Friday Donuts

Friends, What makes a work of art stand out? People swarm around the Mona Lisa while Titian's works, which sit in the same room at the Louvre, get a passing glance. Pop culture has created a strange hierarchy at museums where permanent crowds make it hard to appreciate certain pieces while others get snubbed. It's like high school all over again. Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace are the popular kids, surrounded by admiring fans while the band kids, statues of MInerva and Etruscan sculptures, barely get noticed -- not to mention the myriad loners, exiled to the reserve collection. Makes you wonder. I leave you with one of the jocks: Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People to get Beignets.​ Happy Friday!

Friends, There’s only so much research you can do before a trip to Germany. The rest you just have to experience first hand. Doing 180 on the autobahn, you realize the Ausfahrt signs don't mean you're in a gigantic city, they’re just exits. The German word for Town Hall is Rathaus … feels appropriate if you ask me. Toilets with no visible tank, large wall-mounted flushing switches and water that doesn’t swirl, make flushing down solids, well, a crapshoot. Soda caps that stay attached, make it challenging to drink straight from the bottle without getting a circular impression on your cheek — good thing they haven’t done it to beer. Doors and windows designed to partially come off their top hinge if you twist the lever a certain direction — wait, did I just break it? And then there’s the donuts. Spritzkuchen, literally “syringe cakes” (you might also know them as French crullers), talk about getting your fix. Liebesknochen, or "love bone" (don’t get any ideas). And, of ...

Friends, Traveling to Paris as a non-French speaker, was a stark reminder of my reliance on language to do most everything. The “oh, crap” moment came before the ink was dry on my CDG passport stamp.The test: getting a metro ticket. After five minutes of fumbling through incomprehensible prompts, I was given a reprieve by the Union Jack icon that let me navigate my purchase in a language I could understand (albeit with the sporadic extraneous vowel and ‘s’ trying to pass for a ‘z’). I now know how helpless it can feel to be illiterate. There’s a sense of being on the verge of comprehension, unable to cross the threshold, which aggravates when you’re surrounded by words you can almost make out. “Danger de mort” jumps out at me on a Metro sign I try to read. Following these dire instructions feels relevant in a city where so many were decapitated. A city where just this week a prime minister was ousted. Perhaps avoiding death can act as motivation to learn. What few new words I did pi...

Friends, Yellowstone has Old Faithful, Sidney the Opera House, and Paris the Eiffel Tower. Sites so intricately linked to a place’s identity tourists feel trapped into visiting. I suppose that’s why they call them tourist traps. But locals seldom seem to go. Instead of having a croissant by the Seine next week, I’m considering a donut at Boneshaker, or making smoke donuts at Tabac du Châtelet. Then again I’ve also bought tickets to the usual places, after all, when in Paris … or was that Rome? Happy Friday!