History

I took a sailing adventure, the “14-Day Historic Coasts/Canada & New England Discovery,” aboard the ms Veendam of Holland America Line, or HAL (Seattle, WA; 877/932-4259, www.hollandamerica.com), Aug. 29-Sept. 12, 2015.

The cruise embarked from Boston, sailed up the New England and eastern Canadian coastlines, entered the St. Lawrence River and ended in historic Québec City. As a single in a partial-ocean-view stateroom, my total cost for this trip was $5,637.

Dear Globetrotter:

Welcome to the 485th issue of your monthly foreign travel magazine.

Having traveled much of the civilized world on all seven continents, I hungered to journey someplace that would open my eyes to new cultures. The Silk Road, traversing the Caucasus and five of the ’Stans in Central Asia, offered a rich blend of architecture, people, philosophies, history, landscapes and food.

Reading Fred Kranz’s article “In Search of Family History in Poland and Belarus” (Feb. ’16, pg. 32) immediately brought me back to the independent trip my husband and I took to Poland and Germany in August 2002. We, too, were searching for the backgrounds of our families.

Our parents had been born in the US, but our grandparents were from Romania, Latvia, Germany and Poland. We had visited each of those countries, but on this trip we were looking particularly at Lublin, Poland, and Frankfurt, Germany.

Since I would be attending a dermatology conference in Riga, Latvia, my wife, Yuki, and I decided it would be a good time to visit the three countries collectively known as the Baltics: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

Vilnius

For two days of sightseeing in St. Petersburg, Russia, in September 2015 before I started a cruise to Moscow, I used Dancing Bear Tours (Prospekt Ko­smonavtov 15A-6H, St. Petersburg, Russia 196211; phone +7 812 379 26 33, https://dancing-bear-tours.com), which advertises in ITN’s Mart. I had contacted the owner of the company, Julia Ivanushkina, when I received my Russian visa, three months before my trip.

Located on the National University of Singapore campus, the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum (2 Conservatory Dr., Singapore 117377; phone +65 6601 3333, http://lkcnhm.nus.edu.sg) opened in April 2015.

In a building that looks like a corner of it has been sliced off, the museum displays more than 2,000 of its one million animal and plant specimens, including insects, spiders, reptiles, mammals, etc., anchored by three nearly complete, long-necked diplodocus skeletons from Wyoming. 

Liz and Jack Kaufman of Lake Quivira, Kansas, wrote, “We have visited cemeteries all around the world. The best ones combine history with beautiful gardens and superb architecture…. We would like to read travelers’ recommendations for cemeteries to visit.”

So we requested that subscribers each name a special, historic or quirky cemetery that they visited outside of the US in the past few years and to tell us what most impressed them about it. 

From mounted insects to a 4-story high Mamenchisaurus skeleton, 11,000 plant and animal specimens — along with artifacts from human history in eastern China — are on display in the Shanghai Natural History Museum (phone +86 21 86822000, www.snhm.org.cn [in Chinese only]), which opened in its new location, the north section of the Jing’an Sculpture Park (128 Shimen Er Lu, Jing’an, Shanghai, China), in June 2015.