Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

It has been this way for centuries. Every year, on the 15th evening of the eighth lunar month, the small, secluded Hong Kong neighborhood of Tai Hang is the center of an awe-inspiring dance of the flames. That evening was yesterday - and I was lucky to be one of the many running around the narrow alleys, while a 67-meter blazing dragon was carried around by 300 local men. The ceremony is part of the traditional Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, where the city parks are filled with lit paper lanterns and  where friends and families gather to enjoy an evening of the full moon. In the parks, it is a family event - in the alleys of Tai Hang it is a ritual of flame and fury. You first hear the drums and gongs - and then the beast, the mighty dragon, winds its way with burning cput into its long hemp-rope spine. It is prompted along forward by two so-called 'pearls', two burning balls of fire swinging on the end of long sticks.   Sometimes the procession moves...

When I look out the window from my 22nd-floor apartment in Causeway Bay, the view is filled with glittering lights from the high rises surrounding the Hong Kong harbor. Anchored boats are gently rolling on the water below me. Lots of cars are driving by on the Wai Chan Bypass It all seems so romantic, but it is - literally - the quiet before the storm. Mangkhut, the fiercest typhoon ever to hit Hong Kong in all of recorded history, is just hours away and I, coming from a peaceful Denmark, which was never hit by any major natural disasters, have no idea of what to expect. The last few days, CNN has been wall-to-wall about the storm Florence, which was hitting Florida. Hundreds of thousands were evacuated and as far as the news was concerned, the US storm was a matter of life or death. The Mangkhut  typhoon, coming our way, is so strong, it should  make Florence look like just a mere puff of wind, but here in Hong Kong, I see no preparations ...

I just walked past a palm tree, but it was not in Hong Kong, where  Michael and I had been planning to spend this  Autumn. The tree, I walked by, is standing on the harbor in a windswept, small, Danish fishing village   How come I'm here?  Well, as they say, life is what happens when you're busy making other plans The other day, hours  before our planned departure for our several months long stay in Hong Kong, I visited my doctor for a routine check-up - and I was immediately put up for further examinations, as my blood pressure turned out to be pretty high We thought it would just postpone my flight for a couple of days and Michael took the scheduled flight out to arrange everything in the Hong Kong apartment, we had rented. Now it turns out, my high blood pressure needs some medication - and the doctors have forbidden me to travel for some time. What to do?     Our flat was sublet to another family, the Danish autumn had set...

We're on our last day in Paris, and the stay has - once again - been a gorgeous experience. Friends, who haven't visited the city for a while, have asked us about how it is evolving. For some, Paris is probably now synonymous with armed police surveillance and  dread of terrorist attacks, of migrants camping in the streets, of piles of filth and garbage, of Paris, as one put it, being turned into a sh*thole! OK. There ARE people sleeping on benches or wrapped in cardboard boxes, but as far as we can see, most of them are not African migrants or fugitives. Most seem to be ethnic French, who have fallen through the security net of the welfare state, and even though the street people are far too many, the wast tent camps, which we, just last year, saw erected below the bridges along the Seine have now disappeared. There ARE complaints about people pissing in the streets (and even more complaints about the many, quite ...

Michael has a dream of exploring the catacombs below Paris - but his dream doesn't include standing in a long line of tourists waiting at the official entrance. He wants to find a secret manhole somewhere, which leads down to some of the 300 kilometers of labyrinthine tunnels, which lie below most of central Paris. People called cataphiles are actually exploring these labyrinths - but I have nightmares about him climbing down into slimy darkness and perhaps on his way back finding out that the manhole he entered had been closed shut from the outside. No way! Luckily he found another way to be a trespasser and explore  hidden parts of the city without going underground The Petite Ceinture (“little belt”) is a disused railway line which traces the 32-kilometer perimeter of Paris. It was built about 150 years ago and now long abandoned. Today most of the tracks are quite inaccessible and off limits, overgrown  and forgotten, ...

  This is how we do when we walk the streets of whichever place we're visiting: We choose a point of interest as our goal and then we stroll serendipitously towards it - looking behind corners, down alleys, inside courtyards - perhaps even wander so far off course, we never arrive to our original goal. This time our goal was the Ozenfant house - the first Parisian house built by famed architect Le Corbusier. The search for this house let us deep into 14 arrondissement, which - besides Tour de Montparnasse and the entrance to the catacombs - is probably not on the itinerary of many tourists. The 14th turned out to be a lovely place to wander around - the Parc Montsouris was so pretty on a sunny afternoon, with its lake and great lawns. We found the Ozenfant and I took in all the fantastic details - but just from the outside. The building is privately owned and not open for visitors. Right next to this modernistic masterpiece, we ventured down Square Mo...

For the umpteenth time,  we have returned to Paris. This time we've exchanged our house with a Parisian family living smack in the middle of my personal heaven: the garment district on the slopes of the Montmartre. I can every morning pop down to the shops and look through masses of rolls of beautiful silk, flowery pieces of cotton or just any pattern I like. I imagine myself making a dress, a silk pajama, a pair of trousers. All the things I didn’t make of the lots of fabric I bought last summer. As a bonus, my favorite Parisian consignment boutiques are just a few minutes away. The very nice Chinemachine in Rue de Martyrs ( www.chinemachinevintage.com ) being a favorite. I also visit the much more scrappy Guerrisol ( www.guerrisol.fr ) and Emmaüs boutiques ( www.emmaus-paris.fr ), where you can dig through mud and come up with pure gold Just the last few days, I have located a beautiful Cacharel shirt, a silk dress, a long green robe, some t-shirts and a lin...

Sometimes you don't have to travel the world to find adventures. Sometimes you can find them in your own back garden. We're back from Lyon and staying for a few days in our house in the Ardeche, where Michael always has wanted to do a trek up in the mountains just as we did when I was living in Greenland. With his birthday coming up, he made it his birthday wish to camp out and even though my broken knee forbids me to do actual rock climbing, we could always set up the tent on our small mountain terrace behind the house, overlooking the Mas river. The tent was an old thing which we had last used in the Paradise Valley outside of Nuuk and as it was almost ten years ago, we found it a little bit complicated to remember how to assemble it. Finally, it was done. Our food, the wine, and the water were carried down, and it was not a minute too soon. The thunderstorm that threatened to break loose all day, finally decided that it was time. I think it is the most wonderful fee...

Two days ago, we came back from Morocco. We landed in Lyon,  which we, during the years, have passed many times going to and from our house in the Ardeche. Every time we passed, it looked so lovely, spreading along the banks of the Rhone and the Saône - and this time, we decided to stay in the city for a few days and explore its wonders. With Bastille day and World cup final happening on two consecutive days, our stay has almost been one, long party. On the night of July 14, the sky above the Fourvière basilica explodes with the most fantastic fireworks and we sat together with thousands of Lyonnaise, on the banks of the Rhone river, gasping at the wonders above.  The next morning, we went to 'Les Halles Paul Bocuse', a wonderful food market named after the local, culinary giant, where I could let my inner foodie loose among stalls run by hand-picked food merchants of the region. We filled a bag with two beautifully crafted tarts, some pate, some bread...

We've now lived in Essaouira for more than a week and we feel a little bit sad about leaving. It IS a wonderful town, and we'll absolutely return. When we arrived, we found ourselves lost in the labyrinth of the old souks, but the medina is actually not that large and the big walls, the gates and the sea are great for giving you bearings. Now we walk through the alleys and take the narrow bypasses like old timers. You can see a lot of stuff about Essaouira in the guidebooks. The wast fortifications are exactly as beautiful and impressive as you can read  (or see on Game of Thrones or in the old Orson Welles version of Othello). Here  are some special tips we learned from a knowledgeable friend or had to experience ourselves Where to stay There are lots of riads inside the medina, but only a few with an actual view of the sea. We're staying in a place called Riad Dar Nor ( www.darnor.com ) just next to the city wall. Dar...