Today is Wednesday our second day at home. Slowly the body adjusts to the mid-western time zone. France is seven time zones earlier than Chicago. (Tomorrow perhaps I will not be wake at 5AM) A memory that lingers is our Bateaux Mouches cruise up the Seine at dusk in Paris. This is an ancient…
Back at last. Ten days in France became twelve. The airline cancelled our return flight. The lesson was learned which I suppose all seasoned travelers know. When reservations are upended by circumstance one thing alone matters, – to hash out the details of an alternate flight yourself. The airline is unlikely to independently reschedule…
Travel in a foreign country asks the traveler to adapt. Humans can be very adaptive. Or frozen, by patterns of past experience, those impossible expectations paralyzing the mind, and then spinning like a top, after energy is spent, wobbling to fall over. It is Sunday morning, I compose these lines at the end of…
We stayed a night in Tours. Tours was once the capital of France. I will always remember the Starbucks that looked convenient across the street. There I’d be able to simply order medium-sized, dark roast coffee as I am accustomed back in the states. It happened not to be found on the menu board….
Our fourth day in France featured a pilgrimage to Chartres. Could one conclude that the cathedral at Chartres is one of the wonders of the world? Yesterday in conversation with three Parisians we mentioned our plans to visit Chartres. Their eyes became wide, they assured us Chartres was amazing. The story of this great…
The day three, another outstanding breakfast at our hotel. The French feature of flakey, buttery pastry and fresh fruit, plus a charcuterie board is impossible to beat by my breakfast standards. My standard of what makes a good breakfast has been elevated. Today is Sunday. We arrived at the church of Saint Augustin, where…
The first day in Paris featured several outdoor mini-concerts, the first at the Eiffel Tower, the second occurring among the swirl of an outdoor music festival organized by the French government. The rationale of our visit to France is the opportunity for performances by the Fox Valley Festival Chorus. The often mention in the…
This is to be our second day in Paris. I have a strange sensation of being in a country, and a city that in my fathers time suffered four long years of German occupation. I cannot exactly describe the feeling of walking along the Seine yesterday afternoon, the air filled with the sounds of…
Contrary to the expectationsof 19th century radicals, religion hasnot gone away–perhaps we’d be better off if it had–but instead has increased in power,seemingly in proportion to the global increasein the realm of technology& rational control. Both fundamentalism& the New Agederive some forcefrom deep & widespread dissatisfactionwith the System that works againstall perception of the…
It was shocking in the Sixties when the painter Anselm Kiefer photographed himself in various European locales performing the Nazi salute. “Too soon,” people said – even if it’s satire. Those wounds were still raw. (Even Mel Brooks was a couple years away from “springtime for Hitler.”) Kiefer was born in Germany at the…
