11 Wednesday Sep 2013
Posted in Accommodations, Short, Travel
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My Galaxy Tab, along with the keyboard/case that I bought to accompany it.
I have a modest laptop. Not too big; not too small. Enough oomph to render a video (slowly) now and then. It has now traveled to Mexico, Spain, Greece, France, and Italy and served me well. It is named “Gulliver,” in honor of its many travels.
Alas, with accessories, Gulliver weighs more than five pounds. He travels with case, a power brick, a wireless mouse, a charger for the wireless mouse, and a backup hard disk.
09 Monday Sep 2013
Posted in Short
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Like us, Abbey Kaye is an expat and a travel blogger. She writes with a wit that’s not that common among travel blogs, and she travels compulsively. I only “follow” half a dozen blogs personally, and Abbey’s blog (titled “I Love Airplane Food” http://iloveairplanefood.com) is one.
The other day, Abbey nominated us for the Liebster Award, which is given to “up and coming” blogs. A liebster (as an adjective, translated from the German) is beloved, or liked very much. Wow. Thanks, Abbey!
Part of the responsibility in receiving the Liebster Award is to “list eleven random facts about yourself.” Okay. Here goes:
29 Thursday Aug 2013
Posted in Sentiments, Short, Travel
Egads! It’s Thursday. Today is our last day in Bellagio — in Europe, even. We just found the best pizza in town and we still haven’t found the fabled two-dollar beer. We can’t leave yet!
22 Thursday Aug 2013
Remember those “Can You Spot the Difference” features in the back of comic books? There would be two pictures, with eight or ten tiny differences (really: a horse with three legs?) and you were challenged to find the differences. The answer was invariably printed upside-down at the bottom. Remember those?
18 Sunday Aug 2013
A beautiful Italian day bathed us in the soft air of the Lake Como countryside. We had arrived at the town of Lenno via the lake’s “slow boat” (see Louise’s post here) and, feeling a little lethargic from beer and pizza (my gawd, the pizza is good here!), we decided to hike back to the prior boat landing rather than return to the landing where we had just got off. The five-kilometer route took us high into the hills overlooking the quaint community of Mezzegra, not far from the Swiss border. Wildflowers and chalets surrounded us. If this had been Austria, we no doubt would’ve seen Julie Andrews twirling through a meadow, singing Rogers and Hammerstein.
29 Monday Jul 2013
We don’t have a car here on Crete. We could rent one (or rent a motorcycle, which was our original plan), but after ten minutes of watching Cretan drivers, no one in his right mind would choose to drive himself, especially on a moto. It’s best to take the bus, and there are lots of buses.
28 Sunday Jul 2013
This is post #100 on the Expat Almanac. It’s a milestone, of course, but one without any real significance. It does serve, however, our psychological needs. Why do we post? For the same two reasons, I suppose, that people post on Facebook or tweet on Twitter: the need to belong and the need for self-presentation. (The link points to a Boston University study that found those two primary reasons for participation in social media.)
25 Thursday Jul 2013
16 Sunday Jun 2013
On the terrace: (from left) Sybil, Louise, Jeanette, Luisa, Vicens, Gerard, Tom, Moira, Steve. (Click to enlarge)
We invited some friends over last night to show off introduce my daughter Sybil, who has traveled across nine time zones to visit with her father on Father’s Day this year. There was plenty of cava, Louise’s magic chicken pie, and a $30 orange cake that lasted barely five minutes before the celebrants reduced it to crumbs.
That’s my girl!
07 Friday Jun 2013
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
One of the things I do to while away the time – while I’m cleaning the kitchen, for example, which it seems I’m always doing – is listen to podcasts. And one of my favorite podcasts is called Radiolab, self-described as “…a show about curiosity. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience.” In short, Radiolab has no particular subject nor format; but it gets the dishes done.
Although Radiolab usually measures an hour, they occasionally feature what they call “shorts,” which are what you would expect them to be: short podcasts – far shorter than the usual hour.
Which took me far off topic, and I haven’t even introduced the topic yet.
This is an Expat Almanac “short.” A brief little tidbit of a post. The Spanish would say “un poquito posta.” I like that.
Oh yes, the topic: How we get our mail.
The Expat Almanac 