Features

After seven months of planning, learning a bit of the language and becoming somewhat culturally savvy, 14 Friendship Force members, myself included, arrived in Moscow to stay for one week with Russian host families.

We landed in a brand-new world of more than 15 million people, with speeding underground trains connecting acres of public squares, metro stations as resplendent as art galleries, spectacular palaces, enormous apartment buildings and pigeon-swept monuments.

This May ’08 Friendship Force exchange was not a tour but a chance to make friends with people across...

by Marisue Pickering; Orono, ME

When visiting family in England, one of the things my husband, John, and I enjoy doing is exploring lesser-known, often out-of-the-way parish churches. All have features that make them special — if not to a large public then at least to the local population and the dedicated “church explorer.”

Church guides

Although we have been exploring British churches for several years, it was a mention in ITN (Oct. ’05, pg. 108) of Clive Fewins’ “The Church Explorer’s Handbook” that made us realize that what we had been doing had a name! We also...

by David Tykol, Editor, ITN

While Shikoku is the smallest of Japan’s four main islands — tucked under the largest island, Honshu, and to the right of the southernmost, Kyushu — it promises big surprises, as I learned on a visit Oct. 13-18, 2008, as part of a small group of journalists.

Our gateway to Shikoku was the 8-mile Seto Ohashi Bridge series, which traverses five tiny islands in the Seto Inland Sea. Crossing this soaring structure aboard an express train traveling from Okayama, Honshu, to Takamatsu City provided a striking first impression!

Noodles in the...