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Today is the first day of the New Year according to the Lunar calendar used in Mongolia. Tsagaan Sar, as it is called in Mongolian, is the biggest celebration of the year in Mongolia—kind of like the Gregorian New Year, Christmas, and Thanksgiving all rolled into one. I have spent a dozen or more Tsagaan Sars in Mongolia, but unfortunately this year I will not be there. You can read about the 2005 Tsagaan Sar   here. By the way, as I write this the temperature in Ulaanbaatar is 12ºF, practically a heatwave in UB. Usually this time of year it is 20 to 40 below 0ºF. By contrast it is 5ºF in Richmond, Virginia, USA, seven degrees colder than UB. Richmond’s notorious Devotees of Bacchus will have to break out their mukluks if they want to go out and celebrate the New Year at their local wine bar-temple. Anyhow, it is the Year of the Female Wood Sheep. Happy New Year!

Since childhood have always considered myself more or less of a Stoic, although admittedly I later became enamored by other philosophies, creeds, and beliefs.  The belief system known as Stoicism was founded, as most of you know,  by the Greek Philosopher Zeno (352 B.C.–255 B.C.—other dates have been proposed), who was born in what was then the city of Citium, on the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean. Citium is now the city of Larnaca in the Republic of Cyprus. Hoping to get back in touch with my Inner Stoic, I decided to visit Larnaca, the birthplace of Zeno, founder of Stoicism. Thus it was that at six o’clock in the morning I found myself standing in snow flurries at the Pazartekke Metro stop in Istanbul just inside the Theodosian Land Wall s . I took the first train of the morning to the Zeytinburnu stop and there transferred to the airport train. The one-hour flight to Athens left at 9:30. Of course I have heard about the economic downdraft in Greece, but I was not

From The Spinx I wandered up the road to the Pyramid of Khufu, also known as Pyramid of Cheops. This is the largest of the three big Giza Pyramids. Although the grounds were nearly deserted when I entered at 8:00 a.m.—opening time—a considerable crowd has accumulated while I was admiring the Spinx. Most of them appear to be Egyptians. Many have hired horse buggies to haul them around the pyramids. The road leading up to the Khufu Pyramid does not look that steep, but the horses are having a hard time negotiating it. They are shod, and their steel horseshoes keep slipping on the asphalt surface of the road. As I watch two horses slip and fall to their knees. Obviously they are used to this, since they very quickly jump up and resume pulling. One horse, pulling a buggy with a family of Egyptians—father, mother, and three small children—refuses to go up the hill. It tries to turn and head back down, but the driver, who is walking along side, starts whacking it with a cane and it very rel

No sooner had I entered the grounds of the Pyramid Complex than a horde of would-be guides descended on me like a Biblical plaque of locusts. “But who will chase the other people away?” moaned one when I turned down his services. Indeed, some visitors might be tempted to hire one guide just to shoo away the voracious sellers of camel and horse rides, postcards, model pyramids, head wraps, cowboy hats, and a host of other gimcracks and ephemera. But I pushed on; I just wanted to soak in the atmosphere by myself without someone chattering in my ear. First on the agenda was the Sphinx. The Sphinx of course needs no introduction. Reputedly both the oldest and largest monumental sculpture in the world, it is also one of world’s most instantly recognizable images.  As with most monuments of ancient Egypt, there is considerable controversy over when the Sphinx was built and by whom. I think we can safely rule out the theory that it is over 10,000 years old and was carved out by aliens using l

Camels: You can’t help but love them (click on photo for enlargement)