View From Here

MicroView: Kuta, Albania

STORY AND PHOTOS BY NICK ST.OEGGER

In this series, we offer you a little window onto life in one corner of the world or another. Enjoy peeking through the curtains with us!

The late afternoon sun beats down on the open central square of Kuta, where the old men have retreated to the shadows of a café, smoking and quietly chatting. It’s market day, and a woman with her fruit stand braves the heat with her friends. I pick up a few apples and figs, but when I reach for some money, she smiles and waves it away, telling me in Albanian that it is a gift.

Far-Away Family

BY SCOTT J. WILL

Pull up a chair and lean in as new Culture Keeper contributor Scott Will introduces us to family members you’ll wish you could know too.

I knew it would be hard. I had started preparing my heart and mind nearly one year before the day arrived. And when it did arrive, I knew it was time, and felt great peace with my decision, but I also longed for those last few moments to linger on and on. I stepped up to the six-passenger plane, like numerous times before when I had left for short stretches, but this time I felt the weight of the finality of it all.

MicroView: Del Ray Neighborhood, Alexandria, Virginia

STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAMI L. RICE

In this series, we offer you a little window onto life in one corner of the world or another. Enjoy peeking through the curtains with us!

Havana Is not ‘the City Stuck in Time’

STORY AND PHOTOS BY ROSHANDA CUMMINGS

Rather, it’s a city stretching forward, according to Culture Keeper contributor Roshanda Cummings.

Close your web browsers and your guidebooks. Erase your search history. Forget everything you’ve heard about Cuba and what you assume has happened to it as relations have begun to warm between America and this neighboring island nation.

From India with Love and Fire: Shorts

PHOTOS AND STORY BY AMBER KIDNER

This installment from our resident contributor based in India was inspired by Lydia Davis’s very short stories. Photos were taken on an unpredictable Holga

MicroView: Port de Toulon, France

STORY AND PHOTOS BY CATHERINE RICOUL
ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY KAMI L. RICE

In this new series, we’re offering you a little window onto life in one corner of the world or another. Enjoy peeking through the curtains with us!

From India, With Love and Fire: A Visit

By Amber Kidner

Just before Christmas I had an opportunity to visit a small school in Delhi. The school that my children attend had begun to work with this school in various ways. My assignment was to photograph the children both at work and at play, as they inhabited their school space on that particular morning.

A Moons and Houses and Hope Travelogue

By Kami L. Rice

We entered Bosnia by road as night fell. A full moon rose and threw a spotlight down on houses scattered like carcasses through the countryside.

So very many carcasses.

Empty inside, roofless, with charred stone walls marking a former existence.

Silent, somber, haunting, poetic testimony to tragedy.

What exactly had happened here?

Suddenly it all mattered.

From India, With Love and Fire: Water

By Amber Kinder

As I brushed off my Hindi notes recently, I was reminded of our water summer, and I thought of my continued foray into this language like swimming in a pool. With a renewed sense of purpose I’m wading in: testing, floating, choking, shivering, enjoying…

From India, with Love and Fire: Embrace

BY AMBER KIDNER

The setting was beautiful. Compared to Delhi’s flat, dusty, crowded surroundings, this was steep and quiet. The roads twisted and pulled and unbalanced us as we travelled up and around the mountains. They led us to falls, mountain towns, overlooks on the valley below, and the Himalayas beyond…