The saung is Myanmar’s most iconic musical instrument, a boat-shaped harp that sounds like nothing else.

I’m sitting in Bangkok’s airport, about to board a plane to my wildest destination yet: My sister’s wedding back home in Santa Cruz. What will I find in America after two years of constant travel?

I woke up to a mysterious text message from my friend Ekrem: “I’ve got a one-of-a-kind job waiting for you in Cappadocia if you can make it here by Monday.

Frequent readers will know that Western Africa is one of my favorite parts of the world, so my expectations were already high when I secured a lift to Bamako.

Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty of Studio KO have a knack for creating spaces so well contextualised that they seem to distill the essence of a project. Their design of Sahbi Sahbi (meaning soulmates in Darija, the local Arabic dialect) is a perfect example. The warm, textured brick, wood and tiled interior provides the perfect setting for the restaurant’s dadas(home cooks), a formidable team of women drawn from across the country for their deep regional food knowledge and skills. They execute perfectly cooked tagines, unusual couscous recipes and fragrant pastilla parcels stuffed with cinnamon-scented pigeon from a central open kitchen, so you can get a glimpse of into the heart of the Moroccan cooking. It’s a perfect celebration of home and heart.

A riad (which means garden in Arabic) is a traditional Moroccan house or palace with an interior courtyard or garden.