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The Mini Room
When I checked in to my hotel in Oldenburg, the man at reception told me he was giving me the “mini room”, sounding as though he was doing me some kind of big favor. Of course, I thought he just meant a small room, which didn’t surprise me because I Read More ...
Vauban’s Citadel above Besançon
More than a hundred meters above the old town of Besançon, Vauban’s Citadel covers eleven hectares on the top of Mont Saint-Etienne. Besançon was controlled by the Spanish until 1674, when it was besieged and conquered by a French army of about 70,000 men under Vauban’s direction. Under one of Read More ...
The afternoon of 9/11
My office in 2001 was on the fifth floor of a six-story building in the unfashionable Gallus quarter of Frankfurt. At around three in the afternoon (German time) on a Tuesday my colleague from the next office came in and told me she had just received a strange phone call Read More ...
Rousseau in Montmorency
L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” This quotation from the beginning of The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), is one of those that used to be on display in the town of Montmorency, a Read More ...
Tales of Broca Street
When I was staying in a studio apartment on Rue Broca, in the Croulebarbe quarter of the 13th arrondissement, I decided to take a walk up the street to see what there was to see. Rue Broca is not a very long street, only four blocks, but it used to Read More ...
A rainy day at Place de Roubaix
A nice thing to do in Paris when it starts to rain is to take refuge in one of the many cafés and watch the rain from the second row of tables, just inside. At Place de Roubaix I docked my Vélib’ bike at station 10029 on Rue de Dunkerque Read More ...
Cutting edge technology …
… of bygone decades. In the winter of 1989 one of the monthly computer magazines — I forget if it was a German or an American one — came out with an article called The Ten Worst Computers of the 1980s. As the absolutely worst computer of the decade they Read More ...
Birthplace of Heinrich Heine
You’d think the people of Düsseldorf would always have been proud that their city was the birthplace of a major nineteenth century author, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). But no, until quite recently a lot of people in Düsseldorf wished he had gone off and been born somewhere else. Why? Generations of Read More ...
Mozart in the Madeleine
When he died in December 1791 at age 35, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was still working on his last composition, his Requiem Mass in D Minor (K. 626). The Requiem had been commissioned by a mysterious messenger with wads of money who wouldn’t say who he was working for. Read More ...
To Leipzig by train
Even now, after thirty years of German unification, it still feels eerie to ride in a train as it barrels through the town of Gerstungen without even slowing down. Gerstungen used to be the border stop between East and West Germany, and every train had at least a one-hour stop Read More ...
Johannes Casimir welcoming visitors to Heidelberg
Heidelberg Castle is a large picturesque ruin up on a hill overlooking the city. On the (only half-ruined) façades facing the castle courtyard there are several statues of imposing gentlemen who were all-powerful counts or dukes or whatnot in their time. This one is identified as Ioannes Casimirus MDXCII which Read More ...
Conversation and more B2
The photos in this post are by a professional photographer, Rolf Oeser, who happens to be a long-time participant in one of my English courses at the Frankfurt Adult Education Center (VHS). Rolf’s photos appear nearly every day in the Frankfurter Rundschau, one of the city’s three daily newspapers. He Read More ...