Amsterdam

For Easter Weekend, I went back to Amsterdam, this time with Nicole. I was there last summer for more than a week, and loved it. I am happy to report that I still do. Even with the weird, bad weather (snow/rain/sleet), it stood tall as a charming, cosmopolitan place. It has the feel of a small town, but with subtle reminders that it's actually quite plugged in. Having a three-story brownstone on a canal now vies with my dream of a Tuscan villa. Both in appeal and improbability, unfortunately.

On a related note, here's another reason why I don't think I'll pursue a career in travel writing. (Those who know me know how I feel about Peter Mayle et al.) This from a pretty well-respected US newspaper: "We ate like the locals, slowly savoring the simple fare."

Guess where they were? The south of France. Not exactly uncharted territory, and the "local fare" was steak and shrimp. Sorry, but I could write the same about a burger joint in Anaheim. It would just sound a lot less romantic.

Which leads me to the pic of the month, from a shop in Amsterdam that sells American and British food. The first person, other than Nicole :), to guess the price of a box of authentic American cereal gets that amount.

The rest of the pics can be found here: http://good-times.webshots.com/album/562911720cMCUtY

Cheers!

Bookmarking

This certainly doesn't count as the mega-update I owe (give me one more week), but every few months I find myself searching for this little ditty. It's time to give it a home.

Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.

One fine day.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Flat Earth, Pippi Style

I can't tell you how happy finding this link again has made me. I have been searching for it on and off for a year and finally found it again today.

http://www.efraimstochter.de/songs/songgesamt.shtml

Dig the SUPER-groovy intro in the Finnish version.

Some of you may think it childish, but anyone headed to a hostel in Europe will find it extremely useful in fostering cross-cultural understanding. At least with others born before 1976.

Incisive, well-researched political entertainment...I mean, coverage

I know I still owe a real update, but I came across this and thought I'd share it. (Thanks, Harry Shearer).

It's not a startling, dramatic, or shocking clip. It's just the camera running off-air in between on-air segments of Katie Couric covering the presidential campaign.

But watch it a couple of times and it becomes, at the very least, unsettling.

Katie is no Dan Rather, but as far as I understand it, she's a "respected, seasoned journalist" and I'm sure some people rely on her for news and analysis. Having watched this, I'm not sure I would rely on her to order a pizza without her staff to help.

And I don't mean to single her out. I'm sure this is actually pretty tame, compared to what other "journalists" are like.

Sigh. Oh well, back to WSJ Online.

http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=30054

Early Christmas Present

I got an early Christmas present today from, of all places, the German bureaucracy. Seems that they had (quite efficiently, as one grows to expect) figured out that am I no longer working, and invited me in to "chat." A good friend here in Potsdam (whose help was hugely valuable) and I met today with the "Foreigner's Office" official. Although she began with the fairly standard facial expression of a bureaucrat confronting anything slightly out of the ordinary, our combined apparent trustworthiness and sincerity won out, and I am free to hang out doing nothing for at least another six months, at which time she'd like to chat again. Works for me, and it's a great feeling to know that I am still legally blessed. (Although, I have to admit that I was kind of hoping for some sort of stamp. No visit to a German official is complete without at least one seal or stamp hitting paper. Oh well.)

So, back to enjoying Weinacht in Germany. I have to say, Deutschland really does Christmas wonderfully. The picture above is from Dresden, but Christmas Markts, decidedly tasteful decorations, and fun traditions abound everywhere. For example: the aforementioned friend hosted a feuerzangenbowle party last weekend. I will try to explain more when I post a few pictures, but basically a feuerzangenbowle (which translates into English, according to another friend who would know, as "Fire Tongs Bowl") is red wine with fruit, into which one adds 108 proof rum (in increasing quantities as the night progresses, it seems) by soaking a large sugar cone which rests horizontally above the wine pot on a special metal holder, and then lighting the sugar so that the rum and sugar melt down into the wine. Yes, it's as cool and potentially dangerous as it sounds.

Unfortunately, my official stampless stamp of reapproval comes a bit too late to realistically make plans to head to the States for Christmas, so I will float around here a bit. Quite happily. If I go to Barcelona, for example, it will officially be a potential tradition.

Just in case I don't get around to it in the next seven days, Merry Christmas to those to whom it applies. I will do a longer note for New Year's Day, my preferred holiday anyway.

Cheers, all.