At Home In The Wasteland Travel Blog

On New Year’s Eve we took the Clipper to Victoria, British Columbia. Victoria has been on my to-do list ever since we’ve arrived in Seattle and I figured the extended New Year’s weekend would be a good opportunity to finally make the trip up there. We left early Saturday morning and after a comfortable three [...]

I love snow. Probably because I grew up in a place where the average winter temperature is 74 degrees, so I never had the whole winter wonderland experience. We woke up to our first snowfall of the year here in Seattle. It doesn’t snow here very often, so the entire neighborhood was outdoors throwing snowballs [...]

Yes, Venice again. I know it’s quite possibly one of the biggest travel cliches out there, but I adored this city. We spent a few days here during our holidays in Italy, after visiting Rome. This is the Grand Canal, the major water-traffic corridor in the city. You can take either the water buses (vaporetti) [...]

This portrait of “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung and “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il was hanging in a Pyongyang souvenir shop when I visited North Korea in September 2009. The pervasive cult of personality that surrounded the Kims ensured that every building you set foot in prominently displayed portraits of the two leaders. Now that Kim Jong-il [...]

The above structure is the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, originally built in the year 141. It is currently in the Roman Forum area in the center of of Rome, and contains a number of ancient structures dating back to Rome’s heyday as an empire. Along with the Colosseum and Vatican, the Forum will certainly [...]

One of the great things about living in the Pacific Northwest is the hiking. Yes, the east coast has hiking, but nothing that compares to what we have on the West Coast (in fact, I am hard pressed to come up with anything the east coast does better. Subway systems, maybe). Back in October we [...]

Although the Soviet Union fell nearly 20 years ago, symbols of the regime still remain throughout the former USSR. This hammer and sickle adorns the Russian State Duma (the lower house of the federal legislature) building in Moscow. This building formerly housed Gosplan (State Planning Committee), the agency responsible for economic planning in the Soviet [...]

The Arch of Reunification (or, Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification as I’ve also seen it called) is your typical North Korean monument: large, not particularly beautiful, and glorifying some event that either didn’t happen, or will likely never happen (according to the plan North Korea has devised, anyway). And, of course, there [...]

(Courtesy of the Chicago Wikipedia entry) Despite traveling to the far reaches of the world, from Pyongyang to Cairo to Rome to London, there are a surprisingly large number of major U.S. cities that I have yet to visit. One of these would be Chicago. I’ve been pretty close; I once had a business meeting [...]

And finally, here is the last of the footage I shot in North Korea. This was taken at Moranbong Park during North Korea’s national independence holiday. With plenty of beer and meat on the grill, it’s not that far off from an American 4th of July celebration (except for, you know, that whole notion of [...]