06 Wednesday Jan 2016
Posted in Accommodations
Louise covers a dainty rivulet of spittle leaking from her Novocainned lips while waiting at the Portland airport.
This will be short. I’m using my phone and I’ve had two beers.
Which is nothing compared to Louise, who has had three martinis. Doubles. She’s pictured above, in gate C7, hiding her face but happy. Really happy.
29 Tuesday Dec 2015
Posted in Travel
The bungalows at Hotel Luna Llena in Tamarindo, Costa Rica
Dedicated readers will remember the SNAFU with a real estate agent in Puerto Vallarta that left us without a place to live for the first two months of this year. We adjusted, but were left holding two plane tickets, which Alaska Airlines graciously agreed to let us use in any way we liked—as long as we flew Alaska.
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.
13 Tuesday Oct 2015
Posted in Travel
Lenin’s corpse in perpetual repose. He’s freshened up every now and then, but his is probably not the afterlife he had in mind.
I kept wondering why the buses from the boat went to the Kremlin over and over again. After all, Moscow is an enormous city. But the Kremlin, which is the old walled city where Moscow was born in the Tenth Century, is not the gray place of newsreels. My childish mind likes color and clever design, and that I found aplenty.
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.
08 Thursday Oct 2015
Posted in Accommodations
The Moscow Radisson
In our last episode, we were tossed out of gate C30 in Copenhagen because our visas would not be valid until the next day, therefore, we could not yet travel to Russia. “The Russians are very strict about this,” the Danish gate woman said. Of course our generation was brought up to be terrified of Russians, so we sure didn’t want to push it. Besides that, we were dog tired. I was secretly wishing for a real nap.
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.
The Expat Almanac 