I’m guided by a signal in the heavens/I’m guided by those birthmarks on my skin/
I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons/First we take Manhattan then we take Berlin.
~ Leonard Cohen
cafe honoring Austrian playwright Joseph Roth, who lived next door. (click to expand)
Its utterly sock-knocking to be back in a proper international landscape after so [...]
The kids packed the rental car with a year and a half of life à la ChittyChittyBangBang, and headed off to Berlin, by way of Toscana. Joyful, sorrowful, thrilled, about to be older, not likely much wiser. Here is some footage from last weekends visit with Manfred, Peggy and Stefan, hiking the Creux du Van.
(Ta [...]
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View from the prison tower, the oldest building in Neuchâtel, with foundations from the 10th century.
In 1688 Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer introduced the term nostalgia for the condition also known as mal du Suisse (Swiss illness) or Schweizerheimweh (Swiss homesickness), because of its frequent occurrence in Swiss [...]
Generally we drive, but for this trip to Zurich we took the train. Maybe the ride was my favorite part. I used to ride Amtrak several times a month for work, from New York to Philly or Washington. A lady can do her best thinking on a train.
I was thinking what if I were [...]
Parque Natural de Alcornocales (Cork Oak Trees). Notice the numbers on the trees, which are stripped at the base. A five-man gang traveling the forest in a nine-year cycle carefully harvests the cork. Once loaded, a tap on the back sends their burros unaccompanied to the factory.
We had been traveling in Portugal in what turned [...]
I’m leaving because the weather is too good. I hate London when it’s not raining.
~Groucho Marx
We spent the last days in NYC cleaning the party loft, brunching at Dressler, cleaning and packing up our apartment (wedding cake in the freezer, this goes to LA, that goes to the basement, this comes to Europe…), handing our [...]
Alfonso dismissed it as anti-Enlightenment flim-flam. Though I had to agree, the ossuary–located about an hour south of Prague in a suburb of Kutna Hora called Sedlec–was also intriguing.
A chandelier made of (at least) one of every bone in the human body is something to see in my book.
Here is how it [...]
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The story goes that the German-born physicist Albert Einstein worked out his theory of relativity while employed as a clerk at the Berne patent office. We visited this Medieval town–the capital of Switzerland–this weekend with Alfonso’s cousin Antonio (of terrifying Angel fame) and his girlfriend Mimi.
The town’s best known icon [...]
“You really can’t go home,” Ali said. We were standing in the dark in front of the summer apartment in Senigallia once owned by his parents. All his childhood and teenage summers were spent there, or in the two treasured movie theaters that are now a car showroom and a casino.
We stood staring up [...]
It is perched in a blown glass egg, the base of which reads Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza. The right middle finger of Galileo–this heretic’s reliquary–is tucked in a case among telescopes, celestial globes, solar orbs, and tellurium.
Or it would be, if the museum’s wonderous objects were not mostly hidden away while they [...]