World's Best Places to Visit

I love traveling by train around Europe. With parents working for the national rail company, I spent much of my childhood playing around locomotives and steam trains, and I have witnessed first-hand the evolution of train travel. I was a curious child, and this led to many adventures, from learning about how the oil gets changed on a diesel locomotive (which was offered refereed to as “the camel”), to riding in the cabin of a steam strain, when they would be hired for film productions. I even met Costa Gavras on the set of Amen, but I was too young then to know who he was. I grew up traveling by train, riding alone the 7 hours between my hometown and my grandma’s house ever since I was 14 years old. As soon as I got my first passport, I started exploring Europe by train, from the northern countries all the way to the Balkans. There was something special traveling around from one place to another, boarding a train in the evening and waking up to a totally new place in the m...

When I say “old cemetery,” what do you picture? Crumbling tombstones? Grand old mausoleums? Overgrown shrubbery? Chances are, whatever you picture is fairly dark; morose; depressing. Because, in Western culture especially, Death is usually a dark, morose, and depressing subject. Even though old cemeteries may be grand and people may visit them (yes, cemetery tourism is a thing), they nearly all project a feeling of sadness to some degree, no matter where in the world they are located. But not Merry Cemetery. How could you possibly be depressed here? Not far from the small town of Sighetu Marmaţiei in the Maramures region of Romania lies Săpânţa , an unassuming little village where it seems like nothing has changed for the past 100 years. Farmers still go about their work in horse-drawn carts, and old women still wear patterned scarves on their heads. But Săpânţa has a very unique claim to fame — it is home to Cimitirul Vesel, or “Merry Cemetery.” ...