We only saw two Fringe shows our last two days in Edinburgh. Tuesday we went to “Are We All in a Cult?” by an obscure comedian whose stage name is Mowten and about whom I can find precious little information on the internet. And Wednesday we went to Dana Alexander’s “Don’t Start Me on White Jesus.” The rest of the time we either did straight on tourist things–visiting the Edinburgh Castle...
The reviews from our second day at the Fringe.
A review of my first day at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Last weekend, Sadé and I went wine tasting at a vineyard called Mas Comtal in Penedes. I have been to a couple of different wine tastings before. When I was in Spain about 9 years ago when I visited to a big corporate cava producer. It was fairly unimpressive. It felt like a commercial venture–wine Disneyland. And when I was in France in the summer of 2019, I went to a couple of small...
Last week we went into Barcelona and went on a Spanish Civil War walking tour organized by Nick Lloyd and Catherine Howley. It’s been reviewed in the Guardian and other places. In many ways, it has been the best thing we’ve done in Spain: by turns educational, provocative, and emotional. The tour took place almost entirely along Las Ramblas and in the Gothic quarter. It started in Plaça de...
Today was a day that it was a good to have a back-up plan. We went to Barcelona with the intention of taking the train to Zaragoza. Once we got there I found out that we needed to have our passports with us in order to buy non-regional train tickets. Of course, we didn’t have our passports on us so we had to change plans. We ended up taking a regional train to Tarragona, which is where we were...
We are Sitges. We got here last week and we’ll be here for another eleven days or so. We are using it as a homebase while I write and we take a variety of day trips around Catalonia. Sitges is one of those places that’s been described as “the crown jewel of the Mediterranean.” It is a beautiful beach town about 40 minutes South of the center of Barcelona by train (the train leaves every 15...
Kew Gardens has long been one of my favorite places in the world. They are the Royal Botanical Gardens started by George III and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. As I mentioned in my post about walking around Oxford, I have always had a soft spot for English gardens. The oldest, like Kew or the Oxford Botanical Gardens, are magical multiple generational projects where the power of what humans can...
Since my purpose in visiting London was to conduct research, it only seems reasonable that I offer a blog post about the city’s libraries. I spent time at only a fraction of them. There’s probably well over a half dozen libraries that I could have made use of if I had had more time. But, because I was in the city for only two weeks of archival research, I focused my time on two places, the...
I spent last weekend visiting my friend from graduate school Zach Nowak. Zach’s now the Director of the Umbra Institute and invited me to come stay with him. I had never been to Italy before and the combination of seeing an old friend and free housing seemed like a great idea. Zach’s an Italian citizen but he’s originally from Rochester, New York and has a deep love for, and deep knowledge of...