Inside the Real Noah’s Ark buried on an Arctic Island

In the event of Armageddon, I think I know where I’ll be headed now. Buried 390 feet deep inside a sandstone mountain on an island between Norway and the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, also known as the doomsday vault, is home to the millions of seeds that could save a post-apocalyptic world. These are the…

We went on a Picnic in a Parisian Nazi Bunker

I‘ve been on some adventures in my lifetime, but none of them ended with a candlelit banquet in an abandoned Nazi bunker. And it is with great pleasure that I finally get to share this surreal experience with you. The idea began with the proposal of a picnic with a few friends, somewhere a little…

Ultimate Basement Find: A City

Have you ever cleared out your basement or attic only to discover a box of childhood memorabilia or an awkward middle school yearbook you wish you could have forgotten for slightly longer? Well, there is one guy in Turkey who has us all beat. He discovered an entire ancient underground city behind a wall in…

Inside the Secret Parisian Warehouse where the French Presidents Go Furniture Shopping

Picture an IKEA warehouse – but make it chic – and add an inventory of priceless furniture, textiles and objects that date as far back as the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, who indisputably raised the bar on what we’ll call French ‘power decorating’ for centuries to come. A sprawling Art Deco reinforced…

The Reformed Nazi Cult trying to Open its Colony to Tourism

I was sent down a deep and dark rabbit hole today when I came across a new movie trailer for Colonia. The film is based on true events which took place in 1970s Chile at the Colonia Dignidad, a dangerous cult that was revealed to have Nazi ties and to have used torture among other atrocities within its inescapable walls.…

Liberating Paris with Mixed Reality

Vive la resistance! Join me 600m below Paris to liberate the city in a special new “Don’t be a Tourist” episode with Microsoft. Discover a WWII bunker deserted for decades and relive the liberation of Paris with HoloLens mixed reality technology through the eyes of French resistance fighters in the underworld.

So in Albania, the Number of Abandoned Bunkers is Kind of a Problem

Once upon a time, during the Cold War, Albania’s paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha forced his country to build 700,000 bunkers, one for every four citizens. Today, the country is still trying to figure out what to do with his concrete mushrooms that have become synonymous with the landscape. A number of them have been creatively…

The Vault

So Last Night I went to the Most Surreal Party in Paris

I think Dali would have been proud of me last night. I had received a call from my new friends over at We are the Oracle (underground unique party planners extraordaires) inviting me to a shindig they were throwing with “a bit of a twist”. It was going to be held at the same location as one of their…

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The Nazi Bunker Sitting Under a Paris Train Station

Unbeknownst to the thousands of passengers that pass through the station each day, right under their feet, between platforms 2 and 3 at the Gare de l’Est (East Train Station) lies an old concrete World War II bomb shelter. One of the busiest stations in the heart of Paris, the 19th century terminal is hiding a 120m²…

The Charming Village with a Billion Dollar Secret

Disguised by two seemingly innocent village homes, none of the locals of Cochem knew that for two decades during the height of the Cold War, 15 Billion German Mark– the vault of West Germany’s central bank– was being stashed below the streets of their sleepy town nestled in the slopes of the Mosel valley. As…