01 Sunday May 2016
This is our last Sunday in Paris, and it is magnificent. It happens to be May 1st, when people are buying and exchanging little bouquets of muguets des bois (Lilies of the Valley, pictured above), a lovely old tradition. It is also Labor Day here, a celebration of workers with a bit of a socialist tinge, so more people than usual have the day off. On top of all that, it has been sunny all day and the temperature is well into the 60s.
20 Wednesday Apr 2016
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Yesterday was a perfect day … as perfect as a day gets. It helps, of course, to have spent it in Paris.
11 Monday Apr 2016
The last time I saw the Avenue des Champs-Élysées (maybe 30 years ago), it was lined with stores that were terrifying to the average tourist. Designer boutiques, purveyors of Rolexes, Tiffany, and Cartier, all in little polished box stores with no excess of stock visible, attended by lean chic Parisiennes wearing dark suits, dark hose, and needle heels, plus that particular Parisian frown that signals that you’re in the wrong rodeo, cowboy.
29 Monday Feb 2016
Graphic of Freda Kahlo hanging in our room
We’re back in Puerto Vallarta!
(Well, not for long. Ten days is all. We came down here to attend to a dental issue but when we got here we were told there really was no issue, so now our visit is entirely pleasure. We’re not disappointed. There’s no disappointment in Puerto Vallarta.)
23 Saturday Jan 2016
Playa Conchal
This part of Costa Rica – the northern Pacific Coast – is a paradise of beaches and not much else. (This is why you’ve read nothing uplifting about our visits to ancient Mayan ruins.) Yesterday we visited Playa Conchal (Beach of Shells), recommended for having the clearest blue water around.
14 Thursday Jan 2016
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery, Travel
Louise at El Vaquero; Tamarindo Beach in background
According to Wikipedia, Portland, Oregon has at least sixty breweries within the city limits, more than any city in the world. Many attribute this to our natural resources (hops, barley, and our remarkable Bull-Run water), but I’m convinced it’s because I live there. When it comes to beer, I am the industry’s greatest asset.
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:
21 Wednesday Oct 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery
The back yard in Uglich
In the small town of Uglich on the Volga, which has its medieval charm and also its unpainted tumbledown shacks, we visited Olga in the new house she built after retirement. It was a largish but simple two story white brick house. In the back was the vegetable and flower garden that every Russian householder wants and treasures,
Viking Cruise Lines arranges for its passengers to visit with real locals. This was our home visit.
17 Saturday Oct 2015
Posted in Gallery
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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.
The Expat Almanac 