Apartment Choice

I arrived in Madrid in December 2012, in time to celebrate the bleakest Christmas the city had seen in a generation. Capital and country were reeling from a series of shocks that had brought Spain to the brink of ruin. Six months earlier, a slow- burning banking crisis had blazed out of control, forcing the government to request billions in rescue aid from its European partners. Spain was in recession and suffering an unemployment crisis that would see the jobless rate peak at 27 per cent a few months after my arrival. Reminders of the nation’s desperation were everywhere. On days when I took my son to kindergarten we would pass a long line of people — not all of them poorly dressed — waiting outside a church- run soup kitchen . Walking to my office in the morning, I would find more and more shops boarded up. Inexplicably, the tiny store that sold and repaired mechanical typewriters held out, defying both the economic downturn and technical obsolescence. Then, one day, I found that ...

We’re pleased to share the prelude, titled Freundschaft, of Kristen Ghodsee’s upcoming book Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism. In Red Hangover Ghodsee reflects on the lived experience of postsocialism and how many ordinary men and women across Eastern Europe suffered from the massive social and economic upheavals in their lives after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This text is not final, but we hope it gives you a taste of this impactful new book, to be published in late October. Two pairs of earrings, four bracelets, and a mixtape inspired me to write this book. I was in the Stadtmuseum in the German city of Jena, peering into the various display cases of an exhibit called Freundschaft! Mythos und Realit ät im Alltag der DDR (Friendship! Myth and reality in everyday life in the GDR [German Democratic Republic]). The exhibit ruminated on the official and unofficial uses of the word “friendship” in the context of communist East Germany between 1949 and 1989. In one c...

Valletta, Malta’s compact, walkable capital , overlooks its magnificent Grand Harbor . (John McKenna/Alamy Stock Photo) A strategic location can be more curse than blessing. Just ask the Maltese, whose tiny island nation lies 50 miles below Sicily. Early in World War II, when Malta was a British possession, Germany and Italy bombed it almost daily. And centuries earlier it was the site of the Great Siege of 1565, a devastating, yet ultimately unsuccessful, step by the Ottoman Turks toward conquering all of western Europe. For travelers today, Malta’s proximity to Europe’s glamour destinations is a definite plus — if not a widely appreciated one. Often experienced as a day stop on Mediterranean cruises, Malta greatly rewards a longer stay. The 17-by-8-mile island is packed with lovingly restored sites that bring history to life, as my wife and I discovered in mid-May in what served as a perfect four-day prelude to a Venice visit. Beyond its history, Malta’s landscape offers a natu...

This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org. I suspect that when Americans think about retiring abroad, they focus on Latin American countries , due to proximity and because places like Panama, Belize, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic usually show up on Best Places to Retire Abroad lists . Well, you won’t find any of those four countries in the Top 10 of The World’s Best Places to Retire in 2017 from Live and Invest Overseas . What you will find is a preponderance of Europe (six of the Top 10) plus a smattering of Mexico (two places) and Asia (two places, both in Malaysia). Another surprise: eight of those didn’t even make the Top 10 in the 2016 list from Live and Invest Overseas . “That surprised me too,” said Lief Simon, investment editor at Live and Invest Overseas and husband of the group’s founder and publisher, Kathleen Peddicord. In this year’s Top 10, the Algarve region of southern Portugal ranked No. 1 (for the fourth year in a row). Rounding out the...

Good morning and welcome to the Saturday Morning Quilt Break ! Today I’d like to tell you a story, one that I’ve wanted to tell almost since the day I started working here seven years ago except I didn’t have an ending until a few months ago. If I were the hero of a quilting comic book series , I believe this would be considered my origin story. So settle in with your beverage of choice because I’m going to take you back a ways. A long time ago, during my senior year of high school, my parents offered to allow me to take a gap year between high school and college as long as I spent my time doing something worthwhile. As they put it, “You can live at home and volunteer at a homeless shelter if you want, but you can’t just spend a year working at Robinson’s-May,” which is where I was working at the time. For almost my entire childhood, my parents, younger brother and I lived in a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom condo in Van Nuys, which is smack-dab in the middle of the sprawling San Ferna...