Destinations | Culture With Lina

Hanami: How Japan Turns Cherry Blossoms Into a National Holiday of Joy

For a week or two every spring, Japan collectively looks up. Hanami, “flower viewing,” is the centuries-old custom of gathering…

I signed up for a Kyoto tea ceremony thinking it would be a pleasant hour of cultural tourism. I left…

After the noise of the cities, Kerala felt like India exhaling. The backwaters are a 900-kilometer web of lagoons, canals,…

Jaipur is the city that made me fall for Rajasthan, and it did it with a color. In 1876, the…

Nothing I had read prepared me for Varanasi, and I had read a lot. One of the oldest continuously inhabited…

Barcelona is the only city I know where the architecture makes people laugh out loud. Not mockingly. Delightedly. You turn…

Moroccan hospitality has a flavor, and it is mint. Within an hour of arriving, I had been offered tea three…

The best advice I got about Marrakech came from a riad owner on my first morning: “You will get lost.…

There is a reason every guidebook, every poet, and every taxi driver in Andalusia tells you the same thing: you…

Seville is a city you walk slowly through, neck craned upward. From the soaring Giralda tower to the Royal Alcázar’s…