Cairo, on the Nile. I came upon these walls as I was walking from the Opera House metro station to the Cairo Tower, along Al Gezira. Most of the art [...]

I overdosed on temples and tombs in Luxor over two swift afternoons. The temples of Karnak and Luxor, the Valley of the Kings, Medinet Habu . . . The dusty slides from my high school and university courses were brought to life in Luxor, and while quick, this side trip was enjoyable and I got [...]

We left Cairo on an overnight bus to the Sinai. Seven or eight hours of interrupted sleep later, I opened my eyes to a perfectly round, robust, and bright orange sun, sitting low in the sky of the Egyptian desert. Layers of jagged golden rocks and mountains hugged the winding road. The chaos of Cairo, [...]

Hello! I apologize for being so quiet here the past several weeks. Here’s the first of numerous photo posts from Egypt. I’ve been here for about three weeks: I started off in Cairo, then escaped to a beach on the Sinai Peninsula, returned to Cairo, and am now in Luxor. Tomorrow, I fly back to [...]