Yesterday, I also learned that there is a spectacularly good restaurant in Havana that all journalists who go there made a pact to never write about, to avoid its “discovery” by the tourists.

My friend was not able to get her travel companion who worked for NYT to tell her either !

ok, enough for now.

why oh why do I follow blogs that make mentions of ancient Roman bridges…

it makes me want to be anywhere but here. but preferably somewhere where such bridges could conceivably exist, and where there are empty beaches and crystal clear water.

(knowing that my friend, who goes there each summer, is there right now, does not help things)

tokyo-camera-style:

Spotted in a JR station- a new poster promoting travel to the Tohoku region of Japan with a young woman and her chrome Leica M4 with a 50mm f2 rigid Summicron lens.

JR-East stations in Tokyo devote lots of ad real-estate to promote tourism through their train lines. The photography is always excellent and a very different take on what I see in airports in the west- rather than luxury or majesty the photographs are far more subdued and suggest the joys of the mental escape personal travels can offer. The palettes in which advertisements in Japan are often shown are more subtle, washed-out, and calm. There’s probably a grad school paper on this somewhere.

You can see the full set of JR posters with model Ayano Kimura on their site here. Ms. Kimura is the same young woman in a charming JR East TV spot with the chrome M4 (and 90mm lens) that you may remember from a post on Tokyo Camera Style from last December.

Rent-a-foreigner in China

Came across this, and my immediate thought was how this could help making travel in Asia more affordable.

But the further thoughts were – it pretty much implies being a party to racial objectification. In any case, I probably would not qualify anyway, as a second or third rate foreigner.

Maybe Fridays should be for posting photos from old trips. Because that’s when I’m itching to be going somewhere the most.

I am aware of rules social media has about what days are for what, but I don’t care about that.

I’ll just keep putting old road trip photos from faraway places here every Friday

Reading saffronfingertips’ post about Balkans, here’s where I want to be – near the Mediterranean, climbing over overgrown ruins, eating simple fresh food, drinking tea, sleeping in a treehouse and smelling orange blossoms.

Is that too much to ask?