Right Brain Feed

I've been having trouble getting my photos together from our last big trip. I tend to put off blogging about a trip until the photos are organized and posted to picasaweb. We took an amazing trip in June for *two* weeks to northern Italy and southeastern France. The trip was also Sarah's birthday present. She said she wanted to be hiking on her birthday. So I planned and planned, and optimized the plan, reworked the plan, added to the plan, and finally we were able to go. The best pics on this trip are Cinque Terre and Chamonix. We started in Milan, not because we were dying to see Milan, but because that's where I could get decently priced Easyjet tickets. We had a low key day there, we toured the cathedral, walked around the city, and not much else. A few Milan pics at: Milan Album Then we took the train down to Cinque Terre. It's a National park on the Italian seashore consisting of 5 tiny villages built on cliffs over the water, with the area crisscrossed by hiki...

We zipped down to Avignon last week. Our neighbors from Austin were visiting us in Paris. I knew they'd love the Chef's hosted dinner at La Mirande, so we all made a short getaway to Avignon. While the dinner was great, and the place we stayed was a treat, Sarah and I did have our plans ruffled by a French public holiday. We had planned a hike along a grand randonee (national French hiking trail) out in the country. Our first plan starting from Pont du Gard was bust because the bus schedule evaporates on public holidays. A very kind lady at the Avignon TI helped us formulate a new plan of hiking starting from St. Remy, and found a bus schedule that worked. That plan was nuked because the bus never showed up. ...sigh.... So we had to settle for a much shorter walk, but found a killer pizza joint along the river. I found the lavender in this picture blooming, and managed to get a nice shot of it with the famous Avignon bridge behind it. Dinner in the restored kitchen of La Mir...

I keep putting off a post on our trip to Vienna. Part of that is because I've been sick, and part of it is because we had so much fun in Vienna, I wanted to take some time to blog it. I'm feeling better now, so I wanted to get some memories down before they all seep out of my head. We were able to spend a full week in Vienna, and we timed our visit just right. We had beautiful brilliant early Spring sunny days. We snagged a nice Interhome appartment week long rental right in the heart of downtown. Vienna was the eastern most outpost of western European civilization, and the ruling seat of the Hapsburg Dynasty for a loooong time. Every Hapsburg king and queen seems to have built their own palace in Vienna, so the city is filled with interesting architecture, and nice gardens. Since we had a week there, we spent plenty of time hanging out in the gardens. We also got in the habit of going to coffeehouses in the afternoon, which is a popular thing to do. Suzy got in the habit of ha...

This weekend we made a day trip to Auvers Sur Oise. It's a small village outside Paris where Vincent Van Gogh spent his final few months. We enjoyed jambon et fromage crepes with a bit of Cidre for lunch. Yum, I will miss the crepes in France. Then we visited Vincent's room above a restaurant. He died in that room after a self inflicted gunshot. While it was slightly moving, I did find it overpriced. The town has set up plaques where van Gogh painted different scenes, so we toured some of those. We also visited his grave, and took a nice walk in the wheat fields. We also visited the Absinthe Museum. Bizarre. Absinthe was a drink in the late 1800's to early 1900's that had hallucinogenic properties. Artists and writers in Paris got hooked on it, and felt it helped their art (sure, buddy). It's nickname was the 'Green Faerie'. The museum was filled with lots of absinthe stuff.... posters, ads, art, glasses, bottles.... A common theme in the posters was a...

We just got back from a week in Vienna and a short nip over to Bratislava, Slovakia. Bratislava is a really bizarre place. It's a broad mixture of many different things. Elegance from the 1800 Hapsburg dynasty royalty, cute domed church towers, funky crumbling Art Nouveau, 40 years of Soviet rule (including lots of blocky concrete), sad little public transportation trolleys, and a gussied up downtown pedestrian area where there are trendy bars and restaurants. Throw in a _completely_ unrecognizable language (hello, 10 cents will buy you a vowel), fantastic cheap beer, nice hiking close by, and that's Bratislava. Of course, you are still wondering about the bizarre picture here. That was our hotel. I kid you not. We weren't to thrilled by it, it was run by supplement popping hippies pretending to be artists (mind the paint and brushes on the breakfast table). The inside of the room was..uhhh...somewhat lacking in cleanliness. We've stayed in plenty of dumps before, that ...

We zipped on the Thalys high speed train to Cologne last weekend. As an American, it's easier to fit into German culture than French culture. Germans dress down a little, aren't babuzzled by our big American smiles, and don't have the small formalities that the French have in everyday life. Don't get me wrong, we've both fallen head over heels for France. We'll be lifetime francophiles, but it is still fun to bop over to Germany. Cologne is great for a short trip. We started Saturday morning with a tour of the monstrous cathedral. The cathedral was built in spurts over several hundred years, but they did a decent job of keeping a consistent look. I had trouble picking a picture of it for the blog, I wanted something with people in the foreground, because you need that to grasp the scale of this beast. I was shocked at how grungy the poor thing was, I guess I'm spoiled by the freshly cleaned Notre Dame down the street at home. I'm wondering if they ...

Last weekend we made a trip to Lyon. It's a quick 2 hour TGV ride, and it was a nice weekend getaway. Lyon is France's gastronomic capitol. Quite a feat, considering the elevated standard of food in France to begin with. So the main point of our visit was to go have a really good meal. We were not disappointed. We ate at Leon de Lyon. I mainly chose it because I wanted a place where we could do a set menu of courses, and the set menu here appealed to us. It's a Michelin two star, but it gets 4 Michelin forks. Stars rate service, how nice the setting is, is the bathroom nice, etc. Forks rates the food, so I tend to pay more attention to that. We had the sommelier chose a wine from the Rhone valley (close to Lyon), and it was a very nice Syrah based wine. It was a Saint Joseph AOC, Domain de Yves Cuilleron 2000 l'Amarybelle. The Lyon wine shop said we wouldn't be able to find that year for sale in a shop, perhaps Leon de Lyon hoovered it all up. Here is the menu: Two ...

We traveled last weekend to Nancy, France. It is a 3 hour train ride east of Paris. Nancy is where Art started at the turn of the 20th century. Sarah and I are both big Art Nouveau fans, so we enjoyed it a lot. The city provides a map with all the Art Nouveau architecture on it. We walked and walked looking at different buildings. It was really cool because there were a lot of houses with interesting Art Nouveau detail on them that weren't by a famous architect. This made the whole town fun to walk through. I've posted some pictures, but I want to caution you. If you aren't an avid architecture fan, you might have trouble wading through them. Nancy Art Nouveau album We also ate at a famous brassiere, Brassiere D'Excelsior. There is a picture posted in my album that shows the ornate interior. I had some nice profiteroles. Profiteroles are vanilla ice cream filled pastry puffs smothered in warm dark chocolate sauce. This place brought a gravy boat of chocolate sauce ...

We took a quick weekend trip to Mont Saint Michel on the coast of Normandy. It has been an abbey since the 900s. After the French Revolution, religion was "out", and Mont Saint Michel was a prison for many years. It was built on a granite island out in the middle of the bay. They have *really* strong tides here, the whole bay is a muddy mucky mess at low tide, and then surges in as the tide rises. It is low tide for some of my pictures, and high tide at others. In the 1860s they built a causeway out to the island so you can reach it without going through the mud. The causeway caused a lot of the bay to silt up, they have just broken ground on a project to build a bridge out to the island, and get rid of the causeway. The project looks rather involved (finishing in 2012) , I'm glad we got to see le Mont before construction cranes descended on it. The island itself is....well.... a tourist trap. A very nice one, but definitely a tourist trap. Packs of tour buses descend on ...

Sarah and I enjoyed a long weekend in Amsterdam last weekend. I didn't do a lot of photography, we spent most of our time in museums and walking the canals. We got museum passes, which worked out really well. Museums in Amsterdam aren't cheap (most were roughly 10 euros). We arrived the day after a freak windstorm swept northern Europe, in fact our high speed train wasn't so high speed because of the weather. We enjoyed the food a lot, there seem to be numerous vegetarien options, it reminded us of some of the veggie places in Austin. I've posted some photos: Amsterdam album And here is a list of the places we visited: Anne Frank house Rijksmuseum - awesome Rembrant paintings Heineken brewery tour Canal boat ride Van Gogh museum Amsterdam history museum Hermitage museum Rembrandt's House Horticulture garden I think I enjoyed the Van Gogh museum the most. Van Gogh only painted for 10 years, and the museum was able to cover those 10 years in amazing detail. It was in...

We had a great weekend in Avignon. We bopped down on an early TGV Saturday, enjoyed two days of nice sunshine, and crawled back to Paris on Sunday night. It was a great break away from the winter grey. We took a nice walk along the Rhone river, toured the Papal palace, and took a side trip to Orange to see the Roman Theater. The pope bailed on Rome in the 1300's and took up residence in Avignon for a bit. A nice papal fortress was built, which was totally ransacked in the French Revolution. So there isn't much detail left to see inside. The theater in Orange was built in the first century A.D., and is the only roman theater in Europe that still has its back wall standing. I think the best part was our dinner Saturday night at La Mirande. It's a Michelin 1 star in a boutique hotel next to the Papal palace. We signed up for "Table d'hote" (hosted table). The hotel has a restored 19th century kitchen in the basement with a monstrous wood fired stove. You get t...

Sarah and I did our first trip to Europe 10 years ago. We pinched and squeezed, staying at the dregs of the listings in Rick Steve's 1996 Best of Europe. Shared bathrooms, anonymous hairs, paper thin walls. One place we had to put coins in the shower to get hot water. Over the years, I sometimes think we've sold out. Rick's listings now include some nice splurges, and we've started sliding towards them. Case in point, this weekend. We're taking a much needed distraction, escaping the Paris rain, and popping down to Avignon for the weekend. We're staying at a nice hotel with a Michelin 1 star restaurant, and we have reservations for a special dining experience across town at another Michelin 1 star. It's a dinner where the chef is supposed to join you for dinner. I'm not sure how that works, but it is bound to be interesting. We've still had awesome experiences at some well priced places. For instance, an awesome time at a cheeeeap place in Berlin...

Side note- I've taken the plunge and enabled comments on my blog, so now you can leave comments on entries. Enjoy. So, sometimes you run across things in Europe that are a little different. This picture is one of those things. First off, look at the tiny little car, it holds one adult, and a child seat behind it. It's the same size as mopeds, and is electric powered. Also notice on the left, it's an electric recharging station. You swipe a card at the machine, and it tells you which plug to plug into. We ran into this on a back alley in Florence. The electric mopeds are a dream come true, they are very very quiet, which you really need in Florence. Moped noise pollution here is a problem.  Living in Paris main page

Sarah and I took a great two week trip to Italy at the end of September. We went to Venice, Verona, and Florence. Venice Photo Album Venice was beautiful, as long as you stayed away from the "Follow the Umbrella" tourist groups. The back waterways were great to explore and get lost in. There were endless interesting photos waiting to be taken, and it was generally quiet and relaxed. Around San Marco/Rialto was a different story. (insert rant on cruise ship tour groups here). It was interesting watching Venetians do things by boat that we typically see done by truck: Uhaul, mail boat, furniture delivery, laundry pickup. We really enjoyed Murano, where they let you wander into glass blowing workshops and watch the guys work. We will go back in a few years during low low low season, and try to see San Marco's interior, we just couldn't face the long long line this time. Verona photo album We kicked back in Verona for a few days, it was a great place to just soak in Italy...

We just spent a lovely week in Zermatt. We timed it just right, it was at the end of August, the weather was brilliant, but the crowds were gone. The picture here is the Matterhorn (Mont Cervin to the French) from the walk to Tuferen. Zermatt is a big ski resort, which means that there is a large array of lifts and specialized mountain cog trains to drag you up the hill to some amazing hikes. While the expensive "resort-i-ness" of Zermatt didn't appeal to us, the broad range of hiking you can do under the shadow of the Matterhorn definitely was. There are also tiny little villages (count the houses with no need to remove your shoes) up in the hills that serve really decent food. In fact, there is one trail we were on called the Gourmet Weg. The food was expensive because they have to drag it all up the hill or get it airlifted in, but quite nice in the middle of a hike. I could describe each hike, but I think I'd rather get together pictures and post them. The picture...

This is a view (on a cloudy day) from Hautvilliers out over the vineyards of Champagne. Sarah and I spent a delightful weekend in the Champagne region of France. Our neighbors who live next door invited us out for the weekend to their country home. We managed very well despite rainy weather both days. They have a very cozy house in the Marne river valley, with views of vineyards on the hills out the windows. I could feel my stress level go down as soon as we got there, it was just so relaxing and inviting. Here's some of the things we did: Went on a champagne cellar tour in Epernay . They have a gargantuan wine casket from 1880's, it holds 200,000 barrels, and was taken dragged by oxen to the Paris fair in 1889. The tour also included a train tour of their underground cellars where they ferment and store the champagne. I now know plenty about riddling bottles and disgorging sediment. Drove through the vineyards, and walked around Hautvilliers (pronounced "ought vee yay...

Oh, Berlin. We got back Monday morning from our long weekend in Berlin. We had an absolute blast! This photo is taken from the roof of the Reichstag, which is the German Parliament building. This building is where the European portion of WWII ended. After the war, it was substantially changed, and this dome was added a few years back. The dome serves as a reminder that government should be transparent. It was a nice break away from Paris in the height of tourist season. We stayed in a nice quiet area of Berlin, Savigny Platz. Our hotel room overlooked the square, we were right over a few sidewalk cafes. I think we hit the timing just right. We waited until Berlin recovered from it's bout of WorldCup fever, and the city was deserted. We waited in 2 lines during our 4 days there, both of them under 10 minutes! We did some major museum hopping, the 3 day Museum Pass made it really easy to hit a lot of them: Museum of Arts and Materials - fun Art Nouveau glass Pergamon Museum- fantasti...

There is just something about throwing open the shutters in your hotel room, and stepping out onto a balcony with a nice view. This photo was taken from our balcony in Assisi. We had a nice view out over the Umbrian countryside, and also a view (not in this pic) of bits of the Basilica St. Francis. We had a great time here, the place is quite crowded by day with day trippers running around in clumps with their tour guides, but in the morning and evening it it just magical. Wandering around pedestrian streets, with beautiful views around every corner. We did a nice hike in the countryside up into the hills around Assisi, and I don't think I've ever climbed so many stairs in my life. The city is still rebuilding some from the 1997 earthquake, but it's basically finished, and looks great. The food here was fantastic, a lot of grilled meats including grilled umbrian sausages and the best lamb chops I've had in my life. I had a fresh pasta with a black truffle sauce tha...

We took one day out of our Sorrento stay to go to Pompeii (about 45 minutes away on the train). It was really interesting. While most of the really cool artifacts are kept at a museum in downtown Naples, there was plenty to see here. Most of what we know about daily Roman life today is because of the sites uncovered by the Mount Vesuvius eruption. We walked around, going through the bathhouse, by the bakers, and managed to find a brothel. It's weird, but the photos just don't convey how interesting it was. There is just something really bizarre about wandering around in a city that was snuffed out in 79 AD by a volcano. Photos at: Pompeii Photo Album Living in Paris main page

We had a fantastic time in Italy. We spent 5 days in Sorrento, a town on the Amalfi coast. It's just south of Naples. There are several small towns clinging to the cliffs over the Mediterranean. This picture is of Positano. There is an amazing bus ride from Sorrento to Positano along the coast. The dramatic cliffs make for a scary road with cars squeezing by each other. We had Positano gelato (candied orange bits and nutella flavored) after lunch. With so much coastline, we of course had amazing seafood. Fresh grilled fish, fresh langostinos and shrimp. And we were right next to Naples, where they invented Pizza. We pigged out. We splurged on a nice meal our last night, and had a truly amazing red italian wine served in monstrous red wine glasses. Sarah will have to tell you about the wine, she enjoyed it a lot. We did some hiking close to Sorrento, and swimming off the coast to help work off all the good food. We stayed in a villa converted into a hotel. It was a little run d...

This is the library at Fontainebleau, a chateau about 40 minutes SE outside Paris. This is another royal pad that everybody had to add their touch to. It was built by Francois I, who loved Italian style. He imported all the artisans from Italy to work on this place, and it shows. Lots of frescos and sculpture everywhere. Lots of heavy woodwork everywhere as well, and decorated ceilings reminded me a little of Spain. Napolean I and Napoleon III also took their turn at "decorating drama" here. I still find it hard to believe how Napoleon I lived and looked every bit like the the King that the French had just beheaded. We walked through the room where Napoleon I abdicated before he was shipped off to Elba. Check out more pics at: Fontainebleau Photos We also went hiking for a few hours in the huge royal forest that surrounds the town. The overpowering greenness of all the trees leafing out reminded us both of hiking in Vermont. Unfortunately it was spitting rain at us during the...

I've put together a few pics from our London trip. I didn't take many, since most of our time was spent in museums. Odd, the museums are all free in London (but ask for a donation), and Westminster Abbey costs 10 pounds (roughly 17 USD) to get into. Hmmmm.... does God know that they are charging that much to get into a church? Pics also include a shot or two of Elgin marbles in the British Museum, and the Chihuly glass piece hanging in the central foyer of the Victoria and Albert museum. Here's the pics:  London Album Living in Paris main page

I didn't have any photos of our lovely afternoon tea, it was just too quaint to mar the moment by dragging out the camera. So the camera stayed stowed in the jacket. We had a very traditional English afternoon tea at the famous Cadogan Hotel in the intimate drawing room of the hotel. We met up with some friends, and it was really fun. Prim and properly attired waiters with deep serious voices waited on us hand and foot. They keep bringing sandwich bits, then scone bits, then pastry bits until you can eat no more. I even had a cucumber sandwich, and it was quite nice. They served clotted cream with the scones, it sounds icky, but tastes great. I'm still listening to my arteries clog up, and dreaming of another yummy scone. I did get a nice pic the day before of Big Ben and a red doubledecker bus, so I've included that.  Living in Paris main page

London is a crazy mix of old and new, I captured some different sides here. They have lots of impressively dressed guards and ceremonies. The guard in the lower right is trudging back and forth in front of Buckingham Palace. In the lower left is a fairly succinct statement from one of the protest signs in front of Westminster, there were all sorts of anti-war signs. And in the upper left are some ideas for my next haircut.  Living in Paris main page