Every day, Fred Schlomka’s Green Olive tour company picks up a car full of Jerusalem tourists and guides them through the Separation Wall into the Palestinian West Bank, visiting refugee camps, social enterprises and – in what’s been seen by some as a controversial move – settler communities. Having joined one of these tours earlier… [Read more…]
November 25, 2011
Here is a classic traveller’s dilemma; you want to travel to and experience one of the world’s greatest cities, but you want to see the ‘real’ London/Paris/Istanbul – not the one served up to you by the guide books and the tourist maps. But when you have limited time, this can be tricky. If you’re anything… [Read more…]
November 15, 2011
Morocco is really a pretty safe place for a woman on her own, as well as being a fairly easy place to get around. The buses between cities (supratours and ctm) are a darn-sight better than anything you’d find in the UK, the people in hotels and riads are really helpful and full of advice on… [Read more…]
November 3, 2011
Approximately 20 hours into this holiday to Morocco, I’ve gotta say; so far it is a little disappointing. Admittedly, I have spent all of one day here in Marrakech, so perhaps it’s a little early to be passing judgement on a whole entire country. However, I’ve been to enough places to be able to recognise somewhere interesting /… [Read more…]
April 23, 2011
On the sunny April afternoon I’m invited to check out the fortnightly protest against Ahava’s Covent Garden store, it’s clear that this week – perhaps more than most weeks – emotions are running high. It is just one day after the body of peace activist Vittorio Arrigoni was found by Hamas forces in an abandoned… [Read more…]
April 8, 2011
With construction beginning in 2003, the Israeli authorities erected the 8m concrete wall with incredible speed. It’s aim, they say, is to help stop Palestinian suicide bombings on Israeli soil. Since then, the number of attacks has declined by more than 90%. However, the wall makes life for many Palestinians even more difficult. For a… [Read more…]
February 26, 2011
Having escaped the bustling streets in favour of nursing a strong macchiato in the wonderful Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem, I got talking to a girl on the next table who, it turned out, worked for the Palestinian News Network. Mentioning this blog, we got talking about the challenges of writing about the conflict here in… [Read more…]
February 16, 2011
I have spent the past 5 days in a quiet, peaceful corner of Egypt, where the only real signs that a revolution has occurred is the fact that is very little money left in any of the cash machines. It seems the country pretty much ground to a halt over the past three weeks, and now the… [Read more…]
February 1, 2011
In the 16th Century the Catholic Church faced arguably the greatest threat of its long history, not from armies or kings, but from the spread of ideas and information. The printing press was at this time becoming a common feature in cities and towns across Europe, and printers and writers were generally considered to be… [Read more…]
December 19, 2010
It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that the world is undergoing something of a digital revolution. So it makes sense that more and more people are devoting their time and money to trying to understand what impact that revolution in connectivity is having on us – as individuals, as communities, as nations and as a… [Read more…]
Kim
December 16, 2011
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