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Austria’s second-largest city has a Renaissance fortress, a blue museum that resembles a friendly alien, and a Saturday market where people pour pumpkin seed oil on vanilla ice cream. Moreover, it is less crowded than it should be. Then there is the matter of the clock tower. The long hand shows the hours while the short hand indicates the minutes, a feature that dates back to when the tower displayed only the hour, and the

Although the bus leaving the airport does not stop at Fairy Bridge, the small stone bridge spanning the stream on the main road to Douglas, the passengers still speak up. “Hello, fairies,” says one person, and a few more join in, partly in jest and perhaps some completely sincerely. The trees along the bank are decorated with ribbons, photographs, and handwritten wishes, some faded by the weather while others were tied that morning. Taxi and

At the Long Bar inside Raffles Hotel, the colonial-era grand hotel on Beach Road that has hosted travelers since 1887, the floor crunches. Guests are invited to brush their peanut shells off the tables and onto the floor, and staff sweep them up by the thousands. In a country known for fining people who forget to flush a public toilet, this is the one room where littering is practically required. The drink that arrives with

Turkey’s third-largest city has more than 2,300 years of history, but İzmir isn’t defined by one famous monument. Instead, it’s a real Turkish city with its own food and character, and it’s close to three of the Aegean’s top day trips. After a few days, most visitors settle into the local rhythm. Around five in the afternoon, a sea breeze drifts in from the Gulf of İzmir and cools the air along the Kordon, the

The first blue plaque that caught my attention was on a little shingled cottage in the West End, almost completely hidden behind a thick thicket of beach roses; the plaque depicted a Cape Cod house being carried across the waves on a boat, with a lighthouse in the distance behind it. At first I thought it was a fanciful kind of house sign, but it turned out to be a biography. The Pilgrims were the

The first word visitors to Fez pick up is not “hello” or “thank you,” but rather “balak,” meaning “watch out” or “make way.” When a mule with propane cylinders passes, its driver apologizes, and the lane closes up again behind him as if it were water. Even though Fez has been granting travelers space for twelve centuries, it still expects them to give way to the donkey. Marrakech is louder and Chefchaouen bluer, but Fez

Coffee rituals may appear odd from the outside—such as a Finn putting cheese into his mug, a Turkish bride placing salt into her suitor’s cup, or a Hanoi barman beating egg yolks into coffee because the milk ran out. Each person is doing the most natural thing in the world, yet each would find at least two of the others a bit alarming. Coffee beans are the same everywhere, but there are many ways to

The first time I saw Krampus was on a side street in the Old Town of Salzburg, and I should make it clear that “saw” is an understatement. What in fact took place was that a creature about eight feet tall, dressed in a fur coat and equipped with a pair of ram’s horns as big as bicycle handlebars, swung a bunch of birch switches just within a foot of my shins while a cowbell

For eleven days every winter, Venice turns itself into the world’s most elaborate costume party. Step into St. Mark’s Square on a Saturday afternoon during Carnevale, and you might spot a courtier in a gold-beaked plague mask posing beside the Basilica. A woman in a hooped gown the color of crushed raspberries glides past a café, entirely unbothered that hooped gowns and narrow Venetian bridges were never meant to coexist. Nobody is in a hurry.

Thirty miles out in the Atlantic, past the last reliable cell signal, sits an island that once ran the world’s whale oil supply and now mostly runs on cranberry bogs, cedar shingles, and a waiting list for dinner reservations. Nantucket has spent three and a half centuries figuring out what it wants to be, and the current answer, equal parts historic seaport, art colony, and extremely well-funded beach town, seems to be working.

In 1659,

At Dong Ba Market, a vendor raises a conical hat toward the doorway and tilts it in the morning light. Between the layers of palm leaf, a shape becomes visible: a line of verse and a bundle of bamboo, something that was not visible a moment before. This is the non bai tho, the poem hat, and Hue regards it as its own. The trick lasts about three seconds and captures the city well. Nearly