Inside the Annual Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Competition

If you’d gone for a walk around Key West in the 1930s, chances are you might have bumped into Ernest Hemingway. Whether making the short stroll from his house on Whitehead Street to the bars on Duval, one block over and several up, or perhaps on his way to the nearby marina where he moored…

The Soundtrack To A Lost Country: Rock Music in the GDR

To the leaders of Communist East Germany, nothing was quite as dangerous and potentially subversive to their nation’s youth as Western rock and pop music. By 1965, Beatlemania may have been at its height with the band regularly attracting seventy million viewers on the Ed Sullivan show, but behind the Iron Curtain, the Party State…

The Strange Tale of the Identical Twin’s Mirrored Mansion

Just outside a small, rural Wisconsin farm town, lay the ruins of a grand mansion. In stark contrast to the flat, surrounding fields and scattered barns, was the peculiar sight of a once opulent home that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue during the Gilded Age. For years, mystery surrounded the…

Here’s What a Futurist World’s Fair Looked like Behind the Iron Curtain

The World’s Fairs used to capture the public’s imagination. From the millions who attended such iconic Fairs as the ones held in New York in 1939 and 1964, to the nostalgia they’re viewed with today, the World’s Fairs were places where people could catch glimpses of a futuristic better world; seeing such technological marvels as…

She Lives at The Last Stop to The North Pole

For the adventurous of spirit, and those who yearn to pack a bag and disappear to somewhere as remote as possible, arguably nowhere quite captures the imagination as Svalbard. The far flung Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ice lies just six hundred and fifty miles from the North Pole. It may be a place where…

The Ruins Of A Swinging Seventies Spa That Kept A Siberian Tiger Behind The Bar

About a half hour north of Manhattan is a curious ruin: a giant, circular concrete drum resting on a narrow concrete plinth, and wrapped with floor to ceiling windows, most of them broken. More concrete can be found in the futuristic looking ramps that swirl around the peculiar structure, giving the abandoned building a Brutalist feel…

There’s No Place Quite like that Big Empty Mansion sitting on a Hilltop outside NYC

You can tell a lot about William Boyce Thompson by walking through the magical garden he left behind nearly a hundred years ago. Meticulously sculpted and adorned with archaeological treasures at every turn, you’ll find sunken swimming pools lined with blue Roman mosaics next to a replica of what is thought to be the world’s…

Here’s what it’s like to Spend the Night in Chernobyl

Look online and the Hotel Desyatka appears on booking sites like most other hotels. A quick Google search will tell you that it consists of, “Basic lodging on leafy grounds, offering a cozy restaurant/pub, plus free parking and breakfast.” There’s even a Trip Advisor entry complete with favourable customer reviews and its own website that…

The Place Where World War One Planes Still Fly

Wander through the quaint, old fashioned town of Rhinebeck in New York’s Hudson Valley, and you may feel as though you’ve stepped back to another era. Especially when you look up into the sky: for its quite common to see vintage airplanes circling high above all day long, the distinctive sound of old, single propeller…

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A Time Traveller’s Secret Stroll through Brooklyn Heights

For all Brooklyn’s ever growing popularity, you’ve not discovered its true virtues until you’ve taken a stroll around Brooklyn Heights. This small, historic neighbourhood is filled with block after block of picturesque old cobbled streets, over 600 pre-civil war houses and a few mansions that look like they’re come straight off the set of Gone with…

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