The opera house in Nancy is on an elegant public square called Place Stanislas, which was designed and built in the 1750s on orders of the Duke of Lorraine, Stanislas Leszczynski. The buildings on the four sides of Place Stanislas all have similar neo-classical façades, and two of the corners Read More …
In three words I can tell you what’s wrong with the Avenue des Champs-Élysées: cars, motorcycles and trucks. This street is marketed as “the most beautiful avenue in the world”, and it really is beautiful except for the fact that there is an ugly ten-lane highway running right down the Read More …
These are the three main opera venues in Prague, Czechia: The larger photo on the left shows The National Theater (Národní divadlo), which first opened in 1881. It currently seats 986 spectators. The opera I saw at the National Theater was Nápoj lásky (better known in Italian as L’elisir d’amore Read More …
The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by the Emperor Napoléon I in 1806 to celebrate the triumph of his armies over the rest of Europe in the early nineteenth century, particularly his triumph over the Russian and Austrian Empires at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. In recent decades, however, Read More …
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 …
While riding my bike through the Westend district of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, I came across this unusual and heartwarming scene. A policeman — one of the few Frankfurt policemen who patrols by bicycle — was writing out a parking ticket for a fat, shiny, black upper-class car, and a Read More …
Since electing its first Socialist mayor in 2001, the city of Paris has made considerable progress in re-allocating public space: widening sidewalks, narrowing streets, creating bus and bicycle lanes and reducing the space devoted to cars. But the problem is so widespread that numerous streets in Paris still have grotesquely Read More …
One day in 2012, I was on rue Saint-Antoine, near place de la Bastille, taking photos of the Beaumarchais statue, when I noticed this yellow sign reading “Piste cyclable neutralisée”, meaning that the bicycle lane had been neutralized, eliminated, done away with. At the bottom of the sign some irate Read More …
Groningen, the northernmost city in the Netherlands, is famous for having the highest percentage of bicycle use in the Western world. An estimated 57 % of the 190,000 residents use bicycles as their main form of daily transportation within the city. 59 % of all journeys within the city are Read More …
Scheinfeld is a happy town in the Steiger Forest in Franconia, northern Bavaria. You can tell it’s a happy town because some internet-savvy person has written “:D” with a felt-tipped marker in the upper left-hand corner of the sign. Up on a hill overlooking the town there is a castle Read More …