Middle East – Flung

Jordan’s Other Magnificent Ancient City

Sarah Stodola — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 02:39:00 +0000

Petra gets all the glory, but there’s another ancient city in Jordan with serious capacity to awe. Jerash, located just 30 miles north of the capital city of Amman, is a sprawling, incredibly well-preserved ancient Roman metropolis. The ruins, including a food market, a main street, a water fountain that supplied the entire population, and intact streets let me envision life in Roman times viscerally. For my money, it was better than the Forum in Rome. I came away from […]

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The People Who Live in Petra (or Not)

Sarah Stodola — Tue, 09 May 2017 18:00:55 +0000

Not long after arriving to Petra, the ancient city in southern Jordan known alternately and aptly as the Lost City and the Rose City, my two companions and I climbed a series of staircases carved into cliffs, which deposited us finally onto a large terrace. At the far end of it, a large room had also been carved into the cliffs, along with an impressive façade of columns and windows. The room, like all the others here, was built to […]

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10 Ways To Get the Most Out of Your Trip to Petra

Sarah Stodola — Tue, 09 May 2017 15:42:07 +0000

You’d have to try pretty hard to have a bad experience at Petra, the stunning ancient city carved into the desert cliffs of southern Jordan. That said, the landscape there is extreme, and aside from the Treasury building, the way to the gems not always obvious. After my trip there last December, I assembled this list of 10 things you can do to get the most out of this trip of a lifetime to the Lost City of Petra. 1. […]

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The InterContinental Hotel Amman: Long-Earned Glamour

Sarah Stodola — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 16:52:27 +0000

In 1963, the InterContinental in Amman* opened, becoming the first five-star hotel in Jordan. In the years since and despite an influx of high-end options catering especially to the business traveler, the “Intercon” has retained its allure. By this point it is a hotel woven into the very fabric of the place it inhabits, having transcended its well-known global brand to become a singular point of reference in this ever-expanding desert city. Staying here not because I was a business […]

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What It Was Like To Get Appendicitis During the Turkish Coup

Sarah Stodola — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 16:00:05 +0000

There’s getting sick while traveling overseas, a patently awful experience. Then there’s getting appendicitis while traveling overseas. And then there’s getting appendicitis while traveling overseas during a military coup. This is that story. Aaron Spencer, a United Nations Development Programme contractor based in New York City, headed to Turkey last July to assess initiatives there and to look at the response to the refugee crisis in the region on the local level. Two days before his scheduled flight from New […]

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Not a Religious Experience (But Also, Sort of, Having One)

Sarah Stodola — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 15:00:44 +0000

My plane from New York landed in Tel Aviv on a Friday afternoon, and after settling into our hotel, my boyfriend and I walked pretty immediately across the street and down to the Mediterranean Sea, that body of water that was until then so firmly planted in my imagination as a glamorous playground of the West. There, along with the volleyball players and the sandcastle builders and the matkot games in progress (it’s sort of like paddleball, and wildly popular), […]

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On the Trail of the Best Kabab in Tehran

Erum Naqvi — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 15:56:29 +0000

The light here is cool. Not a blue white, but a violet one. It is unforgiving, but earnest. In many places, cool light is winter light and summer light is golden. But here in Tehran, on the southern slopes of Iran’s Alborz Mountains, the violet rays bounce off white marble buildings with fierce ripples of arid heat. The irrigation canals flanking every street in this vast city run dry. In the spring, when the city blooms with flowers, they swell […]

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Throwback Vibes on Azerbaijan Airlines

Erum Naqvi — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 22:45:38 +0000

The first time I passed through Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, I spent four hours in its airport waiting for my connecting flight. Heydar Aliyev International Airport was a strange place back in 2011. It was not in fact even named Heydar Aliyev International Airport yet. It seemed frozen in time, and frozen distinctly in what I imagine 1977 would have looked like. There weren’t that many people there, but the men who were present (it was almost exclusively men) […]

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The Shalom Hotel & Relax: Casual Aplomb and a Slew of Perks

Sarah Stodola — Fri, 08 May 2015 13:10:06 +0000

The hotel scene in Tel Aviv until recently has been a bleak one, as overpriced as it was under-renovated, thanks mostly to the row of circa 1960s high rises lining the Mediterranean along an otherwise captivating stretch of sand. If one was traveling for pleasure, they tended to present as the only option, and although they fail utterly in ruining the atmosphere, thanks to a cosmopolitan energy that pervades Tel Aviv even on the beach, it can still cause a […]

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