24 Saturday Oct 2015
Posted in Gallery
The Neva River in St. Petersburg
The journey home required precisely 24 hours. We arrived at our Portland doorstep at midnight Thursday and fell into bed, where we’ve pretty much remained for two days.
Travel is exhausting.
Not too exhausting, however, to prohibit a few reflections on Saint Petersburg—our concluding destination, where we stayed four days—before we conclude our comments on Russia:
17 Saturday Oct 2015
Posted in Gallery
Tags
The Russian countryside from the Volga River
De-salinization refers to the removal of salt from saltwater. De-Stalinization refers to the removal — in the mid-1950s — of nearly everything Stalin from the Russian landscape (and, for that matter, from the collective Russian psyche as well). But one thing they haven’t removed from the landscape is Stalin’s Moscow Canal, and we are the beneficiaries.
11 Sunday Oct 2015
Posted in Gallery
The Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge over the Moscow River
Bleak. Cheerless. Gloomy. Darkly intimidating.
As a boy, growing up in cold-war America, that’s what I knew of Russia. That and the bomb shelters where we were all going to live when Khrushchev quit pounding his shoe on the podium and began pressing buttons.
06 Tuesday Oct 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
Louise on the phone in the Copenhagen Airport.
Oops!
We made the arrangements to go to Moscow last spring. In late summer we decided that we wanted to spend a few more days in Moscow, so we extended our trip a little bit at the front end.
Everybody was happy with us. Everybody, that is, except the Russians.
04 Sunday Oct 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
Fuel in the tank: check.
Battery charged: check.
Tire pressure: check.
Oil in the crankcase: check.
These are the things one must do before taking a cherished car out of retirement after months of inactivity, and these are the things, figuratively speaking, we’re doing here at the Almanac.
09 Tuesday Jun 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Sentiments
Tags
Our previous apartment on the morning before we moved
I never looked upon moving as a stressful situation. In the seven years we’ve lived together, Louise and I have moved six times, not counting the mini-moves we made during our year of travel. Excepting one, all those moves were exciting and optimistic, untroubled and confident. Excepting one. And that one put me in the hospital.
26 Tuesday May 2015
Posted in Short
Tags
Where do aspiring expats turn for authoritative advice on the expat lifestyle? Wall Street, of course! Could there possibly be a group of people more likely to embrace the allure of the open road than sub-par mortgage specialists and hedge-fund managers?
03 Sunday May 2015
Posted in Accommodations
That’s our balcony with the cathedral ceiling. The TV antennas are actually a half-mile away. We share real estate with them on top of Portland’s West Hills.
Yes, we’re back in Portland. No, there have been no medical emergencies. Yes, we’ve been busy. It’s that time of the year again. We’re moving.
16 Monday Mar 2015
The English and the French point to history with the tip of a spear. One conflict measured a hundred years, but after that the French and Brits became allies and in central France, agriculture ruled. People planted seeds. People tended the fields. People harvested the crops. People hauled the harvest to market.
Then came the industrial revolution. People moved to the cities. The population of central France was halved in 150 years. Houses were left behind. With a strong pound sterling and all those empty houses, the time for another British invasion ripened.
That time is now.
09 Monday Mar 2015
Posted in Gallery
When we told our Martizay neighbor Annie we were going to Le Mans for a few days (Tom was interested. Something about a race museum?), she asked us, politely, if indeed we had seen all the great chateaux of the Loire yet? We took this to mean that Le Mans is a dump.
The Expat Almanac 