I was doing a search in our video footage files and came up a clip I shot several years ago and proceeded to forget. It was a rainy day aboard Peter Deilmann Cruises Mozart, a luxe riverboat the plies the Danube...which is really blue at times and quite beautiful. I fixed my camera on my cabin window and watched scenes along the riverbank dissolve before me. The vocal of Strauss' Blue Danube was recorded by Frieda Hempel in 1907.
The Scandinavians like their summer nights. There aren't so many of them…but they can become intense. The bandstand at Tivoli Gardens in quirky Copenhagen is a place for an early evening jam.
I grew up with Danes and Swedes and Norwegians. The Danes were always the most fun. The Swedes and Norwegians told long jokes. They had great punchlines but it took a Finnish winter to get there. Of northern European cities, Copenhagen ranks as one of my favorites. But, if you really want to stay up late, you have to go north.
Venice
is unabashedly a tourist trap. And that isn't bad.
It
is chic for Italians to denegrate the place as not being the real Italy. It isn't.
Venice isn't Italy just as Disneyland isn't Anaheim and Bali has very little to
do with rest of Indonesia. Venice has lived for tourism for more than 400 years,
since Vasco de Gama proved that you could reach India by sea by sailing around
the tip of Africa. That put the kibosh on Venice as Europe's overland trading
post for the Orient and it disintegrated into a pretty place with lots of festivals
and people wearing frilly outfits that nobody took seriously.
Where are the poets of yesteryear, the bards of epic verse, the drunkards and the rakes whose words spurred torrid love and sent armies off to battle?
I have personally known only one professional poet, a guy who lived in a van and used the occasion of the publication of one of his verses in a precious little journal as an excuse to spend several days sampling a menu degustation of controlled substances. Writer Jan Morris told me once that her son, a poet, along with a group of his Welsh comrades, had gone on strike against the country's broadcasting system for more airtime. This could only happen in Wales.
Unless you live in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch (a town in northern Wales), become adopted as a poet laureate, occupy a tenured position or change your name to Ice T, your financial life stands little chance of becoming rosy as a result of your poesy.
In history, however, poets had clout and lived in really cool places.
What could be more appropriate to hear on the Paris Metro than French horns? They add a holiday feeling to a chilly Paris on a Thanksgiving weekend.
Thanksgiving, of course, is completely off the map of the French. We spent Turkey Day with expat friends slurping oysters and savoring foie gras and boef. Oh, and don't forget the cheeses and chocolates. You see, all of this stuff is good for you…if you are in France.
