You don't have to speak the language to understand songs like this. In the same way that North America produced great music in Irish and British traditions, the former Spanish colonies produce great music in Spanish traditions. Spain Forever, I suppose I can summarize.

Old film photo of mine. My 40-year-old bike on a sunny late-summer day in Cyprus. I rode across the island, and a few other countries, on this thing.

深海で「プラを食べる」細菌が進化──自然が見せた意外すぎる適応力 世界中の海洋で、表層から深海に至るまでPETプラスチックを分解する能力をもつ細菌が確認されつつあります。

Actually the earliest mosques didn’t even have minarets. during the Mohammed’s time the call to prayer was made from the roof of the mosque or a nearby tall house. The word minaret itself reveals its strange origin since it comes from the arabic word manara, meaning a place of

It was a design so effective that it held off every army in history for a thousand years until the invention of heavy gunpowder artillery.

Perhaps I've been left out in the sun for too long.

"Social media [...] bloodsports personality" is an excellent descriptor for the most bothersome people on the internet.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, legendary drinker. Once, after downing 17 glasses of champagne, he drank a tumbler full of whisky and a bottle of wine before giving an effortless reading from Vasari’s "Lives of the Artists." He lived to be 96.

An old photo of the Roman walls of Thessaloniki

I am actually a Western Interior Seaway guy myself

Exploration and guacamole. Not completely unrelated subjects.

1880s. Photographed by Bourne and Shepherd.

Birdprints

There's an excellent Abbasid style minaret here in Doha.

I have run my hand through the waters of the Persian Gulf.

Patrick Leigh Fermor during his sojourn in Baleni, Romania, in the 1930s.

Good evening from Qatar.

I passed the camel racetrack. I saw at least 300 camels.

In the badlands of Qatar this afternoon.