"Aphrodite was reputed to have been birthed from the sea at this very spot. And when you"re in a place of beauty like this, you feel insignificant in the events of time."
ON THE BEACH NEAR PAPHOS, CYPRUS, MARCH 24, 2006 Dimitri Kyriakides, in the foreground, a 51-year-old accountant from Johannesburg, South Africa. "I was born in Cyprus, but I left there when I was very young ?about 10. I felt that I should go and see if there was anything there that I could relate to. It"s always good to go back to your birthplace. I had to go and try to establish some connection with my roots, and I think that was quite important for me at this stage in my life. Aphrodite was reputed to have been birthed from the sea at this very spot. And when you"re in a place of beauty like this, you feel insignificant in the events of time. Time doesn"t have any relation to what you"re doing. I think it made me decide which direction I wanted to go in, and I"m following that in hot pursuit, as they say."
As told to Austin Considine
ATTENDING A GEISHA FANTASY CAMP, KYOTO, JAPAN, FEB. 27, 2006 Suzue Kondou, 32, right, a data entry clerk from Fukuoka City, Japan, with her friend, Emiko Katahira, also 32 and from Fukuoka City. "Kyoto was absolutely a different world. There are a lot of old buildings and many people walking in kimonos. I enjoy seeing old things and hearing about the old days. The history seems very close to people in Kyoto. In the costume, I felt like being a completely different person. People watched and aimed their cameras at us. First I regretted, then, gradually started enjoying being watched. I was totally a different person for three hours."
As told to Makiko Inoue
AT THE DONGDAEMUN MARKET IN SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, MARCH 3, 2006 Brenda Panichi, a lawyer for Procter & Gamble in Kobe, Japan. "I went to Korea to attend the wedding of a friend of mine. She"s the one who told me about this market. She said, "It"s a cool place; it"s where a lot of people are hanging out at night," and boy, let me tell you, that"s true. The place is, like, unbelievable. It has about 25 malls and 20,000 or 30,000 little tiny specialty shops. It"s open until like 5 a.m. I left at about 1:30 in the morning and it was absolutely hopping." As told to Seth Kugel
IN ST. JOHN"S CATACOMBS AT SYRACUSE, SICILY, MARCH 30, 2006 Dr. Iain Moore, 31, left, a kidney specialist from Newcastle upon Tyne, England, with Dr. Alastair McKelvey, a colleague: "I"m from Belfast, but I live in the north of England these days, so I"m used to freezing cold weather and lots of rain. It"s nice to get somewhere where there isn"t that sort of weather. I"d never been in catacombs before, and I expected there to be bones and so on, but the bones had all been cleared out around A.D. 500. St. Paul traveled through and slept or certainly prayed and worshipped there. And whether or not you"re a believer in religion, to think that 2,000 years ago people were building these places and living in them and hiding from the authorities in them and so on ?it"s just a phenomenal sense of history." As told to Austin Considine
ON THE ALFONSO XIII CANAL, SEVILLE, SPAIN MARCH 6, 2006 Anne Pastorius, reclining, a student at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. "When I was little, my favorite babysitter was a Spanish major; she"s now a Spanish teacher and she studied in the same study-abroad program I"m in. This was the first really nice day of the spring, and my roommate had just got over being sick, so we were all down by the river hanging out. It was the first time we could take out our capris and sandals and swimsuits and get a little color. Coming to Spain really, really opened up my eyes to a different lifestyle. In Seville, they are very much night people. I"m also really surprised how much ham they have. They have ham with everything; it"s crazy." As told to Seth Kugel
PLAYING SOCCER WITH A BEACH BALL AT AGIA MARINA BEACH, CRETE, April 19, 2006 Pierre-Jean Baudouard, a radiologist from Le Havre, France, with his 6-year-old son, Paul. "Every year, I go on vacation with my nephew, my sister and my wife, but we had a baby girl this year, and my wife couldn"t come along. So this was a trip just for the guys, and the first for my son, Paul. We decided to go with my nephew, Thomas, to Crete, because we felt sure to find some history, the beach and also a bit of adventure for Paul. We rented a 4x4, and every day we took off into the mountains ?with Paul as the copilot holding the map, which made him very happy." As told to Austin Considine
FEEDING GULLS ALONG DUBAI CREEK, DUBAI, DEC. 20, 2005 Hazem Farhoud, 24, a computer-science engineer from Amman, Jordan: "I go to Dubai for five days every month to do business. It"s beautiful in Dubai, and it"s a great country to do business in, because you find everything you want in Dubai. I find it"s very different ?almost too different ?from my country. Everything is so organized. And, when dealing with people there, everything is different: the people are easy, not so complex. There are many different kinds of people, many different cultures. But the English language is everywhere, so you can work with the Indian people, the Philippine people, the American people, Pakistani people, Emirates people, Arab people. When I go to Dubai, I always throw some food to birds, and it feels great. And I really think that"s what you feel when you"re there ?you feel great." As told to Austin Considine
AT THE DEAD SEA, ISRAEL, NOV. 11, 2005 David Samdperil, owner of a special events production company, with his girlfriend Debbie Blumencranz, an interior designer, both from Atlanta. "You can"t not ham it up when you have mud all over yourself. The mud is sort of like a spa treatment. It has minerals; it has salts; it"s very cold and creamy. You rub it all over your body, you lie in the sun and let it dry. It forms a sort of crust, and then you go in the water with it. You look like an idiot. You become a kid again. You tell jokes, you roll around, and it"s O.K. There"s nothing deep or profound about it; it"s just one of those places where you have a unique experience. If you"re in Israel, you have to go to the Dead Sea." As told to Seth Kugel
AT NAGHSHE ROSTAM, A COLLECTION OF ROYAL TOMBS NEAR THE RUINS AT PERSEPOLIS, SHIRAZ, IRAN, DEC. 21, 2005 Selma Barnard, a retired teacher, from Leiden, the Netherlands. Ms. Barnard is photographing a depiction of King Shapur"s defeat of the Romans in A.D. 260. "I was in Iran for the first time in 1968, and I always wanted to go back, especially to see Persepolis and things like that. So I went with my husband and two friends, and we visited Shiraz and then made the expedition to Persepolis and the tombs there. What"s amazing in a place like that is that they built several such huge sculptures in the rocks. But now, the place is so deserted. And it must have been very busy years ago. It"s so quiet, with hardly anybody there, and there"s time to look at things. I always wonder how people lived in those days because I cannot really imagine it." As told to Austin Considine.
AT THE ORANGE BATTLE DURING CARNIVAL IN IVREA, ITALY, FEB. 26, 2006 Mark Snyder, a real estate sales consultant from Charlotte, N.C., center, with his fianc?, Jennifer McGinnis, also of Charlotte, and their friend Justin Kufahl from Shawnee, Kan. "The "tyrant"s" carts are drawn by four horses, and the only thing that the guards have exposed are their arms, so that"s what we, the so-called peasants, were supposed to aim for. Now, being my first battle, I was aiming for the helmet: I just wanted to hear the orange splatter. These suckers hurt. You can ask my dad. God bless him, he"s 59, and he took four oranges to the same left eye. And the fourth one just lit him up. So we called him Louie Blue Eyes the rest of the trip. He had the best shiner I"ve seen on a guy in a long while." As told to Seth Kugel
Alex Quesada for The New York Times
AT THE BLUE LAGOON, PORT ANTONIO, JAMAICA, JAN. 9, 2006 Barbara Katzel, an esthetician from Burbank, Ill., with her husband, Bernard, a cabinetmaker. "We had gone to Negril for 12 years. Then a friend who lives in Kingston e-mailed me one time and said "You"ve got to see a different part of Jamaica." He picked us up from the airport and drove us to San Antonio. I had picked a bed-and-breakfast right by the Blue Lagoon. It was so awesome to see all these trees, the lushness of Jamaica, like jungle, so different from what you see in Negril. When you swim in the Blue Lagoon you can look out in the ocean. It was very, very quiet. There were no people. I think I saw the movie "The Blue Lagoon" years and years ago. I would love to be shipwrecked there. I think we could survive. I"d be willing to try it." As told to Seth Kugel
THE VIKING RUN, A 48-MILE SKATING MARATHON BETWEEN UPPSALA AND STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN, FEB. 19, 2006 Heijo Scharff, 46, an environmental engineer from Schoorl, the Netherlands. "The reason to go to Sweden is very basic: I love skating and hate ice rinks and there is very little natural ice in Holland. Every year I try to go for three to four weeks. The race is on an interconnected lake system which widens and narrows and undulates. There are trees and farmhouses and you pass small villages. It"s a route that the Vikings used in earlier days. I was No. 33, in a time of 3 hours, 28 minutes. The basic thing that appeals to me in skating? It feels like the closest thing to flying. When my technique is right, I can reach speeds of around 25 miles an hour." As told to Seth Kugel
Josef Polleross for The New York Times
THE TAT KUANG SI WATERFALL, 32 MILES SOUTH OF LUANG PRABANG, LAOS, FEB. 17, 2006 Shinji Yano, a tourism industry worker from Nagoya, Japan: "I"ve been on a trip traveling around Southeast Asia for two months. I like waterfalls a lot. In the many different countries I"ve been to, I usually like to spend time around waterfalls. I wanted to sit down on the rocks because it is so close to the waterfall, and I can concentrate there. When I close my eyes, it"s very nice and I can relax. You know that sit-down style? It"s Zen. It"s a kind of Japanese meditation. When I sit down, Zen style, I"m trying to concentrate. I will not think about anything, and I will not feel anything. I just concentrate." As told to Austin Considine