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 …
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 …
Boulogne-Billancourt is the largest suburb of Paris, which makes it the second largest city in the Île-de-France, after Paris itself. Although I am not a big fan of 1930s architecture, I must admit that Boulogne-Billancourt (pronunciation here) has an unusually high concentration of public and private buildings from that decade. Read More …
On May 21, 1927, my father was in the crowd of more than 100,000 people who gathered at this airfield near Paris to await the arrival of Charles Lindbergh at the end of his transatlantic solo flight, the first one ever. So that’s why I decided to take a not-terribly-nice Read More …
This is a story about my thirtieth birthday that I wrote a few years later. Copyright © 1975 by Remington Review, Inc. As a young man I don’t think I ever once explicitly wondered what I would be doing on my 30th birthday. Which is just as well because if Read More …
The towns of Charenton-le-Pont (to the south) and Vincennes (to the north) both border directly on a pleasant wooded area called the Bois de Vincennes (Forest of Vincennes), which actually belongs to the city of Paris. In the 13th century this patch of woods was used as a royal hunting Read More …