Sailing against the tide
As the world moves closer to WWIII for reasons no sane man can understand, I prefer for the moment to write about travel. I am still reading Vigée Le Brun’s memories about her travels in Italy, and finding them pretty interesting. But then again, I usually like to read diaries or travel journals, even by…
I haven’t written so much about Germany, even though I have been living here for the past three years, for several reasons. The main one is that I never expected this country to be my permanent home, but just a place in which I accidentally and temporarily ended up for a while before moving to…
I am currently reading the souvenirs of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, or, rather, a part of it focusing on her travels in Italy after having escaped the French Revolution. Madame Le Brun was no Raphael or Rembrandt, but she was a talented painter, mostly famous for her portraits, in particular for the several portraits she…
Last year, I visited New York and Seattle and was surprised to see so many homeless and drug addicts roaming around the streets. Public transportation seemed more chaotic than usual and the cities still were reeling with disorder and a highest cost of living. I haven’t visited other cities there recently, but many visitors tell…
There probably couldn’t be two more dissimilar places than Sicily and Finland and, yet, somehow, I love them both. If Finland is calm and order, then Sicily is noise and chaos. In Finland, people would wait for the pedestrian’s green light to appear before they crossed the street — any street, even if it was…
This is Altenburg, which I visited some time ago. It means “old fort” in German. A strange city. In demographic decline since the 1980s, it lost 40% of its population since then, and people still seem to be leaving. Currently it has 33,000 people, down from 56,000 in 1988 (data from Wiki). And it shows….