These are actual complaints received by "Thomas Cook Vacations" from dissatisfied customers.

California is sometimes called the Granola State, the land of fruits, nuts, and flakes. I am from California, native-born. I guess I could just stop this chapter right now and you would understand why strange things gravitate to me.

Bluesmen have been lacing up their walking shoes and relocating to Europe for generations. The list is extensive; Memphis Slim made his home in Paris the latter part of his life, and Champion Jack DuPree lived in Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, England and Germany. Harp player Hook Herrera still lives in Scandanavia and the late Frank Frost once said he loved being in Italy.

Theatre Review Is it a book?  Is it a film?  Is it a play? Is it a musical? Is it “Jersey Boys?”  Is it “Guys & Dolls?”  Is it “West Side Story?”  Well, my friends, if this production was a stew, it would be a dash of this, a little bit of that, and a drop or two of schmaltz* …

Standing in the Lima airport, a knot was forming in my stomach — a feeling many of us associate closely with airports, the anxiousness of a hard goodbye or a long overdue hello. My Parents Were Coming to Perú. We’d been planning the trip for months, and I could already picture the forthcoming collision of worlds and cultures.

Once thought of as the domain of cultural elitists, opera has garnered a more universal audience, perhaps because of the accessible Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD annual broadcasts, featuring a series of ten outstanding productions, simulcast to movie theaters on Saturday afternoons — truly live from the stage of the Gotham’s Met.

In the 1955 film Daddy Long Legs, the actress Leslie Caron, playing a teenage waif in an orphanage, is plucked out of her drab milieu and introduced to a posh life, where she can have just about anything. What she asks for is an "'amburger with chocolate sauce," homing in on the most tasteful delicacy she can imagine.

During my second trip to Hamburg (a city, I should parenthetically add, that has captured my heart), I had occasion to drive with a friend into the countryside, skirting decorated, half-timbered homes with elaborate thatched roofs in charming neighborhoods. A highlight of this road trip was our drive through Altes Land, the largest fruit-producing region in Northern Europe.

I can’t remember how old I was. Maybe ten. It was a happy moment. His name was Pecky, my first and only parakeet. I played with him every day and loved that bird. But the day that will live in infamy was about to be played out. Like a giant locomotive rumbling into the station, the inevitable was approaching.

I’ve seen many castles and fortresses on my travels, but none stick in my head like the fortified Old Town of Dubrovnik, Croatia. If I didn’t actually walk upon its marble streets and touch its historic stone wall for myself, I’d swear it was a modern recreation of another time.