Oh hey, it’s evidence that I’ve been negligent. No, really, this is entirely unexpected; I had zero clue that I have been lacking in the motivation department, and I certainly didn’t realize that we had gone to Strasbourg the weekend before last, not when this past weekend was spent on such amusements as sitting in …
While in Milan last weekend, I found my thought constantly returning to the historically fractious nature of Italy; there is little doubt that these thoughts were influenced by Barbara W. Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, but I suspect even without having recently finished said book, I would have been thinking of the differing interests of the dukes …
This is the story of a joke that went too far. And scope creep. But the root cause analysis would probably point towards that joke gone awry. In the beginning there was a lion. Orange, with a sparkly nose, and stout-though-satiny wings, we acquired Marco when we visited Venice in November. Subsequent to the lion, …
I like Malta quite a bit, but I couldn’t tell you why. It suffers from most of the problems that seem to come along with being an ex-British isle (traffic flows on the wrong side, roads are poorly laid out, large portions of the island bear a strong resemblance to a garbage dump, an obvious …
The weekend before last’s trip to Brussels (yes, I am behind) for their version of the marché de noël featured a significant amount of wandering, the consumption of copious quantities of hardly-healthy food that still somehow was tailored to each of our dietary needs (read: the Purrito tackled the sausages while I consumed an unholy number …
Unlike Florence, which was long on boobs, Venice was short on boobs and long on lions; this is hardly surprising when one considers that the Lion of Saint-Mark was the symbol of the city. It’s also an excuse for another gallery, so here we go.
I am finding that my feelings towards Venice are difficult to synthesize. We went in what was apparently the deep off-season, so while we traded the teeming masses for cold and wet weather, both the Purrito and I felt that the almost-haunted feel of the city, with the heavy fog and not-always-so-elegant state of decay …
In other news, I wound up seeing a version of Mont-Saint-Michel this weekend…
While not as arresting as Versailles (but then again, what is?), it is immediately apparent why Fouquet wound up in prison along with the man in the iron mask while his architect (Le Vau), gardener (Le Nôtre), and painter (Le Brun) were immediately approipriated by Louis XIV and put to work on designing Versailles (that, …
This weekend’s visit to Melun was entirely my fault. We had been discussing going to Vaux-le-Vicomte for a while, thus leading to the inevitable scope creep; see Vaux-le-Vicomte became spend the day at Vaux-le-Vicomte, which morphed into see one of the soirées aux chandelles at Vaux-le-Vicomte , which became stay near Vaux-le-Vicomte so we wouldn’t …
Fezzik In Paris 