In this photo from around 1910, a train has just arrived from Paris and is waiting on the quay in Cherbourg. The photo, much enlarged, is now on display at the spot where it was originally taken over a century ago. The railway line from Paris to Cherbourg was inaugurated Read More …
This welcome poster at the entrance to the parking lot of the Cité de la Mer (City of the Sea) in Cherbourg was probably just intended as a collage showing various elements of the Cité in no particular relationship to each other, but I still find it irritating because it Read More …
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 …
My recent visit to Cherbourg, France, has reminded me of a minor mystery in my family’s past, namely my father’s eleven-week trip to Europe in 1931. He was 26 at the time, single, living in Chicago and working for a wholesale costume jewelry company called Morris, Mann & Reilly Inc. Read More …
The young man on the right in this photo is my father at age 20, playing chess with his friend Gustav Lamb in a suburb of Paris in the year 1925. On the back of the photo he wrote (in German): Mein Freund Gustav und ich beim Schachspiel in BoisColombes Read More …
The train trip to Bois-Colombes takes all of nine minutes from Saint Lazare station in Paris on the J-line of the Transilien. There is only one stop along the way, at Asnières-sur-Seine, since the J-trains go through the station Pont Cardinet without stopping. The cost for a one-way ticket is Read More …
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 …
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 …
This unusual and wonderfully creative museum consists of a long-term exhibition called “The City of K., Franz Kafka and Prague”, which originated in another city entirely, namely Barcelona, where it opened in 1999. Numerous people from Barcelona were involved in creating the exhibition, which seems to have benefited enormously from Read More …
We 21st century folks are so accustomed to doing everything electronically that we tend to forget about (or not even know about) the amazing mechanical devices our grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents used to use. From music boxes to player pianos, musical clocks to orchestrions, barrel organs to self-playing violins, Read More …