Writing

The book

Travels with My Mandolin

Travels with My Mandolin is a memoir of music, chance encounters, and restless journeys, told through the unlikely companion of a small mandolin.

Over more than a decade, the instrument travels through deserts, old European towns, island villages, railway stations, festivals, border crossings, hostels, beaches, bars and borrowed rooms. It opens conversations where language fails, turns strangers into temporary friends, and gives each place its own song.

This is not a conventional travel book. It is a personal map of memory: part road story, part musical pilgrimage, part search for connection. The mandolin becomes a passport of its own — small enough to carry anywhere, strange enough to invite curiosity, and warm enough to turn lonely places into human ones.

The journey ranges from the cold streets of Kraków to the sunlit alleys of Madeira, from the castles of Romania to the deserts of Jordan, from the cafés of Morocco to the forests and islands of Casamance. Some chapters are comic, some reflective, some full of music, grief, kindness or absurdity. Together they form a portrait of travel as it really happens: improvised, imperfect, sometimes uncomfortable, often beautiful, and always shaped by the people met along the way.