What’s it called? My Argentina: Learning Spanish and Loving Thatcher. What’s it about? How I accidentally fell in love with Argentina and learned Spanish, while: buying Evita dolls with clunky shoes; reading sexy political memoirs; witnessing the Earth’s creation near polystyrene palms; and re-living the sinking of the Titanic. Is it tasteful? Extremely. Beyond taste. Do I…
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Jan
Before I went to my first Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in 2014, I scanned through over 3,000 events in the program, picked out those I wanted to see, compiled a list of when and where they were on … but when my friend Sam and I arrived, on that first afternoon, we got to the Royal Mile,…
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Jan
Mainland Antarctica does look chilly here, but the lowest it ever got outside on my cruise was about two degrees below freezing. It was January 2008, the middle of summer, just above the Antarctic Circle, so in theory we were in a temperate zone. Ninety-eight of the 110 passengers were American. For many, it would…
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Jan
If I’d seen Brokeback Mountain without knowing anything about it, I would have said it was a very good movie. Subtle performances, pristine landscapes, haunting music, Jake Gyllenhaal … but it had so much hype, the best film of all time, if not better, that I walked out a little disappointed. It was, I guess,…
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Jan
There seems to be an unwritten international law that great waterfalls must be on the border of two countries. Niagara Falls, for instance, straddle the USA and Canada. If Iguazu Falls were there, rather than in Argentina and Brazil (and close to Paraguay), they’d be the most famous in the world. Instead, I’d never heard of them until my…
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Jan
I say ‘other’ with the (optimistic) assumption that you’re coming to my own show! In January 2014, when I opened my copy of Fringe World’s printed program, I thought – ugh! There were 418 events inside. A year later, this number had grown to 556. But between these two festivals, I’d been to the Edinburgh Fringe. That…
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Dec
Unless there’s a strike. I actually did it in two.
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Dec
I was having Saturday morning breakfast in Subiaco with some friends who’d recently come back from New York City. They talked about how much they liked the light show on the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. I told them about a big Christmas tree in Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, in 2011. It also had a light-show: but it was one-off, because the light came…
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Dec
