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Once upon a time, Prince Semchen Chenpo took a recreational sojourn to the forests of the Himalayan foothills with his parents and two brothers. After finding a place to rest and set up camp, the three brothers went exploring and discovered an ailing tigress lying in a nearby cave. Endowed with extraordinary compassion, Semchen stopped […]
The metropolitan area of Bangkok is estimated to be home to at least 400 Buddhist temples (wats), with only about 100 of them no longer operational. The most common sect of Buddhism in Thailand is Theravāda, which places a great value on its monastic orders. As such, most temples in Bangkok will actually home and educate […]
The Convent of the Holy Apostles, the largest and most impressive in northwest Romania, stands on a plateau looking down on the Iza River. It was rebuilt starting in 1993 on the site of an old monastery abandoned during the 1790s and is now home to an Orthodox community of nuns. The church, designed by […]
The origins of Germany’s Maultaschen are deliciously devious. Legend has it that, in the late Middle Ages, a lay brother named Jakob invented the stuffed pasta dumplings at the Maulbronn Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site founded in 1147 by Cistercian monks in southwest Germany. One direct translation of Maultaschen is “mouth pockets,” though “Maul” […]