From the Latin Quarter to the Marais

One morning in September 2011, a group of VirtualTourist members met at the Square René Viviani in the Latin Quarter of Paris (with the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in the background) for a walking tour led by VT member Paul Smith, who took us through some side streets of the Latin Quarter, Read More …

Boucherie chevaline

Hippophagy, meaning the eating of horse meat, wasn’t even legal in France until 1866, although there was a black market for horse meat long before that, especially in times of crisis. According to the French historian Sylvain Leteux, horse meat lost its taboo status and became a popular food in France Read More …

Baths of Chatêaudun

This old façade of the Bains de Chatêaudun, made mainly of ceramic tiles, has been lovingly preserved and renovated, although the bathhouse itself no longer exists because most people now have indoor plumbing at home, so they can bathe or shower whenever they want to without going out to the Read More …

Zaengerler et Roussel

This picturesque art-deco façade — made mainly of ceramic tiles — provides a welcome splash of color on the otherwise undistinguished Cours de Vincennes at the eastern end of Paris. Zaengerler et Roussel was an enterprise that made tiles and mosaics. The company no longer exists (having gone bankrupt in Read More …

The summit, so to speak

This protrusion at the north end of Hampstead Heath used to be the highest point in London, at a dizzying height of 137 metres (449 feet) above sea level. It was, in fact, the highest point in the former County of London, which existed from 1889 to 1965. But the Read More …

Back Lane and the Holly Bush

On our VirtualTourist walking tour of Hampstead, we went through a street called Back Lane, where we came across this house (at 1 Back Lane) with an 18th century “Assurance” plaque on its brick façade. Sarah explained that in those days each insurance company had its own fire brigade. Before Read More …

Historic Houses in Hampstead

The Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) lived in this house at 10 Keats Grove, Hampstead, for seventeen months from 1818 to 1820. From here he travelled to Rome, where he died of tuberculosis at age 25. The sign by the plum tree explains: “Keats wrote his famous ‘Ode to a Read More …

Walking tour of Hampstead

Hampstead is a former village (once a fashionable spa) which is now an affluent district of London. It used to be known for its intellectuals, artists and writers such as George Orwell, who lived there in the 1930s and wrote about it in his early novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying Read More …

To Hampstead on the Northern Line

Somehow I thought Hampstead would be a great distance from the center of London, but it turns out to be only an eleven-minute ride on the Northern Line from the underground station King’s Cross St. Pancras, with stops at Euston, Camden Town, Chalk Farm and Belsize Park. By this time Read More …

Frankfurter Büro Center

Frankfurt Skyline Countdown # 20 Construction of the Frankfurter Büro Center was well underway in 1975, when the oil crisis brought work to a standstill. The building stood unfinished for four years while the financial and rental situation was sorted out. Then finally it was sold to a company Read More …

Featured posts

The Opera House in Amsterdam

In the entrance hall of the Amsterdam Opera House this statue of a violinist seems to be erupting through the floor from some forgotten world below the surface. My impression of this violinist is that he is dead (look at his hand) and that he is perhaps a Jewish violinist 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 ...

Building the Aida stage set

The stage for Zeffirelli’s production of Verdi’s Aida in the Arena of Verona is dominated by two large statues of ancient Egyptian pharaohs (rulers), which between performances are stored out in front of the Arena on the Piazza Bra. Here are some more of the stage elements for Aida in Read More ...

Tay Ninh and Cu Chi 1995

On our last day in Vietnam in 1995, my son Nick and I took an excellent day tour (organized by the Sinh Café) from Saigon that went first to Tay Ninh, the home of the Cao Dai religion, and then to the tunnels at Cu Chi. I was especially interested 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 ...

What’s so bad about it?

A glance at a map of Germany will reveal that there are hundreds of place names that start with the word “Bad”, and you have probably guessed that this does not mean all these places are bad in the sense of awful or terrible. The German word Bad means “bath”, Read More ...

Beaumarchais

This bronze statue of the playwright Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799), the author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, among other plays, is on display in Paris at the corner of Rue Saint-Antoine and the Rue des Tournelles, in the 4th arrondissement near Place de Read More ...

21st century Greiz (operetta)

Greiz is a town of 22,548 people (down four thousand since my visit) in the Elster Valley 33 kilometers south of Gera. (My lead photo shows Greiz at 7:00 a.m.) When I was asked to conduct a teachers’ workshop in Greiz I first had to look at the map to Read More ...

Racine’s Esther in Saint-Cyr

One of the features of Madame de Maintenon’s school in its early years was that the girls were allowed to perform plays, to improve their public speaking abilities and expose them to great literature. This was common practice in boys’ schools at the time, but was unheard of in girls’ Read More ...

Carmen in Coburg

Like many of the other opera houses in Germany, the Coburg State Theater was originally founded as a court theater. Coburg in earlier times was the Residence of the Dukes of Sachsen-Coburg, a princely family that was famous in the nineteenth century particularly because one of its members, Prince Leopold, became Read More ...

German Emigration Center

Bremerhaven, as the name implies, is the harbor city belonging to the city of Bremen, which is 50 km upstream on the Weser River. Over a period of 150 years, an estimated 7.2 million emigrants sailed from the various wharves of Bremerhaven to begin a new life in the New 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 ...

Nemorino's travels

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