New Yorkers, it seems, love their hamburgers. The proof is in the lines. It says something that harried, impatient New Yorkers are willing to queue up at places like Burger Joint at Le Parker Meridien Hotel or Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. They stand in these long lines just...

Don't be surprised if you end up in Panama soon. Given the tremendous expansion of the national flag carrier, Copa Airlines, Panama City has become a critical transit hub for flying between the United States and South America. Earlier this year, after booking my fourth stop over in Panama's Tocumen...

It's always gratifying to discover new artists, especially younger artists who take risks and who reflect their own personal development in their pieces. Paul Pretzer, a Dresden, Germany-based painter who is showing at the Marc Straus Gallery on New York's Lower East Side, is just that...

It's not often that one considers a candle as more than a means to an end. They've always had clear practical uses that place function before form. In Asia, candles were originally used to measure time. They were ancient timepieces in the age before clocks. Over time and as their...

As a college student some 15 years ago, I backpacked from Bogota to Buenos Aires, largely by land. One of the most memorable legs of this trip was a bus ride from Bogota to the northern coast of Colombia. I eventually landed in the coastal city of Santa...

Bike-friendly cities and bike sharing programs are constituents of that class of ideas that sees to cross-pollinate from country to country, skipping surprisingly quickly from point to point on the globe. It is almost hard to believe that it's only recently that urban planners and municipal leaders began to share...

Private equity has been in the news quite a bit over the last few years. The industry, once known mainly in financial circles, is now ingrained in the public consciousness, and its dealmakers can thank Mitt Romney for the unwelcome glare of public scrutiny. Not surprisingly, Romney's political foes have...

A few months ago, I wrote a post entitled "The Drawing Room: Artists and Their Sketchbooks Occupy a New York Gallery" about the eponymous exhibit at the Milavec-Hakimi gallery. The conceit of the show was to assemble sketches from a diverse set of artists and then display them...

Drawing is a highly intimate form of expression. Even thought it's highly relatable (we've all done it at one point or another), it's underappreciated. With the endless rush of blockbuster auctions and the celebrity-driven art scene, representational art is out of fashion. The tweeting masses aren't looking for the quiet...

When you're talking Rio de Janeiro, it's hard not to mention Carnival, the epic party during which the world descends on Brazil, especially Rio, for a few precious days each February. While lots of people love Carnival, it's not for everyone. Plenty of Cariocas (Rio natives) head for the hills...

Last May, I made a 20-hour stopover in Latvia on my way to Ukraine, where I was headed to visit Kiev and the Chernobyl exclusion zone As luck would have it, I arrived in Riga on the one night each year called the ""Night of Museums,"...

Just after Thanksgiving, I flew to Sao Paulo, for a week of meetings in South America's largest city. Unfortunately, as soon as I arrived, I discovered that my luggage had been misplaced during a layover in Detroit. While I was assured each day that my luggage would be coming the...

The citizens of Buenos Aires, commonly known as porteños, are known for their sense of style and for over 130 years the city's most fashionable address for the well-heeled deceased has been Recoleta Cemetery. The cemetery is home to former presidents and wealthy industrialists, not to mention the most famous...

Slum tourism is hardly a new concept. On a visit to New York in 1842, Charles Dickens visited the infamous Five Points slum, which he characterized as a place where "poverty, wretchedness, and vice are rife."

Two developments are now making this type of experience more accessible to large...

When I was growing up in Southern Maine, lobster was a once-in-a-year treat that I associated with the Fourth of July. On the Fourth, we'd head to a local lobster pound to pick up some lobsters and then we'd cook them up on our stove and eat them at the...

The government of Ukraine recently launched a slick tourism campaign under the slogan "Ukraine: All About U." The tourist agency's website features colorful photos of pretty Ukrainian girls, profiles of some main tourist attractions, and a catchy commercial complete with dancing maidens. What the site doesn't include, however,...

I was walking through Hayes Valley on Friday afternoon at 2 pm when I saw a line of people snaking through Patricia's Green. As a New Yorker, I'm used to seeing people queue up for food. Whether it's Joe's Coffee, Soup Nazi soups, Shake Shack burgers, or Magnolia cupcakes, New...

Although my flight touched down at Uganda's Entebbe airport at around 3 a.m., the country's position on the equator ensured that within seconds I was engulfed by outrageously humid air. My only previous experience with that kind of heat was the all-encompassing stickiness of Hanoi in July. Lucky for me,...

It's hard to believe that Colombia and its people were once almost exclusively known for drug-related violence and guerilla warfare. While pockets of conflict remain, the country has largely battled its demons. Foreign tourists are flocking to the beaches of Cartagena and the restaurants of Bogota. And they should. Colombia's...

As the old saying goes, New York is the city that never sleeps. In the West Village at least, this perpetual insomnia probably has something to do with the neighborhood's coffee shops. With an astounding breadth and depth of choices, New Yorkers need only look to the West Village for...