travel that speaks to the heart
To my daughter, Heidi Rose, on her second birthday, Happy, happy birthday, Little One! What a journey we’ve had these past two years! And what a joy it has been to watch you grow and become the remarkable human you are meant to be! From the moment of your arrival in Zurich, Switzerland to the…
Dear Daughter, Welcome to the world, Little One! Just a few weeks ago, you were placed in my arms for the first time, and since then, my world has changed. And that got me thinking about your world – the world you are going to grow up in. A world that is simultaneously full of…
Snowflakes rush past – an army of sugar-coated ants scurrying home in the wind. The scenery moves with them: Forests built on rocks; Rocks resting on sea – a sparkling body of cold energy, an ever-changing tapestry pulled across the loom of my horizon. Wooden cottages, painted deep red, trimmed with white appear in the…
To shake things up and offer a fresh perspective, I invited my dear friend and fellow traveler, Ida M., to write a guest post for Global Heartbeat. Ida is the curious and creative mind behind About A Book, a beautiful blog dedicated to the lost art of reading and the wonderful world of literature. Today, Ida shares her top reads of the year that…
When you go grocery shopping, do you prefer one supermarket over another? Every time I move to a new city, I eventually find a favorite place to shop for my weekly essentials, and moving to Zurich was no exception. In Switzerland, two mega-companies vie for the support and loyalty of every Swiss household. They are Coop and Migros. Established as the Union Suisse…
As we travel and explore the world around us, we invariably wander into museums here and there. As time passes, we collect an indeterminable tally of standard-museum-visits that eventually fade from memory. Yet, that may not be the case for a select few. I believe that some museums stick with us for life. Take a moment to…
Snow falls softly on the quiet hillside, the flakes small and light – but numerous and relentless. A sparkling blanket of white spreads out slowly over yesterday’s footprints, filling in the lumpy gaps to restore the seamless covering over the frozen earth. The trees stand tall through the dusting of power, their branches stretching out to catch…
When we are reintroduced some twelve years later, we are little more than acquaintances. Proud and distinguished, like an elderly woman born into luxury and predisposed to a particular standard of life, Milan greets me in her finest display of fashion prominence and financial power as I step off the train. Amidst the briskly moving…
On a blistering hot afternoon in the Cambodian countryside, we walked into a landmine. A landmine museum, that is. About 25 km outside of Siem Reap resides the Cambodia Landmine Museum. This little complex has a big heart for healing war-torn Cambodia and a mission to care for and educate children who have been directly affected…
It was a blustery autumn evening in 1970. The alpine winds whipped off Lake Geneva with unseasonal gusto. The leaves rustled in the trees and rained down in a lazy, haphazard manner, making their whirling descent toward the cobblestone streets below. Lamp posts offered stations of false warmth to pedestrians passing under their soft glow.…
“I’m going to shoot myself,” he said. What? Why would he say that? He shook his head slowly and then moved close to her face. She leaned towards him coquettishly in response. Vodka tonics. Red wine. They had already consumed an unknown number of drinks, and it was around the sixth hour of the transatlantic…