Ivan Dražić

Exploring Catania on foot through its palaces, churches and fish market, with Bellini along the way, pasta alla Norma at dinner and rather too many reasons to miss my train.When Venus and Mars make love, Vulcan rages in the depths of Etna, spewing his pain into the sky. Fire rains down on Catania, but Liotru, the mighty black elephant, takes the go

Lost photographs from a 2007 trip to Bulgaria bring back Plovdiv, Bachkovo, a global conference and a suitcase misrouted to Tirana.In 2026, while looking for photographs for a completely different blog, I found an old compact camera. I had assumed that whatever remained on it had disappeared from my life years ago, yet its memory card still contain

Amsterdam 20 Years Later: Same Tracks, Tired Windows, Stronger Weed — and the Suspicion That the Party Moved to BerlinIn 2004, Amsterdam ended for me with a daytime train to Cologne. Twenty years later, Cologne was where Amsterdam began again. I was returning along the same railway corridor to a city I remembered well enough to miss, but perhaps no

Fifteen stops, one phone, years of Prague experience — let the hunt for the best Prague photograph begin.I have been to Prague enough times for another round of classic sightseeing to make very little sense. I know the major landmarks, I have photographed most of them before, and I certainly do not need another picture proving that Charles Bridge i

Foul-tasting hot water with laxative ambitions, rapidly declining sightseeing standards and two detours from Karlovy Vary — on the day Czechia set its all-time temperature record.By the time I finally made it to Karlovy Vary, I had already been to Czechia more times than I could easily count. Prague and Brno were familiar territory, and I had even

I was staying in Fes, but Meknes gave me my first medina — and the first lesson that Morocco is rarely as simple as the guidebook version.My first serious day of sightseeing in Morocco did not begin in Fes, even though that was where I was staying. It began about fifty-five kilometres away, in Meknes.Read "Fes — I Walked Through a Gate and Left the

My driver gave me twenty minutes for Moulay Idriss. Just enough time to enter the medina, trust a boy I had never seen before, climb almost above the town - and somehow see far more than twenty minutes should have allowed.My driver dropped me off near the entrance to the medina of Moulay Idriss and gave me twenty minutes to look around.Twenty minut

Before my first time in China, I worried about cultural differences. Instead, I found QR-code payments, a stubborn firewall, barely any English, robots using lifts — and a system that somehow became completely normal within three days.I had travelled long-haul before, but only once, to New York. So China was not my first encounter with a seriously

Four Istanbul hotels: a spectacular suite, an efficient stopover, exceptional hospitality and a cocktail that became a minor engineering project.Choosing between Istanbul hotels can easily become part of the journey itself. Stay in Etiler and the city feels modern, vertical and distant from the postcard version most visitors come to see. Move to th

I came to Turkey for a business meeting in Ankara. A few days of annual leave turned the journey into a solo detour through İzmir and Pamukkale, one reluctantly abandoned plan for Ephesus, an exceptionally good hotel redemption and, eventually, a bowl of perfectly chilled fruit beside the Aegean.Ankara, eventuallyThe official reason for the journey