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 ...