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Follow the gleam
Posted on September 16, 2013 Leave a Comment
I’d never been to Rome before. Just as I’d never been to Vienna. Or Prague. Or Berlin. Or Copenhagen. Or any number of other places I just got through visiting on my two-month-long, very-low-budget, round-about tour of Europe. Then again, there was an earlier time in my life when I could have said the very […]
Under the Volcano
Posted on September 13, 2013 2 Comments
I was getting very close now to Rome. Still I couldn’t resist one more turning in the road — this time to Pompeii — to stand in the ruins of a once thriving town and look up at Mount Vesuvius. As schoolchildren many of us were told about its epic eruption in the year 79 […]
Back to Italia
Posted on September 10, 2013 Leave a Comment
Sometimes you wander. Like Dante, you go astray. Like Ulysses you take a wrong turn or two. Then one day you wake up and a month has gone by and the rest of your crew is all back home and you’re by yourself somewhere north of Oslo and wondering how you got there. When something […]
Past-imperfect Prague
Posted on September 8, 2013 Leave a Comment
“God gives us nuts, but doesn’t crack them.” — Czechoslovakian author Franz Kafka My guide on a free walking tour of Prague this summer repeated that line to us after pointing out Kafka’s statue in the old Jewish Quarter, then gave everyone a moment to reflect on how that must mean God gives you opportunities, […]
Garden of brains and bones
Posted on September 7, 2013 Leave a Comment
Let’s give the French their due. Before English naturalists and American geneticists began receiving so much credit for break-through discoveries in the Life Sciences — from Darwin to DNA — you first had to collect, compare and categorize as many species as possible. And for that you had to travel to Paris. More specifically, you […]
Going Dutch
Posted on September 7, 2013 2 Comments
What if people on bicycles ruled the road? Not truck drivers. Not motorhome highway hoggers. Not even the galactically mindless males driving their dad’s pick-up trucks around Anchorage. But people like you and me — on bicycles. Well, I’m thinking that world might look a lot like Amsterdam. Bicycles in the Dutch capital easily out-number […]
Olympic Dreams
Posted on September 4, 2013 Leave a Comment
If Anchorage truly wants to host the Winter Olympics — as its current mayor and a former mayor are hoping it will — the city would be well advised to send emissaries to Lillehammer, site of the 1994 Winter Games. But I doubt that they ever will. Why Lillehammer? Longtime Alaskans might recall that about […]
My Nobel Surprise
Posted on September 3, 2013 1 Comment
You know you must have finally become an Alaskan when the summer that you’ve enjoyed abroad eventually grows a little too balmy and predictable and you find yourself longing for a good old autumn williwaw. Or at least a cool breeze. That’s what made my brief journey from Central Europe to Stockholm so pleasant last […]
Road to Sachsenhausen
Posted on August 27, 2013 6 Comments
“It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God.” — Elie Wiesel, 1986 Nobel Peace Prize lecture On my way from central Europe to Scandinavia last week, I stopped off in Berlin to visit for the very first time the former beating heart of Hitler’s Germany. How […]
Dour Danes, revisited
Posted on August 25, 2013 Leave a Comment
As if Copenhagen isn’t pretty colorful already on a sunny summer afternoon (especially from the carefree vantage point of a bicycle), I had the good fortune Saturday of turning a corner on mine and suddenly finding myself in the center of a spectacular gay rights parade. Now was that fun or what?! In fact the […]
Rowing with Ulysses 