Emigration through Cherbourg, 1928
This large baggage room in the former maritime railway station doesn’t really have much to do with emigration, since it wasn’t completed until 1933, when the flow of emigrants was already greatly reduced. But it is now used as part of the Cité de la Mer to explain the history 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 ...
The sun in its travels …
Avignon was the hub of the universe for most of the fourteenth century. Or at least the hub of Western European Christianity. What happened was that in 1309 Pope Clement V settled in Avignon with his Cardinals and the entire Papal Court, because Rome was in constant turmoil. Seven (or Read More ...
Mekong Delta tour 1995
Towards the end of our Vietnam trip in 1995 Nick and I took a three-day bus tour of the Mekong Delta at the southern end of Vietnam. This excellent tour was organized by the original (and at that time only) Sinh Café, which is now called TheSinhTourist to differentiate it Read More ...
The Lady and the Unicorn
The most famous and most intriguing exhibit in the Cluny Museum is “La Dame à la licorne” (The Lady and the Unicorn). This exhibit consists of six large tapestries on display in a room with subdued light. Five of these tapestries show the five senses; Taste, Sight, Touch, Smell and Read More ...
The Weikersheim Planetary Trail
The Weikersheim Planetary Trail begins on the Tauber Valley Cycling Route at the northern edge of the city of Weikersheim. A yellow sphere, about one and a half meters in diameter, represents the sun at a scale of 1:1,000,000,000. From there you start walking or cycling slightly uphill towards the Read More ...
The clean-up man
Clip clop (or rather klip klop) go the horses’ hooves that echo through the pedestrianized streets around the Cathedral and Saint Peter’s Abbey and the Festival Halls of Salzburg. Tourists who want a small dose of nostalgia can go around to Residenzplatz, on the north side of the Cathedral, and Read More ...
The Hölderlin Path
These signs near the Goethe House, in the center of Frankfurt, show the beginnings of the Hölderlin Path (22 km) and the Goethe Trail (11 km). From here, the Hölderlin Path goes off to the left and the Goethe Trail goes off to the right — which is appropriate considering Read More ...
Aux Désirs de Manon
At 129 rue Saint Antoine in the Marais district of Paris there is a small bakery and pastry shop with the marvelous name Aux Désirs de Manon, referring to the heroine of the novel Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost (1697-1763) — a novel which was the inspiration for operas by Read More ...
Cycling at night in Paris
One of the things I really love is cycling home at night after the opera. This is even more magical in Paris because you not only have the opera going through your head, you also have Paris all around you. You do have to look out for the taxis, though, Read More ...
Victor Hugo at the Place des Vosges
Victor Hugo was 35 in the year 1837, when this bust was sculpted by his friend David d’Angers. By that time, Hugo had already published his novel Notre-Dame de Paris (known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), as well as several volumes of poetry and plays such as Hernani Read More ...
The Anomaly
As I was walking from the Bois-Colombes railway station towards Villa Osouf, I came across this bookshop, Nouvelle & Cie at 69 rue Bourguignons. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, I hadn’t been in a French bookshop for nearly two years, so I went in — and discovered from a display Read More ...