On Saturday we took an adventure by train to Aarberger, to the annual brocante (flea market). This is part of my Explore Your Own Country initiative, prompted by a general lack of traveling elsewhere. Next up is a journey to hike the Creux du Van.
Most of the pictures below are from the train or [...]
Today I was unfriended on Facebook. Because the event that lead to this relates to something I have been pondering all week and I’m interested in your thoughts, I will tell the sad tale:
We were best friends for many teen years. We worked as wenches at the Renaissance Faire together; we sun-bathed in her backyard [...]
sign of spring #1: this pie-faced man with pretzels for ears and sandwich feet.
Utterly remiss. I mean it’s April and I’ve yet to write Spain posts from New Years Eve. Criminy. My excuse is, well, my website was hacked, for one. I designed and built the first version of it myself and can code [...]
Our hosts in Andalusia were an old friend of Alfonso and his wife, who is native to Cadiz, of the town Sanlucar de Barrameda. Upon our arrival we were thus treated to a party of adults and kids, a reunion of sorts for the high school girlfriends of our host and their menfolk and children.
Much [...]
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 [...]
Today I’ve been thinking about The Monster at the End of This Book, a Little Golden Book of my childhood featuring the neurotic but lovable Grover (and somehow in my mind, Klaus Kinski).
In it he pleads with the reader in increasingly hysteric tones to not turn the page, in a foiled attempt to avoid meeting [...]
Begun for Macdowell Colony dispatches, continued as an experiment in being other than I am (or at least stretching boundaries regarding self-exposure), and no end in sight…
Thank you dear blog, thank you dear readers.
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He was a man so cranky he seemed a character in a story by Dickens. This man–let’s call him Ebenezer–spit a response to my innocent inquiry, “Please sir, where is the real cricket playing tiny violin?”
No matter, we found said cricket–and the flea in golden horseshoes, and the whole herd of camels in the [...]
We traveled to many villages and towns in Provence and the Luberon Valley–there was Avignon, home of Palais des Papes (Palace of the Popes), called by poet Petrarch the “most foul and stinking city on Earth” (its not, but it sure is touristy!), and where we saw a couple waltzing in the morning sunlight on [...]
I have been reading several travel and food writers lately, for pleasure, but also with a secret fantasy of being one I think. A. J. Liebling’s Between Meals, Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste, M.F.K. Fisher’s Two Towns in Provence, and Sybille Bedford’s Pleasures and Landscapes are all on my night table at the moment.
we stayed [...]