Slideshow of Kieron and Breon's Euro-Vacation

Here are more, as a slideshow (click here for ALL of them).

Does God use Twitter?

Eurotrotter: First half of week two: Berlin

To catch you up on the past few days:

We took the train from Paris to Berlin:


We arrived and are staying at a mansion on a lake called the Wannsee. It's on the far southwest corner of Berlin (it's the last stop on the rail line for Berlin).


Above is the view from my Dad's room, and him at the desk in his room (15 foot high ceilings)



This is the view from my room.

Breon (tonight at 8pm) will be on a panel discussing the new translation of The Tin Drum for German national radio.

As you can tell from my posts, I've done nothing except:

Talk
Eat
Play chess
Read The Odyssey

A great vacation!

I'm moving 150 mph backwards as I type this: Globetrotter Day 5

I'm on the train from Paris to Berlin, and have about twenty minutes to type up this entry before we change trains at our next stop (Frankfort). In the train, half the seats face "forward" and half face "backward". Right now, ours are facing backward.

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6/28/09 Paris 1pm, Cafe "Grill 14" on the Boulevard Lefebre

The Holy Grail

Breon and I have spent hours scouring the streets of Paris, seeking the holy grail of sweet-smelling water for Lynda. The requirements make it next-to-impossible to find. It must be:

1. Eau de Toilette
2. Say "Paris" on the bottle
3. Look "pretty"
4. Smell "good"
5. Cost less than $20
6. Not be a name brand

Since Breon and I aren't sure what all the name brands are, we basically can't buy anything from a nice store (which might carry name brands).

#2 cuts out half the bottles
#3-4 are subjective, so we are convinced we will fail (especially #4)

The Gourmand

I've decided to order interesting food whenever possible. This is a picture of me two nights ago in Breon's favorite restaurant from the olden days with my lamb's feet and giblets stew. There being only three hooves in the pot, I complained to the waiter, "What kind of lamb are you serving me?"

He just frowned the french frown, and said, "Eat your tripe, American pig-dog."



Last night I learned that if you order the bone-marrow appetizer at the Hippopotamus, be prepared to scoop the surpirsing amount of fat contained therein onto the accompaning toast.

The Queues

Yesterday we had lunch with Bill Cagle, the director of the Lilly Library before Breon. They walked around, looking at dolls*, and ended up at Notre Dame cathedral. There were about 200 people waiting to get in, so we deicded to skip going in (if you look carefully at the photo, you might recognize Breon at the end of the line):



Ditto with St. Chapelle (only 100 people in line):




Now, we did successfully wait in line to get our train tickets to Berlin. There were a couple cute babies who met each other in front of us:



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This morning we went to mass at Notre Dame des Champs and then on to a flea market near the Port de Vanves Metro stop (see Holy Grail above). Receiving as much enjoyment from flea markets as I do from ambling stop-start down an alley under the oppressive sun, pretending to be interested in other people's trash, I seperated from Breon at my first opportunity to sit in this comfortable cafe and catch you up on our progress, such as it is.

*After reading this to Breon, he wanted me to clarify that they are not "dolls", but "marionettes" (which neither of us can even spell). And, here's a picture of some of his ill-booten-gotty:

Globetrotter Day 4

Today I walked to a nearby church (Notre Dame1) and caught the last few minutes of the noon Mass before they kicked out everyone (about twenty-five people).

The park next to the church had nice benches and a whole slew of Parisians biding their time. As the African woman next to me napped, I read my magazine ("The New Oxford Review").



Some observations in the "people watching" category:

1. I see no laptops. And I don't mean fewer laptops. I mean I've seen none - nada - zero. Not in any parks, not in any cafes.
2. There is a similar lack of people thumbing away at their cell phones. Surprising to me, since I thought that the text-message craze came from Europe...well, England at least.
3. In the park, people are actually READING BOOKS. It's crazy.

I went back to the Hotel about 2pm to meet back up with Breon, who had been out looking at more books. After fighting with the fraud department of his credit card (who found it hard to believe that anyone could be simultaneously buying high-dollar items in Canada and Paris), he was off for yet another go at it while I lounged in the room.

Now (7:45pm) we are back from dinner and in for the night (unless, having napped for a couple hours, we get all restless and decide to paint the town red sometime after 10pm).



1By the way, since "Notre Dame" means "Our Lady", there are a BUNCH of "Notre Dame"s in Paris. This was NOT the famous one.

Globetrotter Days 2 and 3

We arrived in Paris about 10am Tuesday, having flown about 8 hours from the Cincinnati airport (which is not only *not* in Cincinnati, it's not even in OHIO). As you can see from this photo at the Gate in cinci, it's easy to tell the difference between "native" Parisians and immigrant Parisians:



After checking into our hotel, we ate lunch at an (apparently famous) restaurant called "Le Dome"; just across the street from our Hotel. Dragging ourselves back to our room, we collapsed for an eight-hour nap.



Waking up about 10pm, we had a late dinner a few blocks away. We decided *not* to eat at the "Indiana".



Back to the hotel and back to bed for a good night's sleep.

Day three, and jet lag has been conquered! We go down to the hotel lobby for an all-you-can-eat breakfast; paid for as part of the price of the room.

Breon, having been told by a book dealer that morning that he "assumes you are in Paris for the book fair starting today"; decides we'd better go find it (at Place St. Sulpice, which is a group of permanent booths around a beautiful fountain in front of a huge church about four blocks from our hotel). We walk there and Breon systematically scours each booth for books while I sit in a nearby cafe catching up on my internet duties (facebook comments, mostly).



On the way there we see a Smartcar advertising the Sims3. I can't resist a picture (every time I take one, I feel like an offending tourist/rube...so I take much fewer than I otherwise would).



One thing I notice about Paris is that everyone is dressed just a bit nicer than I would expect a typical American to be dressed. It's very unusual to see someone in a T-Shirt and jeans (which is what I wore to Le Dome on the first night...imagine my charin when I looked around at everyone else in jackets and the waiters in black ties!). This guy was just doing some painting:



One cool thing is that you can somehow "share" bicycles. I was wondering what was going on when I saw a bunch of people riding what looked like very well-maintained bikes. I figure, after seeing the line-up of bikes pictured below, that it's one of those deals where you pay for the equivalent of *one* bike, and then you can always have one out. When you check one in, then you can take a different one later, or just leave it.

Globetrotter Day 1: Ellettsville, Indiana?!

Welcome, dear reader, to the beginning of my travelogue for my trip to France and Germany with my Dad (Breon). Here is the gist of the next ten days:

• He is going to do a reading/panel discussion for a book he is (re)translating (The Tin Drum) in Berlin on July 2nd for National Public German Radio (I'm sure I've got 50% of that wrong). That is the main reason for the trip.
• Before that we'll spend a few days relaxing and recovering from jetlag in Paris. We'll have dinner at a fancy restaurant w/ some friends of his, he'll go to some book stores to pick up some books he bought for his job (they are expensive, so it's better if they are hand-carried, I imagine).
• We'll take the train to Berlin and stay in a Villa on the Wannsee (apparently quite beautiful).
• In addition to the panel and book store visits, there are flea markets, museums, and book auctions to spend time at!

Tonight, I'm sleeping in the bedroom I had as a child (from age 11 up). It no longer has the sports-themed wallpaper, and there is really no hint that I ever inhabited it for a short 6 years, about 20 years ago.

The picture at the top of this entry is an example of the current decor.

Papal Prayer for June: That international attention towards the poorer countries may give rise to more concrete help...

That international attention towards the poorer countries may give rise to more concrete help, in particular to relieve them of the crushing burden of foreign debt.

Kittens and Viruses

All kittens have been given away...as a matter of fact, we gave away SEVEN kittens. Now, you may recall that Alice only had a litter of five. So we had to come up with TWO extra to give away. We are officially kitten brokers now, I guess.

I just did the final cleaning of a virus from my PC that has been plaguing me for a month. It was particularly devious since is was not actually located on my PC, but had made subtle changes on my wireless router which were hampering me.

Here's my lesson (this should be an easy one, but lessons seem only able to be learned by experience): ALWAYS CHANGE THE DEFAULT PASSWORD. My router still had the username "admin" and the password "password". This allowed the virus to logon to the router, and change the DNS setting so that every time my computer (or any computer in the house, for that matter) logged onto the internet, it was routed to some shabby DNS server in Eastern Europe.

That server was not allowing me to connect to my anti-virus website, anti-spyware website, or to the windows update website!

One Kitten Left

To a good family, I present you with the last available from a litter of five, currently called "Bear":