It’s rainy, the back of our house is roped off with Caution tape, and I wish I were somewhere else, writing about my travels. If you’re stuck in Istanbul with nothing to do, make your way to the covered bazaar, where you will find, in the third row of stalls, a man whose family has been making paper airplanes for three centuries. He will sell you one for five to ten cents (don’t forget to haggle) and invite you to his home, which is on an island and only accessible by boat. By the time you are halfway there you will wish you hadn’t accepted his invitation.

In Brussels one must not miss the Mannekin Pis.

Few visitors to Goa know the legend of Mary Mary, who led sailors to their deaths.

In Venice, actually, David and I lunched next to a couple who invited us back to their palazzo, an invitation we, our eyes meeting, accepted. I don’t know if I had already read Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, in which a young couple visiting a city just like Venice is stalked and killed by a friendly older couple. Once we got to the palace, or really the half-palace (subdivided), we were separated, and I was shown their bedroom. One of them wrote poetry, and I remember there was some kind of evidence of this around, although what could it have been? We admired their house, and went out again into the street. This was the kind of thing we thought you should do while traveling, meet people and have little adventures.