Travelers' Intercom

With my primary purpose being to learn more Spanish, I visited Antigua, Guatemala, June 14-July 11, 2009. I have been visiting countries in Latin America for many years and have been a student at schools in those countries. I also have a small tourism company in Colombia, The Colombia Experience, LLC (e-mail thecolombiaexperience@earthlink.net), for which it always helps to increase my understanding of the language.

I attended the Centro Lingüístico Internacional Spanish School (Avenida del Espiritu Santo 6, Antigua, Guatemala; phone/fax [+502] 7832 1039, www.spanishcontact.com) for...

It was my privilege to visit Tiya as part of a trip to Ethiopia with Spiekermann Travel Service (Eastpointe, MI; 800/645-3233) in January ’11. Tiya is regarded as the most important of the 160 archaeological sites in the Soddo region south of Addis Ababa.

Thirty-six huge stone monoliths, 32 of which bear strange carvings of swords and other signs and symbols, stand clustered in the tall grasses of a large field less than a kilometer outside the small town of Tiya. The stelae were designated a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site in 1980.

The site is enclosed in a barbed...

My wife, our granddaughter and I took a trip to Germany, June 16-July 2, 2009. I had made all of our travel arrangements on the Internet, including the Deutsche Bahn (DB) train tickets to the various places we were going: Frankfurt, Munich, Ampfing, Würzburg and back to Frankfurt. These all were highly restricted, advance-purchase, nonrefundable, nonchangeable “Internet saver tickets.”

We flew from San Francisco to Frankfurt on United, but our flight was three hours late departing SFO (no reason given by the airline) and did not make up any of the lost time.

Even though I had...