The reason I'm discussing several countries on this page is not because they were less important or because I spent very little time there, but rather because I have very few photos. For example, I have only a handful photos from England (where I lived for almost an entire year) and none at all from France where I stayed for a total of 6 weeks. While I think that many of my pictures are interesting, hardly any of the truly significant things I experienced ever made it into a photograph.

I lived in England and traveled around Europe for about a year in 1988-1989. For most of year, I lived in Devonshire Hall at Leeds University. Devonshire is somewhat analogous to an American fraternity. This is how I had to dress every Sunday for lunch. Devonshire had quite a bit of old world charm and was steeped in tradition.

I walked along the path up and to the right almost every day on my way to classes. Considering that I was in a city of about a half million people, it was very easy to find solitude. There were lots of open green spaces, plenty of areas that were very quiet, and even years later I can still smell the cool moist air and leaves. I must admit, though, that walking on this path in the dark was really creepy.

I used to be an expert in traveling on the cheap. My normal practice was to go to some random town and hang around in a bar for awhile. I never ceased to be amazed at the hospitality that people extended me -- I have literally stayed for weeks with people who never met me before.

This picture was taken in a bar called El Chupito in Getafe, Spain (near Madrid). Getafe doesn't have any claim to fame, but it's always been among my favorite places. In Getafe, I was lucky enough to meet and stay with a person who was effectively the minister of culture. Despite the fact that I was a ragged student, I got to eat, live, and hob nob with really interesting people.

Here's a picture of me standing by some remnants of the Berlin wall a little over a year after it was torn down. I was a very impulsive traveller and literally decided to just leave Prague one day (where my English teaching gig had just ended) to go to Berlin. I bought a bus ticket for $4 amd jumped on. When I arrived in Berlin from Czechoslovakia, I heard some street vendors speaking Russian.

Although I know it's strange to approach someone just because you speak the same language, I'd just come from a country where I had great difficulty having anything beyond a basic conversation. People are sociable animals and it can be hard to be someplace where you don't really understand what's going on. Fortunately, the street vendors were happy to talk to me because apparently there were relatively few Russians for them to talk with.

I was Guatemala during the mid 80's after it had been torn apart by a "silent" civil war that had been going on for decades. Of all the places I've been, I've never seen such a high concentration of machine guns. Wars make normal people do horrible things in the name of good, and it's places like this that really made me question the wisdom of supporting ideological struggles rather than addressing practical needs. This photo was taken in an orphanage (I'm in the middle towards the back by the kid in the striped shirt).

I met the family on the right near Lake Atitlan. The gentleman on the right gave me a shawl that he wanted me to wear so that I would remember him and Guatemala. I promised him that I would, and it turns out that keeping my word was easier than I would have guessed at the time. On an aside note, while I was in Guatemala you could often tell what village people were from simply by how they were dressed.

Guatemala is really a beautiful place. One of my favorite destinations was Lake Atitlan which I think is almost worth the trip by itself.

One thing that's always amazed me is that even though jet travel makes everything seem so close together, you don't have to get far from the plane before it's clear that you're in a very different world.