November 27, 2005

12:43:20 am Southern Africa Diary II  

Friday, November 25, 2005 - Botswana and Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe - Overcast, occasional light rains, 70s.

I'll pick up things here again and later Deanna will post on our six-day safari in Botswana, which was incredible--one of the best parts of our year-long tour. After our last safari drive in the morning, we had a charter flight from our last camp to Kasane, Botswana. From there, we were driven about an hour to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, not including 20 minutes to cross the border. We stayed one night at the Victoria Falls Hotel, a British colonial hotel that opened in 1904. I had heard mixed reports that the hotel has declined due to all of the problems in Zimbabwe, but we wanted to stay there, as it is only a 10-minute walk to the falls. While there did not seem to be many guests, and there were some occasional lapses--mismatched silverware at the pool cafe (of course this was Deanna's observation and not mine), overall, the standards are still high and I'm glad we stayed here. The hotel is dripping with character--old framed British travel and propaganda posters line the hallways, extolling the virtues of their African colonies, while mounted wild game trophies would make Teddy Roosevelt feel right at home.

I read parts of a geopolitical book from their library on travel through Europe in 1948 (John Gunther, Behind Europe's Curtain, published by Hamish Hamilton, London, 1949. Other books by the same author include Inside USA, Inside Latin America, Inside Asia, and Inside Europe). It offered a fascinating look on geopolitics in the immediate post-World War II period where it was unclear just how things would turn out in the 40+ year Cold War that was just starting. While today we have the advantage of knowing how history unfolded, we have largely forgotten just how uncertain things were at the time, and how easily an alternative history could have occurred. For example, Italy was in deep poverty, with a high birthrate, and a communist takeover quite possible. Mayors of many Italian cities were communist, and communists controlled about 30% of the seats in parliament. Trieste, on the border of what is now Italy and Slovenia, was divided and belonged to no country. American and British troops controlled one part of the city and Yugoslavian troops controlled the other part, and it was unclear if its future would be on the east or west side of the Iron Curtain. (Churchill's Iron Curtain quote, which I paraphrase here as best I can remember it, was "From Stettin [sp?] in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across Europe.")

Europe recovered of course, in large part due to the US-led Marshall Plan. Italy did not go communist, nor did Greece, or Turkey--other countries in danger of a red future at the time. President Truman, not that highly regarded in his own time, gets high marks today as we realize in hindsight just how dangerous the post-war period was and how well his administration handled things. Italy's birth rate is now too low, ironically, and its population is projected to fall in coming decades. It is prosperous today by post-war standards and Trieste has been a fully Italian city for many decades. The future turned out better than was reasonable foreseeable at the time of the book's writing. The future is often this way--something to remember whenever things like bleak in the here and now.

Victoria Falls were the reason we traveled to Zimbabwe and they were worth seeing. I believe they are the second largest falls in the world behind Iguasu Falls on the Brazil/Argentina border, which we visited over New Year's 2002/2003. Both dwarf Niagara. Of the two, Iguasu are better, but both are spectacular.

Saturday, November 26, 2005 - Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe; Livingstone, Zambia; Johannesburg, South Africa; Cape Town, South Africa.

A traveling day. A van picked us up at 11 AM to take us across the border to Zambia to fly out of the airport at Livingstone, the first town over the border. We flew Nationwide Airlines to Joburg, then South African Airlines to Cape Town, arriving around 8:30 PM. We stay four nights at the SAS Radisson in Cape Town, overlooking the ocean.

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12:36:21 am French Diary VIII, Southern Africa Diary I  

Friday and Saturday, November 18 and 19, 2005 - Paris, France; London, UK; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Maun, Botswana. 50 in France, 80s in Botswana.

Traveling days. We all had similar flight times leaving Paris around 2:30 PM Friday. Mom and Bill flew to Chicago, while Deanna and I flew to British Airways to London to catch the overnight flight to Johannesburg. Air France had a direct flight from Paris, but due to our onward travel after southern Africa, BA was cheaper. In Johannesburg, we met Bill and Stacy Carlson, who arrived from Tampa the night before. After a couple hours in the Joburg airport Saturday morning, we flew to Maun, Botswana and from there we took a small charter flight (our fourth since Paris, the Carlsons fifth since Tampa) to our first campsite. We stay two nights each in three different camps in Botswana.

Stacy and Bill successfully completed their mission to bring us a new PC to replace our old one. I quit writing about this in Spain, figuring I was whining too much about not having a PC, but now I have one again. Most of the credit goes to Mike Fortner, who I used to work with at Inforte. In responding to a routine question I posed to him, he volunteered to order a new PC from a supplier that could ship in time. Mike then had the PC shipped to him, loaded software on it for me, and then shipped it to Bill in Tampa for him to bring to me. It is difficult to capture in words how grateful I am for his help. Deanna is appreciative too, for now I am far less grumpy. There are no phone, email, or internet connections in our safari camp locations, but that is okay as I have hundreds of pictures to edit from 10 countries we have been in since we were last able to post pictures.

Deanna is going to write about Botswana in a separate post. I will pick things up again on Friday, November 25, when we visit Victoria Falls on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia.

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12:18:15 am French Diary VII  

French Diary VII

Wednesday, November 16, 2005 - Paris, France - Cool, 50.

Rodin Museum was unexpectedly closed, so we went on to the Monet Museum, then we split up. I took the sewer tour (stinky, more modern, and less interesting than the Catacombs), while mom, Bill, and Deanna went to Notre Dame Cathedral, which I had seen before. We then met, had lunch, and visited the Louvre. Deanna is somewhat better, but still has a cold.

Thursday, November 17, 2005 - Paris, France - Cool, high 40s.

Apparently, it snowed in Chicago last night, and the windchill is around 0 Fahrenheit. That makes the cool weather here more bearable. This is about the coldest weather we have had on the trip, and likely the coldest we will have until we return to Chicago. The highs in Botswana, our next stop, are around 90 right now.

We split up again, with everyone else going to the palace at Versailles that I had seen before. Mom and Bill liked it. Deanna was less impressed, thinking the palaces in St. Petersburg, Russia surpassed it. I think she is correct. Versailles is the best-known and most imitated palace, but inevitably one of the imitators did outdo it.

I spent about five hours in the internet cafe--2 1/2 hours in the morning and a similar amount of time at night. I needed this much time due to another French let's-do-things-differently-just-to-show-we-can-be-different idea. The French keyboard has five letters in a different place then the standard QWERTY keyboard, requiring about three times the normal amount of time for me to type (the a, w, q, z, and m keys are rearranged). Now all over the world, different countries do customize their keyboards so that local symbols and special characters are present or more prominent. But this is the first time I have encountered a redesign of the letter keys. I am sure the French placement is technically more efficient if you were only to ever type French on a French keyboard. But to deviate from a de facto world standard for a small efficiency gain seems absurd to me. A French person traveling outside of France will be a bit helpless on a standard keyboard, while visitors to France will similarly struggle. This non-standardization is good for French internet cafe revenue, I will say.

In between low-productivity internet sessions, I visited Shakespeare & Company, the English-language bookstore along the Seine, near Notre Dame. It gained fame as the publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, when no other publisher would touch the book. It is a rabbit warren of small rooms with books stacked floor to ceiling in no apparent order. Some books are new, most are old. Most books are for sale, but some are not--you can read them on site though. Struggling writers use the facilities for research, writing, or accommodation, although the conditions appear a bit spartan and dirty. It was interesting to see. You may have seen it in movies or TV shows--I think it was in After the Sunset with Ethan Hawke in the past two years.

After that, I rode the metro out to La Defense, the central business district of Paris that is not in central Paris. Most large French companies have their headquarters here. It is all modern skyscraper architecture in contrast to Paris's 19th century and earlier low-rise buildings. The architecture was good, better than many post-World War II commercial centers and I was glad that I went.

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12:14:10 am French Diary VI  

Tuesday, November 15, 2005 - Paris, France - 50, rainy.

Orsay Museum (art 1848-1914; begins where Louvre ends); World War II section of Invalids; Catacombs. Deanna continues to be sick with a sore throat and now no energy. She went back to hotel after Orsay Museum, but then ventured out later to Invalides by herself.

The Paris subway is among the best in the world. You are never much more than 500 meters from a station and the trains are frequent, the maps are plentiful, and the system is well maintained. It is similar to London in layout, but less prone to breakdown. I don't remember if it is physically uncomfortable in summer; London definitely can be, but Paris's warmer temperatures may mean they have addressed the cooling problem out of necessity. Probably Paris and Tokyo have the best systems overall, although each has a deficiency of escalators/elevators that are present in more newly built systems. Their absence is an inconvenience if you have luggage. Singapore is the sleekest system in the world, in my opinion, although it is not yet as comprehensive. Also, its stations verge on being too big, requiring you to walk long distances to get from the train to the street. Seoul's subway is excellent also, nearly as comprehensive as Paris and Tokyo, but occasionally suffering from the huge station syndrome like Singapore.

Saturday's International Herald Tribune had a great op-ed piece by Roger Cohen on the speech that French President Jacques Chirac has not given, but should, in response to the French riots. Before I discuss what Cohen said, I do have to say that Chirac's feeble response has been so invisible and lacking as to make George Bush's initial handling of Hurricane Katrina look like a model of crisis management. Also illuminating to me is that while in general the IHT has criticized Chirac, it has taken a rather mild tone, before dashing back to its comfort zone of haranguing Bush on everything he does, devoting far more column space to far less serious matters than the French riots. This unbalanced contrast, following the horribly biased Katrina coverage in Europe a few months ago, again shows me that Bush--a man who admittedly does provide much to criticize--is unlikely to get a fair evaluation by the European/US east coast media establishment for the remainder of his term. The sore loser phenomenon of 2000 has a long half-life, especially once the Iraq war re-stoked these passions.

Anyway, regarding France, Cohen providing a soaring speech that pinned the trouble assimilating immigrants to failed economic practice and a welfare state that "inhibits us, saps our creative energy, and extends a culture of dependency into suburbs of despair and vandalism." The answer Cohen says is not more government programs, but a break with past practices such as the 35-hour week and lifelong unemployment benefits that oddly have resulted in more than 60% of French citizens opposed to capitalism.

One thing I will have to commend France on is that they reject affirmative action out of hand, and have continued to do so after the riots, despite some calls to adopt this (most surprisingly by Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading conservative candidate for president in 2007). They also collect no census information on ethnic origin or religious practice, not wanting to put people in groups. Everyone is a French citizen of equal standing, with no distinctions made. Unfortunately, as the riots have revealed, in practice there has been discrimination and immigrant assimilation has not worked as well as in other countries, including the US, which falls all over itself to create ethnic and minority distinctions. I think the US success in immigrant assimilation is due to its economic model that gives hard-working people the opportunity for advancement, rather than its census taking procedures or quota systems, and I would hope if France were to adopt any of our practices it would look to the former and not the later. France's colonial past is full of historical mistakes, but this does not approach the magnitude of US slavery. Thus, I think any justification for affirmative action for France falls short. If they were to adopt any form of positive discrimination, I would hope they would base decisions on economic factors and not race or ethnicity. This might be a better method for the US to switch to as well.

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November 18, 2005

10:45:05 am French Diary V  

Sunday, November 13, 2005 - continued from prior post

There is an official French tourist publication entitled "The D-Day Landings and the Battle of Normandy" that lists all of the sites, but we did not stumble onto this booklet until late in the day. Still, we made the most of the day, visiting Utah Beach, the museum next to Utah Beach (Musee du Debarquement in Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont), Pont due Hoc (a bomb-cratered battle site where US Rangers suffered a 60% death rate but ultimately knocked out German artillery aimed at the beaches), and Musee Memorial D'Omaha Beach. These sites, along with the American Cemetery we saw yesterday, provide a comprehensive full-day visit of the D-Day invasion. You could, though, spend several days here if you wished as there is much more to see. Also, the beaches that were filled with death over 60 years ago are today great recreational beaches. I don't know if people do swim and sunbathe here in summer. It would seem disrespectful on one hand, but on the other, it would seem a waste for 50 miles of wide, pristine beach to sit idle.

The drive to Paris was not long in distance but it was lengthy in time as everyone returned to the city after a three-day holiday weekend. Our missing license plate was a never-before-seen phenomenon that attracted much attention from other motorists, many of whom desired to politely warn us of our condition. The streets of Paris were quiet as could be, with no sign of the recent rioting. In part this was likely due to a visible police presence with officers on about every other corner around our hotel. We stay five nights at Hotel De Suede St. Germain in section 7 of Paris within walking distance of Invalides and the Orsay Museum, with the Eiffel Tower a long walk away. Arriving at 10 PM on a Sunday, no restaurants were open near our hotel, except for one--a Chinese place just down the street. So our first Paris meal was Chinese, where we spoke Chinese to the owner and his wife as we knew it better than we knew French or they knew English. That is to say we barely knew it at all, but we nonetheless impressed them with ni hao, hein hao, xie xie, boo yong, and boo-ker-che (probably all mispelled here), thus exhausting much of our Chinese vocabulary. On the subject of misspelling, I'll note also that the British Airways lounge PC I am typing this on in London prevents access to spellchecker.com, no doubt a site full of offensive words, so the English spellings in this post may not be as accurate as usual either.

Monday, November 14, 2005 - Paris, France - Sunny, low 50s

Eiffel Tower, Arc De Triomphe, Champs Des Elysees. Initial impression of Paris versus prior visit in 1992: cleaner, much less graffiti, less dog crap on the sidewalk although still a lot (I actually saw someone pick up after their dog, an action previously unthinkable), a bit more English spoken but still not that much relative to other places in Europe. Overall: quite favorable.

Regarding the language, it occured to me how difficult it much be for a French person who does not speak English to travel outside of France. The average Dutch or German person we met while in those countries was fluent in English and thus would hae no problem going anywhere outside of their own country. But if you only know French, you aren't going to have much luck outside of places such as Belgium or former colonies like Algeria. You could join a tour group of course, which is what monolinguists from China and Japan must do (younger traveling Chinese and Japanese today know English though). You would have an easier time than Asian monolinguists, as you are more likely to find an occasional French speaker than a Chinese or Japanese speaker, plus you might be able to read English even if you could not speak it. Still, interaction on any question not covered in your French guidebook would be difficult. This experience would be the same for anyone from any country not knowing English of course, except for the Spanish who could be understood throughout Central and South America, but you meet a lot of French who you would expect to know English who do not, which is why I mention it here. Growing up in France you are protected a lot from the outside world. This of course means that you are not always prepared for the outside world.

They are calling our flight, so once again I will have continue this another time.

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November 17, 2005

11:53:55 am French Diary IV  

Saturday, November 12, 2005 - Bordeaux, Omaha Beach, and Caen, France - Cool, occasional rain, 55.

Drove most of the day to Normandy, arriving in time to visit the American Cemetary at Omaha Beach an hour before it closed. There was a sizable crowd, mainly French, probably due to the weekend marking the end of World War I (although this cemetery was only for World War II). World War I lingers in the European memory (and also the Australian and New Zealand memory) to a greater extent than it does in the American memory. Although I have not done the math, I suspect that if you measure WWI casualties as a percentage of WWII casualties, you will find the WWI percentage for the US to be lower than for the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. The US got off lighter, so to speak, due to its late entry. New Zealand, I believe, actually had more WWI casualties than WWII. The US, however, experienced nearly the same number of casualties in Vietnam as WWI, so WWI has lost some significance for us. Armistice Day remains a government holiday, but it is now re-christened as Veteran's Day, and it is not a business holiday. In France, though, November 11 remains a major holiday, and in New Zealand and Australia, the day of their major WWI battle (April 25, Gallipoli) remains a huge holiday, equal in magnitude to our Memorial Day (originally Decoration Day to honor Civil War soldiers), or perhaps even greater.

We stayed one night at the Otelinn in Caen. It is right next to a museum on World War II and the 20th Century that ironically we did not go to due to time constraints. Caen is a small city of just over 100,000, but the town of Bayeux, around 15,000, is closer and more convenient to the D-Day sites. In summer it would be best to stay in one of the small villages of a few hundred or a few thousand people near Omaha Beach--e.g. Colleville, St. Laurent, Vieruille. Once the weather turns colder in October and November and the crowds diminish, many of the small museums, shops, hotels, and restaurants in these villages close for the season.

Sunday, November 13, 2005 - Caen, Utah and Omaha Beaches, and Paris, France - Cool, 50.

Spent the day touring different D-Day sites. The invasion area was 50 miles wide along five beaches: Sword (UK), Juno (Canada), Gold (UK), Omaha (US), and Utah (US). The battle for Normandy, a region in northern France, lasted for several months after June 6, 1944. D-Day is the largest invasion in human history. It was not the turning point of the war--that occurred one to two years earlier (Stalingrad in the Soviet Union, El Alamein in Africa, and Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal in the Pacific) but it opened a vital third front against Germany, allowing the Allies to push into Germany from the west and end the war.

There are dozens of battle sites and commemorative museums throughout Normandy. The bulk of these are along the five beaches. There is no central museum--instead there are numerous homespun museums full of personal memorabilia and often devoted to a particular aspect of the invasion, such as a specific US army unit. You can visit each site in about an hour.

Internet cafe is closing, so to be continued at a later time.

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10:44:57 am Spanish Diary II, French Diary III  

Wednesday, November 9, 2005 - Barcelona, Spain - Rain, low 60s.

We tried to take a walking tour, but a downpour soaked everyone, so after 15 minutes we quit and received a refund. Most of my clothes were at the laundry, so I dug out a t-shirt and shorts and froze the rest of the day. In the afternoon it poured again and I was soaked again. Further, I was unable to upload any pictures to our website as none of the internet cafes had picture editing software. Actually, I found one that did, but I was not familiar with the program, rendering me clueless to operate its Spanish version. When you are out of the country for a year, some days everything goes wrong and you feel helpless and today was one of those days.

Thursday, November 10, 2005 - Barcelona, Spain - Partly sunny, mid 60s.

Made a last-minute decision to take a walking tour of the Gothic Quarter this morning as the sun broke through the clouds just before 10 AM. After lunch and a walk down the La Rambla, we split up with my mom, Bill, and Deanna shopping while I went to the Museum of Catalunya (Catalan)History. I expected it to be small, unimpressive, with limited English, but instead it was new and modern, with translations. The exhibits were also in Catalan and Castilian (Spanish). These two languages look about 80% the same to me, with many words spelled identically and others being close derivations of each other. While I can respect that Catalans have a historically separate identity, today any separatist desires from Spain seem pointless to me, especially with so little difference in language and with everyone knowing Spanish as well.

Afterward, I went to the Gaudi sites that everyone else hit yesterday. His architecture looks like melted ice cream, or buildings you would expect to see in Alice in Wonderland. Deanna and I picked up the laundry at 8 PM, and then the four of us had a late dinner around 10:30 PM, a normal eating time in Spain. I believe this was the first Thai food we have been able to find since Berlin; it was excellent.

Friday, November 11, 2005 - Barcelona, Spain; Andorra; Bordeaux, France - Cool, highs 45-60, depending on location.

Bill's birthday. Deanna got up early and ran to Dunkin' Donuts to get some sugar-fried American happiness for Bill. We left Barcelona and drove to Bordeaux, France. Bordeaux is just a stopping point for us on our way to Normandy, but it was really nice, with old well-maintained buildings, parks, and public walkways. We stayed one night at 4 Soeurs (4 Sisters) Hotel. The owner spent half a year in Moline, Illinois several decades ago and commented that he always liked Americans because they were so friendly to him.

The drive to Bordeaux was eventful. We stopped for lunch in Andorra, a tiny country of less than 50,000 people, high in the Pyrennes Mountains between Spain and France. Shortly after the French border, we were pulled over in a roadblock. Andorra is a low-tax country, so French people buy goods there, and the police set up roadblocks to catch those not declaring their purchases. We bought only lunch and gas--the cheapest so far in Europe at just under $4 per gallon. The French customs officials instantly lost interest in us once they realized we were American, although they did point out that we had no rear license plate. Someone stole it in Andorra while the car was parked in a parking garage! Thankfully, this did not happen in the Balkans where we could have had a lot of trouble getting across the border. The front plate was still in place as the front of the car was inaccessible against a wall. We have special red plates. We think they indicate that the car is leased, or that fees to operate the vehicle in all European countries are paid, or both. Whatever the color designates, it is of value to someone. Bill instantly bonded with his fellow cops, having his picture taken and showing off his Land Rover Club of Chicago card to a policeman driving a Land Rover. The lack of a plate did not seem to bother anyone, as our story was unlikely to be made up (or maybe it was just the power of the Land Rover card). Being a national holiday for the end of World War I, there was no place open to get a new plate anyway. Not far down the road, we were selected in a second roadblock, with the same loss of interest once it was obvious we were not French. Bill was disappointed he did not get to flash his Land Rover card a second time.

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November 09, 2005

11:12:40 am French Diary II, Spanish Diary I  

Tuesday, November 8, 2005 - Juan-les-Pins and Pont du Gard, France; Barcelona, Spain. Sunny, High 60s.

We drove the 350 miles or so from the French Riveria to Barcelona, stopping in Pont du Gard, a three-level aqueduct that is one of the most impressive and best preserved examples of Roman architecture in the world today. One day, technology permitting, we may post some of our pictures of it in the Image Gallery. You have probably seen a picture of it at some point in your life, and for those familiar with European currency, it is featured on the five-euro note.

My first impression of Barcelona is that of a bustling, modern city that I like. It has a grid system, a welcome change after wandering around much of Europe with a map in my hand and a clueless and frustrated expression on my face. My PC troubles caused me to spend a couple hours explore buying a cheap machine here. It is possible, but only with a Spanish keyboard and Spanish operating system. Actually, a couple of more expensive laptops, Apple and Sony Vaio, can be switched to an English operating system. A measure of my technology frustration is that I actually considered buying an entry-level Toshiba notebook for around $900 ($760-$810 with a VAT refund, although the details of this were sketchy) to use for the next six weeks, but in the end I thought better of it as I think the Spanish would get the best of me. I was pleasantly surprised that my vast 30-word Spanish vocabulary did come back to me readily, although it helps when discussing technology as there is often no foreign language translation for a English technology term. "IBM Thinkpad" in Spanish for example is "IBM Thinkpad," albeit pronounced a bit differently.

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11:11:54 am Italian Diary IV, French Diary I  

Saturday, November 5, 2005 - Vernazza, Milan, and Finale Ligure, Italy. Rainy, high 50s in Milan. Clear, mid 60s in Finale Ligure.

Left the Cinque Terra early, driving about three hours to Milan to pick up my mom and Bill, who arrived on a 12:40 PM flight. Not far from the airport along the side of the road, they got their first glimpse of local girls "just dying to meet you," which my mom found as humorous as I did when we were in the Czech Republic. The rest of our trip to Finale Ligure was less eventful by comparison. We stayed one night at Hotel Savoia, on the last night before it closed for the season.

Sunday, November 6, 2005 - Finale Ligure, Italy; Monte Carlo, Monaco; and Juan-les-Pins, France. Sunny, 70.

Drove along Italian Riveria, into France, stopped for a few hours in Monte Carlo, and then on to our hotel on the French Riveria. We will stay two nights at Hotel Juana, a splurge hotel for us made more affordable by the off-season rates. In Monaco, we visited the aquarium, which Deanna wanted to see. Although it was not that big, it had many types of fish I had not seen previously. I'm not usually that interested in aquariums, having been to enough of them and having dived around the world. Usually I've seen it all before, but that was not the case here, and the stop was well worth it.

My PC is not working again, which frustrates me more than anyone could imagine! Yesterday, it worked fine after I used the new battery and power adapter my mom brought, but today it failed right out of the gate. It freezes after a few minutes use. I spent a couple of hours trying different things, but I think it is out of commission for the rest of this trip, a real blow to keeping the web site up to date. I often write these logs on my PC in the car, on a plane, or in our hotel room early in the morning or late at night. This is much more convenient than doing all of the typing in an internet cafe. Also, most internet cafes do not have the ability to edit pictures (e.g. crop, adjust contrast, change image file size). Finally, I was counting on using the internet to look up info and make cheap phone calls to initiate services (e.g. DSL, satellite TV, newspapers, health insurance, and numerous other things) in advance of our return home. It's a lot easier to do this from your hotel room, than from an internet cafe. Once you are used to a technological convenience, it becomes difficult to adjust without it. Fortunately, a few days ago, Deanna made our final travel bookings for this trip, so there is nothing more to do there.

Monday, November 7, 2005 - Juan-les-Pins, France. Sunny, high 60s.

Drove to nearby Nice to go to the Matisse and Chagall museums. Jason Busto who is now in Nice with his father, met us at the Matisse Museum. Both museums were small. The Matisse Museum did not have that much interesting work of his. The Chagall Museum was better, although it only had religious paintings, not my favorite art form. After lunch in Nice, we walked along the promenade. The weather was brilliant, sunny with no clouds. There were a smattering of late season sun bathers on Nice´s pebbly beach. Afterward, we drove to Cannes and walked along its beachfront promenade. You would not know that for the past week and a half in France since October 27 there have been riots with hundreds of cars burned each night.

While we know that some people are concerned for us, we are not too worried. So far this year, we were in Belfast the day after several nights of rioting, we were in London a few days after the second attempted subway bombing, we were in Bali a few months before a terrorist bombing, we were in Bolivia a few months before civil disturbances toppled their president, we were in Ecuador a few months before their president had to flee because of street violence, we were in India the week that flooding killed about 2000 people, there were numerous riots while we were in China that have continued sporadically since we left, and we've been in various countries (China, Vietnam, and Romania) that have had bird flu outbreaks while we were there. And 2005 is just a typical year.

Some of the worst violence this year happened in the US, so no country is immune to civil unrest. Having been outside of the US several times when riots have happened there (Rodney King in 1992, New Orleans this year), I have learned that things usually sound worse from far away. You would be shocked to have heard some of the things the UK media said about the US after Katrina. It's not that those were not bad events--they were--but the foreign media made it sound as the entire American society was about to collapse. And of course there were travel warnings then about coming to the US, just as there are travel warnings now about going to France.

As a rule, I've found that Americans overestimate both the safety of the US (which in terms of violence is actually a more dangerous place than most developed countries) and the danger of foreign countries. For example, while I would not downplay the seriousness of the French riots, I would note that over the past 11 nights there has been one-riot related death in the country. I suspect there has been more than one murder in my home city of Chicago during that time. Similar to the US, most of the trouble is in areas where we would never go. I read where cars were burned in Nice and Cannes, but there was absolutely no sign of anything unusual in those two places on Monday. Nevertheless, we do appreciate everyone's concern. And we can always change our plans if we need to.

Overall, I found the Italian Riveria to be good, but the French Riveria to be better: more activity, with bigger, prettier, and nicer towns. Juan-les-Pins like Finale Ligure is at the end of its season with many places closed. That is not the case in the larger coastal cities of Monte Carlo, Nice, and Cannes, but the hotels there are correspondingly more expensive. Real estate, though, seemed surprisingly reasonable to me--considering the desirability of the locale--just looking at the real estate office storefront listings. Prices were below Chicago and certainly less than the California Riveria (south of Orange County to north of San Diego). For example, you could get a 2000-3000 square foot villa with a pool on over an acre of land for around $1.5 million. Not a bargain, but this is one of the top warm weather destinations in the world, so I expected prices to be higher.

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November 04, 2005

11:45:08 am Italian Diary III  

Wednesday, November 2, 2005 - Rome, Italy - Mid 70s

The warmest day in a long time, perhaps since one day in late July in London. With a cloudless sky, it was hot under the sun, but it noticeably cooler by mid-afternoon. Went to Vatican Museum, Pantheon, and Museum of Rome (city history, last five centuries, as told through art, but generally excluding the 20th Century).

Afterward, I spent several hours in an internet cafe, catching up on news. Headlines: Chicago city council to vote on smoking ban for restaurants and bars at the end of this month. Undoubtedly, our web site has pushed them toward this, although I'm afraid they may water down the ban and pass a half measure. The lead story in USA Today is how US house price rises are moderating. Strangely, they fail to credit our site for predicting this back in June.

Over dinner, Deanna and I talked about what country in the world has the best food. Italy for example everywhere has food I like, but little variety--it's all Italian. Many restaurants seem identical. If you want something other than the three Ps--pizza, pasta, or panini--you need to leave the country. Okay, that's an exaggeration (they have meat, fish, and salad also), but try finding a Thai restaurant. You won't. And I would have to say that I have still not found the Italian food in Italy to surpass the Italian food elsewhere in Europe. For example, I think we had better Italian food the nine days we were in Germany than the week we have been in Italy so far. Anyway, after some discussion, the obvious became apparent to me. The best food in the world is in the largest US cities because 1) you can get any type of food from anywhere in the world; 2) innovative new fusion food concepts are most prominent there; 3) the service is the best; and 4) the cost is low for developed countries and the value for money (quality, service, portions) is better than anywhere else. To be clear, I'm talking about large cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles only. I am not talking about the suburbs of these cities, nor am I talking about mid-sized cities (although you will find occasional gem in these places), nor am I talking about rural areas in the US. I will give an honorable mention to Japan for highest quality food preparation.

Thursday, November 3, 2005 - Rome and Vernazza (Cinque Terra), Italy - Mid 60s

Drove to Vernazza, leaving Rome around 8:30 and arriving around 2:30 after lunch. Only got lost once leaving Rome, a tremendous accomplishment. Initial impressions of Cinque Terra: the towns are more rustic, authentic, and smaller than I expected and getting there is more difficult--often a one-lane road clinging to the side of a steep hill. We are staying two nights at Hotel Gianni (I think that is the name--with my PC not working, I am not able to type these posts in my hotel room with all of my guide books and info surrounding me, so I have to guess a lot of place names). Getting to our room involves hiking up three or four sets of outdoor steps, and then two stories of a narrow spiral staircase within the building. Authentic, but tiring.

Friday, November 4, 2005 - Vernazza, Italy - mid 60s.

Hiked to all five Cinque Terra towns. The Cinque Terra is five (cinque) towns terraced (terra) on steep hillsides along the ocean. It takes four to six hours to hike from one end to the other, but also you can take a train or boat between each town. One of the trails was closed and the boat is closed for the season, so we had to take the train twice, each ride only a few minutes. We hiked from Vernazza (town #4) to Monterosso (town #5), a tough 90-minute hike. We then took the train to Riomaggiore (town #1), a ride of 10 minutes or less. We walked an easy 30 minutes to Manarola (town #2), and had lunch there. The path to Corniglia (town #3) was closed for repairs, so we took a 2-minute train ride. We then hiked 90 steep, up-and-down minutes to Vernazza. Being November, more restaurants and stores are closed than open, as tourist crowds are down even though the weather is still good. There is enough still open though to make the stay worthwhile. Tomorrow morning we drive a few hours to Milan to pick up my mom and step-dad Bill, who will accompany us for a final night in Italy, and then on to Monaco, France, Spain, Andorra, and then France again. We all leave from Paris on November 19, Deanna and I to Africa and my mom and Bill back home to the US.

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11:44:28 am Italian Diary II  

Saturday, October 29, 2005 - Florence, Italy - Low 60s.

Took three-hour walking tour of Florence, including Accademia where Michelangelo's David sculpture resides. Had lunch then took guided tour of Uffizi, the best Renaissance art museum in Italy. The tours were expensive and somewhat long, but they were the only way to see these museums on short notice--reserve tickets were sold out until Tuesday--or without waiting in line, perhaps for several hours.

Sunday, October 30, 2005 - Florence and Rome, Italy - High 60s.

Drove about three hours to Rome. I had always read how awful the Rome traffic is, but traffic was light the entire way from departure point to destination, and especially in the city. It is Sunday, but still Rome seemed surprisingly empty. We are staying four nights at Hotel Veneto. In the late afternoon, we walked a short distance to the National Museum of Rome, full of impressive statues, busts, mosaics, and coins. Deanna especially liked the mosaics that were 20 centuries old. At night in our hotel, we received an email from Jason Busto, a friend of Deanna's from high school, responding to our last email update from the web site. Jason met up with Bill Carlson and I in China in April 2004. By coincidence, Jason in now in Rome on a trip through Southern Europe with his father Pete. We were in Florence at the same time, but did not know it. It turns out he is about a five-minute walk from our hotel. We will join them tomorrow.

Monday, October 31, 2005 - Rome, Italy - Mid 60s

Met Jason and his father after breakfast. Went to EUR, a planned suburb created by Mussolini in the 1930s. The Facist architecture is quite good. We'll post a picture or two in the Image Gallery once our PC is working again. In the afternoon, we went to St. Peter's Cathederal in Vatican City. At night, the four of us had dinner at the Forum Hotel, overlooking the ruins of ancient Rome. We found out that once reason traffic was light yesterday is that tomorrow is a holiday, and many people are away for a four-day weekend.

Jason will say that he only knows two languages, English and Spanish (actually he knows Latin and Russian also), but, in reality, once he is in a country for a few days he can carry on a conversation with about anyone in the local language. I've watched him maneuver around Beijing, giving destinations to taxi drivers who don't speak and English and today I observed him order meals in Italian without using English. Now this is a useful skill to have, but we do not possess it. Fortunately, much of the world does speak our language.

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 - Rome, Italy - 70

Took a three-hour Rome Walks tour of Colosseum and Forum. Expensive, but worth it, as the guide has a PhD in archeology. These are the most impressive archeological sites we have seen on our trip. Contrasting with Machu Picchu provides perspective on just how incredible ancient Rome was. Relative to Machu Picchu, the area in Rome is bigger, the sites are grander, the engineering is even more impressive (e.g. running water, heated pools, invention of concrete, elevators), and Rome was built 1200-1500 years earlier! Machu Picchu itself is big, grand, with impressive engineering, and well worth a visit, but Rome exceeds everything else we have seen. At night, we had a goodbye drink with Jason and his father, who took a day trip to Naples and Capri.

Rome peaked twice--at the height of the Roman empire, 0-200 AD, and in the 1500s with the Renaissance. Today, Rome lives off the fading glory of its past. The past was spectacular, but pride in the present seems lacking. Rome is a bit of a dirty city today. No worse than many other European cities to be sure, but considering the grandeur of its past, the present ought to be nicer.

Here's another thing that I found very odd. Modern history is ignored. Today, we visited a small, mediocre museum, with limited English, on Italian unification. I've forgotten the name, but it is inside the huge monument to Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of unified Italy in the 1860s and 1870s. In the afternoon, I spent nearly an hour in a bookstore looking at various Rome guidebooks to find the military museum (until now every country has one) or a museum dedicated to World War II (again every participating country until now, even those on the losing side, has one). In one guide book, I turned up an unpromising one-sentence mention of a museum that examined the German occupation of Italy. It was not mentioned in any other guide books, including a 200-page book on Rome museums. I decided not to go, as I expected to be underwhelmed with its content and its English based on my review of the guide books. Now if it does not seem odd to you that the 7th largest economy in the world does not have a single decent museum in its capital city devoted to the past 150 years of its history (which is all of its history as a country), then I say you have not spent most of the last year visiting museums around the world. It is in fact, incredibly odd. Offhand, it seems to me the most surprising thing I have observed from a year of traveling around the world visiting museums. Experiencing Italy, though, it seems to make a bit more sense. This is a country firmly in the past. Modern to Italy is the Renaissaince, five centuries ago.

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