Written by I saw a competition for travel writing openers recently and I shook my head. I wish I could wave a wand and remove Opening Sentence Stress from budding travelogue writers. You see, I don’t think the opening sentence important. The opening paragraph is. Let me emphasise that this doesn’t apply to articles or short stories. [...]
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Wi-fi in Germany: no laughing matter
I’m writing this at home after a long, three-week trip to Germany. Hardly blogged from there as I usually do. The reason? German hotel wi-fi or W-LAN as it is called there. Germans have a very ambivalent attitude to wi-fi, like they do to credit cards. I still remember the shock when only ten years [...]
READ MORE »My Fascination with Hungarian
I’ve been fascinated with Hungarian for the best part of a decade. I started with some night classes in Vienna during 2002 and continued with the purchase of the US Department of State self-teaching method that runs into fifty-two 90-minute cassettes (we are talking 2004) and is recommended for US embassy staff and spies, I [...]
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