My blog has migrated to a new host and is being painstakingly reconstructed here. Please bear with me as I iron out wrinkles, hammer out the dents, and apply enough spit and duct tape to hold it all together.— Karen
The communists have a lot to answer for, not least of which is their brutal architectural style. In Bucharest, Romania, hideous, concrete, Soviet-style apartment blocks blight the downtown landscape, often mashed up against some genteel old Victorian with filigree, turrets, and an air of being appalled to find itself in such rough company. Of course,…
Woman in the Augustin train station Sitting around a Transylvania dinner table, one of the British guests told me he’d recently met some Texans in London who, upon learning he was heading to Romania, said apprehensively, “But is it safe ?” Romania is a wild place, but having spent some weeks here, it seems to…
So we get off the train at the station – more of a shed, really – in the dark, in a small village deep in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, and despite email promises, no one is there to meet us. The unpaved road holds no taxis, cars, or even the horse-drawn carts we’ve been…
“Stop! Our passports! Stop the train!” we shouted out the window. The Hungarian-Romanian border is no place to lose your passport, and it had been with some reluctance that we’d turned ours over to a couple of burly men in uniform who’d come on board, headed directly for our compartment, taken our passports (and no…
My beer with grapefruit flavoring & straw “And after dinner, of course,” said one of our new friends, “vodka and pickles.” At this point in the evening, I felt nothing could shock me. Earlier I’d been staggered to observe people in many of Krakow’s charming bars casually drinking liters of beer through large plastic straws.…
The very best thing about the Franz Kafka Museum is the automated statue out in front of it, showing two naked men, peeing into a fountain shaped like the Czech Republic , spelling out famous Czech literary quotes with their “urine” ( see video ). Sadly, it’s all downhill from there. Kafka, as you may…
“So when the Devil stamped his foot in rage, the force was so great that it left an actual footprint here in the entrance to the cathedral,” said Liz, who was showing us around Munich. It seems Beelzebub had seen the cathedral half built, and it struck him as a dark and gloomy place that…
I don’t know about you, but my earliest impressions of Italian culture were based on the famous spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp . You know, the one where Tramp’s friend Tony sets up a table in the alley, the two dogs eat pasta under the stars, and Tramp pushes the last meatball over…
On Sunday, August 4, Rich and I strolled out the front door of our Seville apartment and over to the station with just a small roll-on suitcase each, a shared daypack, and our Eurail passes. We hopped a high-speed train, and five hours later we were on Spain’s east coast in the city of Barcelona.…
Unpacking was “brutal” says Hilton Paris Hilton just brought 19 suitcases with her for a month’s visit to Spain – providing yet more proof that she and I are not twins separated at birth. Not only don’t I own enough clothing to fill 19 bags, I wouldn’t want to drag that much stuff around with…
CELEBRATING GOOD NEIGHBORS These days I’m writing about Good Neighbors, exploring how the people around me are working to help each other get through these challenging times. My weekly posts appear on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on my travel and research schedule.
THIS BLOG IS A PROMOTION-FREE ZONE. As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things I find interesting and/or useful.
