Munich: What a city! Beautiful, clean and orderly, and friendly. We both readily chose it over London. The good weather in April definitely worked in its favor as well as ours. On our way here, in a train trip with two long delays and more train changes than we had planned, time passed quite pleasantly…
‘We’ll always have Paris.“ Remember that famous line from Bogey to Bergman (Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, in case you’re too young to know) in the film classic Casablanca? Done in black and white, it’s vintage Hollywood. A must-see for film lovers. Here’s a short trailer. Paris fascinates Hollywood. Hollywood fascinates Paris, by far the…
Sounds We live directly across from L’Eglise Saint Louis. Right next to it is a grade school. We’re constantly reminded of these neighbors by sounds. Sounds that, to some, might be noise but to us signify the daily flow of life on the island. The bells of the church ring a few times a day…
Inside, the apartment is furnished in both vintage and Ikea. A cupboard proclaims its age on numbers carved on its middle door: 1779.
Ah, the freedom of getting vaccinated against covid. I’m looking forward to museum-hopping again. Preferably in Paris, to me, the museum capital of the world. Many visitors to Paris scribble art-viewing into their itinerary. Not as often, though, I think as shopping and eating. But museums are great on a rainy day. Plenty of them…
Budapest has drama. It’s monumental—in a grungy sort of way. But maybe we felt that way when we visited it because the summer weather was so hot and humid that the requisite sightseeing became a miserable chore. Budapest, the confluence of royal and proletarian legacies in a country of only ten million inhabitants, seems to…
Fusion of French and German cultures has been at the core of being a Strasbourgeois. That is what a Strasbourgeois would tell you―the cab drivers, merchants, and museum ‘gardiens,’ for instance. They embrace the idea as the way things naturally are. This blended identity of the Strasbourgeois may defy attempts to resolve the question of…
Prague has a real treasure “hidden” from most tourist groups herded into the city for a day or three. The current entry on Prague in Wikipedia doesn’t mention it. And, though it’s listed as a top attraction, Lonely Planet does not showcase it as a highlight to a Prague visit. Regrettable, I’d say. Especially if…
A fire nearly destroyed the iconic Cathédrale Notre Dame in Paris—arguably the most famous cathedral in the world. Current efforts to restore it have been hampered, like most of life nowadays, by a deadly virus. Now that we all have to stop and take many deep—hopefully cleansing—breaths, we have the luxury to wonder about its…
We like Austria which we’ve visited twice. But language is a problem although certain German words seem to have obvious equivalents in English. Food was sometimes a problem for us as well. Austria is a meat-eating country. It tends to serve everything in large portions. And that flower-shaped mound of whipped cream seems to top…
Milan. We like it. Quite a lot. Some guide books tell you Milan isn’t really Italy and many tours exclude it from their itineraries. Maybe, they mean it’s not the Italy they have romanticized. Nor Italy of the renaissance or baroque periods. But Milan is Italy as: • Grand gestures; • Innovation and design; •…
It’s a long journey from San Francisco to Florence. On our last summer trip, it took a fairly uneventful seventeen hours of flying and waiting at airports. For a month our pied-à-terre was on the Oltrarno, south of the river. About 900 sq. ft. of voluminous dark space with a loft bedroom and two bathrooms,…
Artsy Rambler 