← Feed

Posts

• View post

  I didn’t expect to find the largest and best-stocked Thai grocery I have ever been in (I have not visited Thailand) just north of the Antwerp central train station, but there it was.

• View post

  The only rational response to it being 34C in Seville. And this is probably the coolest day this week.

• View post

  We are just back from Seville but will be in Poland in ten days, and Hungary in four weeks. It's going to be hopeless to learn any of either language, but I might try to make some long-overdue progress on the orthography. Thanks to an undergraduate degree in combinatorics and much use of it in my research career, I have a bit of a head start with Hungarian names.

• View post

  When I go to Spain and attempt to speak Spanish, they hear the traces of Portuguese pronunciation in my voice, and pity me. When I return to Portugal and attempt to speak Portuguese, they hear bits of Spanish pronunciation because I can't switch so easily, and they hate me even more than they did already.

• View post

  In researching our upcoming trip to Poland, I have learned that "milk bar" did not originate in the writings of Anthony Burgess, but was a Polish term (bar mleczny) for an inexpensive restaurant serving homey food and, while a bit old-fashioned, many of them still survive and thrive. The concept travelled to the US and then to the UK. Also, I have never seen so many menus with steak tartare on them.

• View post

  Google Maps on my oldest (bedside) phone has gotten confused. It is promoting the nearby Zahir Kebab to me, as it often does, but this time it has added the subtext “Premium z Łodzi”. I’ve been researching Poland, so that’s perhaps understandable (though it’s never happened before with other countries), but I’m not sure what “Premium in the boat” signifies.

• View post

  I am not a fan of Side 2 of Bowie's "Low" (I'm on Team Side 1), but I had to play "Warszawa" on arriving in the city. In this year of mad travel, this is the first new country I've visited. (I expect there to be at least three more before the year is out.)

• View post

  This is for @gallais.

• View post

  Today we went to Auschwitz and Birkenau. I will not be posting any more photographs.

• View post

  Three weeks after we were in the Longjing tea region of Hangzhou, the BBC posted an article on it. Two days after we had jagodianzki (bilberry buns) in Kraków, the BBC posted an article on them (today, quoting bakers from Warszawa, where we were a week ago). They're gaining on us!

• View post

  I think there were more cormorants on this one "Chinese fishing net" on the west side of Vembanad Lake than I had ever seen in total in my life before. But we saw many more on our lake cruise, perched on piles and sticks, diving in after fish. And also egrets, herons, and other waterfowl.

• View post

  My India travelogue is almost done (just one more day in Kerala to document) but, annoyingly, it is being interrupted by another trip to Asia. So there will be some live-tooting from Japan and China, not much, and then I will return home, post the last Kerala bits, and then whatever is interesting enough (and not time-sensitive) from this latest trip.

• View post

  This one is for @ccshan.

• View post

  But today, I received a reply to my "Change Address" query. Some human being looked at what I had provided, said, "That isn't what is needed to change address," and sent me boilerplate for what was needed: a tax residency certificate from Finanças with my current address on it.

• View post

  Instead I plucked Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass" ("The Northern Lights" is the original UK title) out of my bookshelf. I had to peel off some Post-It notes left by, I think, Z, when she did a book report on it, something like twenty years ago. I clearly hadn't read it since before then. The pages have darkened with age.

• View post

  (I have been trying for decades to write doggerel about Jorge Luis Borges to the tune of "Oranges Boranges" from the H.R. Pufnstuf TV show, but have utterly failed at it.)

• View post

  @kfitz It has gotten so bad! I think they deliberately made it worse to make their "AI" look better, but I haven't turned any of those features on (and I suspect that if I do, it would still be worse).

• View post

  It used to be that I had to remind myself to not trust anything I saw on the Internet on April 1. But now I can not trust anything I see on the Internet all year round!