a list for friday—thoughts from ten days in Europe

I promise this will be the last post about my trip (although you can see 7,000 pictures on Facebook). It was a wonderful experience, jet lag and all. Here are a few thoughts from my journal.

– Dear Air France: it is legal on both continents to keep the cabin temperature above 55 degrees. Just so you know.

– If you look up “beautiful,” “delightful,” or “charming” in the dictionary, I’m pretty sure it shows pictures of Paris in May.

– French men will flirt with any woman who breathes. We hadn’t showered or slept for 30 hours and a shopkeeper wanted me and Breanne to drink champagne with him. If we’d been clean and non-grouchy he might have proposed.

– Bree is flexible and a ton of fun to travel with. We share a love of museums, an interest in history, a willingness to ruin our dinner by eating apple strudel at 3 in the afternoon, a love of rainy days, AND she can read a map. Which I can’t.

– There are actually people masochistic enough to climb the stairs to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I am not one of them. Neither is Bree—another reason she’s quality.


– If there is a better breakfast than espresso, baguettes, cheese, butter and jam, I have yet to eat it.

– I work too much. Okay, not a revelation. I was practically giddy at the thought of 10 whole days without email, deadlines, errands, chores and task lists.

– The French have a reputation for being rude, and it’s true they don’t much like our attempts at speaking their language. But on the whole we found them much nicer than the Germans. The Deutschland’s waiters are especially grouchy. Local expats said it’s part of the culture since they don’t work for tips. Not wanting to disturb local culture, we just didn’t tip the nasty ones very much.

– The Louvre is stuffy, crowded and hard to navigate.


– The guidebooks imply Berthillon ice cream is so good the world will implode if you visit Paris without trying it. They may be right.

– I’m glad I got a Kindle.

– I wish the US had the cafe culture of Europe’s major cities, where you can sit outside and people watch, read, write or talk as long as you want. I would do most of my work from a cafe table if I lived there.

– Also, America needs more trains.


– French women wear scarves and look effortlessly chic. I look like a woman wearing a really big piece of material around her neck.

–Every store of every size sells beer and wine, and there’s no legal drinking age. Yet we saw very few drunk people, and most of the ones we did encounter were Americans. Make of that what you will.

–Some of Paris is propped up by huge underground catacombs of bones from its 18th and 19th century residents.

– The German people are a paradox. They love rules—more than once we were instructed (without explanation) to carry our bags a certain way in a museum or leave by the exit door instead of the entrance door right next to it. Then there’s the U Bahn and S Bahn trains–there are no turnstiles or barriers to walking on one without buying a ticket, yet everyone stood in line to buy them and validate them in automated machines before each ride.

It’s not surprising to me that this rigid, authority-pleasing group has historically been so easily influenced by dictators. On the other hand, there was also a lot of the random—museums arranged neither chronologically nor thematically, train lines shut down without warning, restaurants without signs. It’s an interesting dynamic.


– Their nuclear shelters are still ready to go. Can’t be too careful.

– If you spend five hours at Dachau, and you see the crematorium, and you walk through the prison, and you see pictures of the liberation, and you read about the torture, you will not talk much on the way home.

–I like sausages and sauerkraut more than I expected to.

– I still don’t like beer.

– Berlin has history from the Renaissance, World War 2, and the Cold War—sometimes all on the same block, along with some of the cheapest food and coolest museums in Europe. I’m in love. Also, unlike Paris, it never smells like pee.


– I need to go more often. I love the USA, but on the whole I think cities across the pond are more beautiful, have better food, and offer a richer culture. I’m already saving for the next trip.