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Munich: The End of Invincibility

2011-08-13T23:50:00.000-04:00

The hospital in Munich doesn't smell the way I expect a hospital to smell. The walls are still gleamingly white, the floors are solid and polished with strips of dark gray tile accenting large paths of even more gleaming white. It's the sort of decorative palette that is designed to be easily cleaned and disinfected. But, there is no lingering smell of disinfectants here. It smells more like

The Spring From Whence I Came

2011-02-14T22:07:00.000-05:00

I never met my great-grandfather, but I can clearly remember my great-grandmother from my childhood. I remember her gardening; pulling up weeds and pushing a lawn mower when she was nearly ninety-nine years old. Whenever we visited her, I always wanted to play in the creek by her house. The tiny stream rushed over boulders that I would climb up and down. I would find rocks to build dams in the

150 Days Since Paris

2011-02-12T12:04:00.001-05:00

I really have no explanation as to why I've been paralyzed from finishing my thoughts on Paris. It was amazing. Maybe I'm afraid that it's gone beyond my grasp. Maybe it's a secret; a dirty secret; a filthy, scratch your back in a dark alleyway secret. Each time I've set foot in this city I have this feeling that it is where I belong. I know it's a crush; infatuation. But, as I sip Beaujolais

Paris: Le Battement de Cœur et Les Rêves - Part 2

2010-12-03T20:00:00.002-05:00

Antoine's flat was in a neighborhood known as Oberkampf in the 11th arrondissement. Most travel guidebooks this year will tell you that Oberkampf is an up-and-coming neighborhood near Place de la République that features good restaurants and bars that have a slightly grungy, contra-tourist, "authentic Parisienne" atmosphere. My personal first impression of the neighborhood differed

Paris: Le Battement de Cœur et Les Rêves - Part 1

2010-10-20T12:18:00.000-04:00

It's only fair to begin writing about Paris with a confession. I loved this city before I ever arrived and all my thoughts about it now are the hopelessly skewed thoughts of a young lover still too infatuated with a distant, lovely mistress (which he has had scant few real conversations with) to really consider any of the realistic downfalls she almost certainly has. It's not even just Paris.

Amsterdam: The Unrequested Baptism in Highly Undervalued Shoes

2010-10-13T14:21:00.000-04:00

Is today the day? Yes, today should be the day, it feels right, it's noon and I'm not sick. But it's cloudy. It's been raining again and the park will be muddy and wet. It's probably going to rain more. But where else should we go? There's no place better. It's better with chocolate, but save some for later. You never know when your life might demand more chocolate. I can't believe the

København

2010-10-13T13:54:00.000-04:00

My nostrils were filled with the sweetly burning aroma of whiskey as the man with long, blonde hair fell into me next to the jukebox. He was Danish and he was happily singing along with a bar full of his countrymen to "Sweet Home Alabama." I caught him and stood him back up. His friends told me that they had been to a whiskey festival earlier in the day and that he had drank far too much. It

Stockholm: A Frigid New Beginning

2010-10-01T15:10:00.001-04:00

Our comfortless Ryan Air flight landed in a muddy field which we mistook from the air as a lumber yard or a saw mill or something else necessitating cutting down trees for industry. We arrived in an absolutely silent, minuscule warehouse that someone had named "a terminal" as a backwoods, Scandinavian inside joke. If you told me right now that someone had to be ceremoniously woken up and called

Rome: The Gilded

2010-09-12T07:23:00.010-04:00

In Rome we stayed a few blocks away from Vatican City. Despite not having a single Catholic bone or tissue or neural path in my entire body, it still only made sense to make a pilgrimage to St. Peter's as soon as we arrived. Its size and grandeur are such that other cathedrals around the world must all be forced to have an unshakable inferiority complex. It bears the kind of earth shattering

Firenze: Sometimes I Need Something Different

2010-09-04T13:30:00.005-04:00

Arriving in Firenze was an odd experience for me. I hadn't realized how vividly I would remember the tracks that came to an abrupt end at the train station there. Five years earlier, I arrived at this train station on my very first trip out of the country, my brand new passport clutched in my hand after just losing its stamping virginity in Milan. Actually, if I remember correctly, it was also

Venice: The Trophy Wife

2010-08-28T12:45:00.019-04:00

So, aside from the nice beach time in Lido, I really don't have any stories from Venezia. Don't get me wrong, Venezia is gorgeous. Gorgeous. I showed up in the city and just stood stupidly with my camera, turning aimlessly in circles trying to figure out what to photograph first. It is staggeringly beautiful wandering the labyrinth of alleys that qualify as streets; lost and overwhelmed.But,

The Trip to Lido

2010-08-28T12:11:00.006-04:00

It's easy to be spoiled by the relentless reliability of the Swiss infrastructure. What I'm saying is that I shouldn't have been surprised when I left Switzerland and boarded an Italian train to find that my seat had been sold to someone else, who was sitting in it contently when I boarded. We checked our tickets and each of us came to the same conclusion - this was the correct seat in the

Interlaken: The Gospel According to Mark

2010-08-28T11:33:00.008-04:00

Our usually reliable guidebook described our hostel in Interlaken as a loud, nonstop party amidst an island shipwreck. However, reality - as you learn again and again while traveling - does not necessarily bend to the will of guidebooks. We arrived to find a quiet, beautiful hotel, our room opening to a wonderful balcony with a view of a slowly melting glacier and the breathtaking, towering,

The Ticking Clocks of Geneva

2010-08-21T12:38:00.006-04:00

Four minutes is only two hundred and forty seconds. Two hundred and forty seconds of grace time between one train arriving in a station and another leaving is not a lot of seconds.Our first train of the night arrived in Toulouse about twenty minutes late. That made us about nine hundred and sixty seconds late for our eight hour long overnight train to Genève. We fetched our backpacks and

Bordeaux Abbreviated

2010-08-20T08:17:00.011-04:00

"Bonjour! On a une réservation pour ce soir pour deux personnes.""Quel est le appelle?"I hestitate for a second."The name?""Ah, yes...""What? Did you only learn enough French to say you had a reservation and nothing more?"Bienvenue a France. Relax, American readers, the man at the desk was clearly just joking around with us."Désolé! Je suis americain, so admit it, I've already exceeded your

Bilbao - We're more alike than we are different

2010-08-19T04:34:00.007-04:00

In Bilbao I was in so much pain from my aching ribs that I barely even noticed the city around me as we arrived. The weather was relentlessly dreary and I had developed an upper respiratory infection, each cough sending a fiery stab of pain through the right side of my chest.But, despite that, what we thought was a private hostel room turned out to be a surprisingly posh hotel. I immediately

San Sebastián - Donostia

2010-08-17T17:52:00.007-04:00

Basque country reminds me so much of home...but...only if you took the ocean and drug its shores to very toes of the mountains. I remember being awestruck by the sheer cliffs falling away as the train brought us north to San Sebastian. When we got to the hostel (after passing by the entrance twice), no one answered the door, which was unmarked and entirely nondescript with the exception of a

Barcelona or The Banishing of Suburbia

2010-08-17T09:37:00.004-04:00

"Cerveza? Beer?""Massage, cinco Euros!""Cerveza? Beer? You want coca?"This is the chorus you hear as you stroll along the Barcelona beach front at night. But, I am getting ahead of myself. How did we get there?The subway to La Rambla, right. Let me begin here. La Rambla is an immensely crowded pedestrian street. It is lined with cafes and street performers in elaborate costumes and ten

Madrid

2010-08-09T04:10:00.005-04:00

The landscape around Madrid is scorched and dry, littered with the crumbling remnants of old fortresses, but also accented by the facades of breathtaking Spanish mansions. Staring out the window of a high-speed train you can't help but imagine your life unfolding on the balcony of one of those houses, watching the dust and the trains drift past under the scorching sun.Madrid the city is also

Exposition

2007-07-29T12:16:00.000-04:00

tell me that you saved the old version of me in the archives. the me that worked so well. here again we find ourselves reengineering when we should just be improving; losing sight and control of another iteration in this broken development cycle. where will you find me next? florida or france or firenze or the same place i was today? don't thank me when i love you, return the favor. here it