Lift Up Your Hearts!

This just in:  middle-aged men have no business stopping to chat with young people.  After all, the young and their elders have nothing in common, right?  No reason to talk to someone who is so different from you.  Certainly no reason to smile and speak to a stranger passing on the street.  Even if you both have dogs.

Here's the story.

The 43-year-old man was the subject of a police "be on the lookout" memo because two children said he spoke to them while they were walking their dogs. Police said no criminal activity had been reported.

I don't blame the police for being cautious.  Maybe the kids had been overly hyped to "stranger danger" by well-meaning parents and teachers.  Maybe they truly sensed something wrong.  In any case, I'm glad the police took them seriously. (More)

After tearful goodbyes, we traveled with our host (who had business in Paris) on an early morning TGV back to Gare Montparnasse.  Porter managed to squeeze two small suitcases, a laptop bag, and a backpack (all our luggage except for my purse and Janet's small backpack) in one of the station's medium lockers, worth every cent of the seven euros because we were then free to explore more of Paris unencumbered.

We began by crossing the street to the Montparnasse Tower.  As I've mentioned before, if all you care about is the view, this is a much better choice than the Eiffel Tower.  Unfortunately, the day was a little hazy.  I was reminded of Japan, where warm weather was accompanied by haziness, and cold weather brought great views as compensation. (More)

Today was another beautiful day.  We've had so many since arriving in Europe.  The week before our arrival was so cold that we brought hats, gloves, and scarves with us, and decided to rely on layers rather than heavy coats only because we were trying to travel light.

(The lady who checked us in at the Orlando airport marveled at how little luggage we were taking to Europe.  Two suitcases—one small, one medium; a laptop bag; and a backpack doesn't quite seem like a small amount of luggage to me, but I guess it could have been worse.  We were blessed by having convenient laundry facilities on this trip.) (More)

Awaking before the rest of the household, I slipped outside to explore the grounds in the peaceful early morning light.  Just me, God, and the neighbor's cows.  It was what I needed after eight days of intense tourism.  We spent the morning enjoying our friends and their home.  Easter Monday is a holiday in France, and most places are closed, which was fine with us! (More)

When our friends asked what our Easter traditions were, my immediate reaction was, "total exhaustion, following a glorious church service for which we had a good deal of responsibility, and into which we had put an enormous amount of time in preparation.  That was the truth for many of our favorite Easters, and it left little time and less energy for other traditions.  We had some, such as decorating eggs, having an Easter egg hunt (though not, as had been in my childhood, with the decorated eggs, as in Florida the real, hard-boiled eggs spoil too quickly in the often hot Easter weather), Easter baskets full of candy (jelly beans for me, SweeTart eggs, chicks, and bunnies for the girls, and chocolate for everyone; I couldn't interest anyone in marshmallow chicks).  More often than not, we shared the day with friends, in not-too-energetic pursuits.  As far as meals go, my family's Easter tradition was ham, and Porter doesn't care for ham, so we never really settled on anything in particular.  "Easy" was a good criterion. (More)

Having slept off our Thanksgiving dinner-style museum orgy, and packed our suitcases for departure, we were ready to indulge in another museum, this time the Musée d'Orsay.  The Orsay begins where the Louvre leaves off, covering more recent (but not too recent) art.  You know, Rodin, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Matisse, Homer, Renoir, and the like.  Being a converted train station, this museum is not as user-friendly as the Louvre; that is, it was much easier to get stuck in the middle of a hoard of other tourists.  I didn't mind so much waiting my turn to get in front of a painting, but when most of the people both ahead and behind me seemed impatiently intent only on snapping a photo with their cell phone cameras, it got rather annoying.  Besides, I'm not much better with crowds than I am with heights.

Still, it was a great visit (and free with our Museum Passes).  Even this much smaller museum has 'way too much to take in on one visit.  Paris would be a great place for a homeschool year abroad! (More)

Ah, to wake up in Paris, and eat breakfast in the café next door!  So what if croissants/bread, orange juice, and tea/coffee/hot chocolate for three cost $40?  When you stay with friends rather than at a hotel, you can afford not to worry too much about the meals.  It was a lovely breakfast, and the orange juice was squeezed from real oranges seconds before being brought to the table.  The orange juice was part of the package, or I wouldn't have ordered it, since I'm a Florida snob who believes that the only real citrus juice is not only "not from concentrate," but hasn't been pasteurized, and that's impossible to get at a restaurant—unless the juice truly is fresh-squeezed.  So this was a delightful surprise. (More)

Transition!  We took the tram to the train station, where we bought drinks to go with the food we had bought yesterday to eat on our trip to Paris.  Janet knew exactly what to do and guided us to the train—it helped, too, that the signs were clear and the station logically organized.  "Did you notice the border control?" she asked, as we neared the train.  Well, no, we hadn't, unless you counted the big sign labelled "FRANCE," and that was her point.  Apparently we were technically in French territory at that point, but no one had asked for our passports, nor did they when we reached Paris.  Eventually the conductor did take our tickets, but that was all. (More)

I thought our Sunday was exciting, until I read about the Daleys'!

It was Sunny on Sunday here, too, at least for the morning.  Porter put our bikes on the back of the car and the skies were blue and clear as we headed out for 8:00 church.  The service was glorious, with lots of great hymns—we needed to double up on the hymn board!  The 8:00 service at Messiah rocks!  (Though not literally.)  Afterwards there's always a great breakfast, at which we fortified ourselves for our adventure. (More)

We had so much fun last year at the Mad Cow Theatre's Orlando Cabaret Festival:  It Was a Very Good Year that it wasn't hard to decide to return.  As we had last year, we gilded the lily by eating dinner at the nearby Napasorn Thai restaurant, although this time we saved a whole lot of money by dining there without buying the parking/show/dinner package.  We lost out on parking, though.  There was some big bash going on downtown, which meant we paid a flat "event parking" fee of $5 instead of 50 cents/hour it should have been.  Ah, well.  Last time we parked in Boston it cost some $32, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

Whereas last year we chose the earliest possible date (1925), this year we picked the latest:  1949.  This time I recognized 15 out of the 19 songs, some of which I hadn't heard in many years, so it was quite natsukashii. (More)

In case you'd like a professional writer's view of Basel, this article was in Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette this morning.

I'm glad she didn't find what she was expecting.  "Bling" does not sound like something particularly desirable in a city.

Today Janet was feeling the pressure of work to be done, and she decided we knew enough to be let out on our own for a while.  So—even though our stock of German comprised little more than "zwei Tageskarten," "bitte," "danke," and of Basel Swiss German merely "greutzi" and the word for thank you, which sounds passably enough like the French "merci"—off we went.

Janet's version is here. (More)

Perhaps Porter was missing Europe and our museum-overload, I don't know.  But the Morse Museum is free on Friday evenings this time of year, so he suggested we visit.  As usual, it was delightful.  There's always something new to see if you take the time at the Tiffany windows, and their beauty evokes such a calm, peaceful atmosphere.  After refreshing ourselves for a while with the windows, we moved on to a new exhibit:   Dickens To Benton—Rare Books and Works on Paper from the Morse Collection.

The Park Avenue area of Winter Park does feel a little bit like Europe, with its small stores, its cafés, its park...and the Morse.  Here, as in Paris, we enjoyed works by Cassatt, Manet, Whistler, Gauguin, and Cézanne—and if they were sketches and etchings of the kind that we passed by quickly at the Musée d'Orsay in favor of the artists' paintings, at least here there were no crowds to contend with and the works could be better appreciated away from the shadow of their more famous cousins.

We concluded the evening with a stop at Chamberlin's for kefir, kombucha, and other interesting drinks, then went home to make mushroom-and-spring-greens stuffed chicken breasts served with cole slaw and asiago cheese bread, and followed by a decadent treat of Ben and Jerry's ice cream (on sale, six pints for ten dollars, at Albertsons).  I guess we both miss Europe! (More)

Janet's version is here.

Today we made the most of both our tram passes and our Basel Cards, the latter providing us free admission to most of the museums (Janet used her Swiss Museum Pass) and various other discounts.  We began with the Kunstmuseum, which has a collection of art that is quite impressive, at least for people who have not been to the Louvre in 40 years or so.  In many ways I actually liked this better than the Louvre, because it is limited enough in scope that we felt we could devote as much time as we wanted to particular pictures.  You can take your own tour here.  (More)

We slept late this morning but otherwise showed more effects from all our walking yesterday than from jet lag.  Janet gave up her bedroom to us and is sleeping on the couch, so she awoke early with her host family, but had no trouble falling back to sleep.  Fortunately she was awake when the call came from the airport:  Porter's suitcase had arrived and would be delivered between ten and eleven this morning if someone would be here to receive it.  Janet handled the entire conversation in German, by the way.

This is what I didn't know about the Swiss yesterday at the airport:  They don't deliver an item "sometime tomorrow between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.," and when they say someone will arrive between ten and eleven, he will.  In this case, right at 10:30. (More)