Travel writer with a love for covering world music. Graduate of Columbia School of International Affairs. JohnOseid@gmail.com
S.A.L.T.—Silversea Cruises’ Tasty New Culinary Program
As international health recommendations vary and change rapidly, as with the C.D.C.’s issuing of a cruise caution yesterday, Silversea Cruises updates its strict sailing guidelines and protocols on its health and safety page. Let the following preview on the S.A.L.T. culinary program whet your appetite for things to come in the new year.
Salt. Word now has it that, in fact, you can’t get enough of it. Okay, not that wonderful and essential sodium compound. When you hear the word on your Silve...
Silver Moon And Silver Dawn: Newest In The Silversea Cruises Muse-Class Of Ships
As international health recommendations often change, strict sailing guidelines and protocols get updated on the Silversea Cruises health and safety page.
For most of us, it’s likely been awhile since we were truly over the moon about a new travel experience. Now, the new 596-passenger Silver Moon promises to get you there, with this latest entry from Silversea Cruises having set sail earlier this year.
Also, this past mid-November, Silversea took delivery of the Silver Dawn, its tenth luxury...
Somiedo: Northern Spain’s Mountainous Biosphere Reserve
Just southeast of the Asturian capital city of Oviedo, adventurous visitors can do a deep dive into that Spanish region’s industrial past, literally so by donning overalls, boots and gloves and grabbing a hard hat and lamp to descend into the old coal mine at Pozo Sotón.
Pozo Sotón is one of several such former operations in which today erstwhile miners serve as your (literally so sometimes) hands on guides. For them, it’s a far cry experience from that of their forebearers who in the 1930s w...
Picos De Europa: Spain’s Otherworldy Mountains In Asturias
Hardly more than a hundred souls make their home in Sotres. If you follow a dirt road from this mountain village up a glacial valley, you’ll think you’re headed to what seems the end of the world. Yet, in a matter of minutes you’ll come upon a cluster of old stone huts tucked at the base of jagged peaks. Not a gambling den, nor a “bull meadow” as its name suggests, this spot called Vegas del Toro in the Picos de Europa massif is devoted to sheep grazing.
Here in Spain’s northern Asturias regi...
Gijón: An Art Nouveau Surprise On Spain’s Cantabrian Coast
It’s like two cities for the price of one. In northern Spain, Gijón both occupies and straddles a small peninsula that juts into the Cantabrian Sea. On either side of the headland you’ll find separate waterfront and beach scenes, and thus distinct vibes.
The peninsula itself was home to a Roman settlement called Cimavilla and culminates at a hilltop parkland where today families and dog walkers stroll past a huge concrete structure with a space-agey edge to it. The renowned Basque sculptor Ed...
Oviedo: The Compact Capital Of Asturias, A.k.a The Cradle Of Spain
Don’t be surprised to spot a few backpackers nursing their blisters in Oviedo’s vast Plaza de la Catedral, the Cathedral Plaza. For centuries, pilgrims have been trekking through this Spanish city on one of the many trails that make up Northern Spain’s famed Camino de Santiago route, also known as the Way of St. James.
Your trek through the Asturias region may be considerably shorter and less strenuous, but thanks to yet another of Spain’s historic centers having been made vehicle-free you to...
Avilés: Alluring Launch Pad To Northern Spain’s Asturias Region
As your driver heads toward the august NH Collection Palacio de Avilés hotel on the main square of Avilés, you realize that you’ve been granted the brief privilege of motoring into a car-free historic city center. After you’ve checked in and started exploring the northern Spanish city’s windy stone streets on foot, you’ll quickly cherish that liberation from noise and exhaust, and find it hard to imagine that not too many decades ago cars would have been zooming all around you.
Not getting ru...
How To Beat The Heat With Your Dog At La Quinta Resort & Club, A Waldorf Astoria Resort
So far over this early summer, the intense heat scorching the Far West has been the major news topic that you’d expect. Pandemic dogs maybe less so. But in these crazy times both subjects have earned a lot of ink of late.
Thankfully, La Quinta Resort & Club, A Waldorf Astoria Resort, has you covered on both fronts. While you might think of the legendary property in the dry Coachella Valley of Southern California as a winter retreat, you’ll delight in plunging into any number of its forty-one ...
The Clark Art Institute Gives Norwegian Painter Nikolai Astrup His U.S. Debut
Everyone in the world knows the great Edvard Munch. So celebrated is the painter today that a towering new waterfront museum named for and dedicated to him will open this fall in Oslo. But, surprise, Norwegians revere plenty of other fine native artists who are coming out from under the Munchian shadow as the world finally catches up to them. Nearly a century after his premature death, painter and horticulturalist Nikolai Astrup is now getting his due at The Clark Art Institute.
One of Americ...
Hockney Meets Van Gogh At The Museum Of Fine Arts, Houston
The world is full of things that at first blush don’t go together at all. Peanut butter and chocolate, anyone? And in the world of art, no less so. This week, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) brought together the illustrious late-19th-century Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and the major contemporary British multimedia artist David Hockney. Didn’t see that coming, did you?
These are trying times for Texans and Houstonians, of course, as they recover from the whims of nature and human hu...
In Vienna, The Venerable Albertina Museum Gets A Modern New Sister
Inch per inch, Vienna possesses arguably the world’s densest collection of landmarks, so culturally and aesthetically rich is the city core that you could hardly toss a pebble without it bouncing off of a major institution of some sort.
To wit, the opening last spring of the rich new Albertina Modern–executed in an understated manner given our past year—would in many another land have scored it as the highlight of national museums. But in Vienna, no fuss; why not just swell the city ranks wit...
Photography Legend Steve McCurry Gets An Assist From Silversea Cruises On A New Book
In the best of days, armchair travel can consume a good chunk of any devoted world wanderer’s time, whether for destination research or destination daydreaming. In these uncertain times when we might not be sure just when we’ll ever get up again from our loungers, armchair travel devotees just got a stunning new boost for their pastime with the release of Steve McCurry’s In Search of Elsewhere: Unseen Images.
In his latest book, famed photographer McCurry chronicles more than forty years of w...
Fasano Salvador: A Brazilian Newspaper Headquarters Turns Top Hotel
As you walk the hallway to your room at the Fasano Salvador, it’s not hard to imagine the sound of dozens of reporters and editors clacking away at their typewriters as they did decades ago. The property in Brazil’s Bahia state capital of Salvador takes up a fine old 1930s landmark building whose original newspaper occupant’s name of A Tarde still stands above the portal. Opened in late 2018 after three years of restoration, the hotel is the Fasano Group’s seventh property.
Overlooking Salvad...
S.A.L.T.—Silversea Cruises Launches A Culinary Immersion Program
A writer for Australian food and travel magazines who recently completed a television series about Balinese home cooking, Maya Kerthyasa grew up absorbing cooking and life lessons from her grandmother who comes from an Ubud royal family.
And some of those lessons soon can all be yours too when chefs and culinary experts such as Maya will be on board the brand new Silver Moon, Silversea Cruise line’s first ship to incorporate their equally brand new S.A.L.T., or Sea and Land Taste, culinary pr...
Silver Moon: Silversea Cruises’ Newcomer Takes To The Sea
In time to celebrate Silversea Cruises’ 25th anniversary, the line’s new ship Silver Moon touched water in late summer of 2019 at the Fincantieri shipyard in Ancona, Italy. For longtime fans and newcomers to the line, now is the time to book a suite on Silver Moon’s May 4 maiden voyage from Athens (Piraeus), a seven-day, round trip which makes calls at Mykonos, Kusadasi, Rhodes, Santorini and Nafplion.
The ninth ship in the Silversea fleet, the 40,700-ton Silver Moon is one of five luxury shi...