You could have been, literally, blown away by this year’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Winds of 20mph and higher gusts forced the high-flying balloons to dip low. You could see the cord-handlers struggling. Here‘s low-flying Nutcracker and Smokey Bear.
This is the best annual party for New Yorkers. And price of entry is only your costume which depends on imagination, or a trip to a costume store if you lack the former.
The sky has to be just right for a Key West sunset. Some clouds to capture and spread the rays, but not so many that the sunset is blocked. The wind has to be good, too, enough to push sailboats through the waves, but not so wild as to rock passengers too roughly and disturb people on land. If the stars are in alignment, ie the weather is right, a Key West sunset is a gorgeous thing to watch.
It was the coldest Thanksgiving ever in New York, in the low 20s with real feel half that. I wish I had the wool hat and wraparound earmuff concession for the marchers and balloon handlers for this year‘s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
A marvelous new Paris art place to visit is the Giacometti Institute‘s recreation of sculptor Alberto Giacometti’s studio, with exhibits of important works. It‘s in the 14th arrondissement neighborhood where he worked, though this art deco townhouse was the studio and apartment of designer Paul Follot.
The Key West Botanical Garden is a gorgeous gem unknown to many visitors because it is on the adjacent Stock Island. But it‘s easy to get to by car or bus. It is a brilliantly organized garden of local vegetation, with signs to point out important and sometimes dangerous plants and an audio setup where you can use a cell phone to get voice explanations at numbered stops.
Nov 2, 2018 – This year’s Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village was a glorious event, partly for the good-spirited humor, sometimes political, often artistic or hokey, and also for the unusually warm weather that allowed marchers and spectators to soak in the artistry without shivering in cold.
Though most of your Key West time will be outside, here are two museums you should visit even when it‘s typically delicious outside. And certainly if it‘s cool or rainy, as alas, it has been known to be.
The Butterfly Conservancy is almost hidden away in a white conch style building near the southernmost point of the island (and of the U.S.!) It‘s like being inside an enclosed glass case (except it‘s not), as the butterflies fly freely around you.
Sunset cruises are special at Key West. Among all the fun things you do, you will remember them most. I generally like the catamarans, as you can walk about them steadily. No lurching from side to side. More about that later.
Bordeaux has been transformed in the last few decades by Alain Juppé, mayor since 1995, who ordered the cars to underground car parks, cleaned the grime off the stone buildings, and turned the city into a gorgeous place for pedestrians and visitors. And as it is a center of the wine trade, a place for wine tastings and trips to vineyards, and a trendy cultural center, it’s time you visited Bordeaux!
I hadn’t been to Lisbon for decades, not since a few years after the Revolution of the Carnations in 1974 when the military overthrew the dictator, Antonio Salazar. Happy people in the streets stuck those flowers in the muzzles of solders‘ rifles and on their uniforms, and so the revolution – which turned democratic — got its name. It was glorious to visit again, and experience Portugal‘s well-deserved reputation for charming, warm and friendly people. But for many American travelers, Portugal is not on their list. It should be.
The oldest demarcated wine region in the world in not in France. It is in Portugal, in the Douro region near Porto, famous for port wine, and a necessary stop on any traveler‘s tour of the country. Though the vineyards are an hour-and-a-half distant and more, the cellars are in Vila Nova de Gaia, just across the river from Porto. There, port wine companies have set up tours and tastings, and we spent a happy few hours there under the tutelage of Taylor Port‘s Claire Aukett.
I saw jazz pianist Ramon Valle at the A-Trane in Berlin. He bills himself as “The Other Face of Cuban Jazz.” He and the members of his trio are Cubans, but they don’t play with the Latin rhythm we might expect. This Cuban jazz is modern jazz performed by Cubans.
by Lucy Komisar If you are in Berlin in mid-July, do not miss the city’s best party of the year! A baritone in a straw hat sat in a rowboat in a pond surrounded by shrubs and trees. He sang opera and lieder to the delight of the dozens of people who stood at the […]
It was just a swatch of cloth, a fabric of golden yellow with eight rows of stars stamped in their outlines and waiting to be cut out. The stars were manufactured by the Berlin flag maker, Geitel & Co, and Jews had to pay 10 pfennig to buy them. Jews six and older had to wear them on their clothing.
From the horrifically mundane, to the surreally horrible, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which opened in 2001, has an astonishing collection of exhibits. I thought I could do my routine two-hour walk-through, but I was so absorbed that I returned a second and third time. It is an extraordinary museum that uses photos, exhibits and audio to tell a fascinating and dramatic history of centuries.
The entrance is through the Collegienhaus, a baroque structure built in 1735 for the regal Court of Justice and rebuilt after its destruction in World War II. But most of the exhibits are in a postmodern building, a huge angular winding gray zinc structure that is said to have been inspired by a broken Star of David. It was designed by the American architect Daniel Libeskind and was completed in 1999. Inside now are exhibits that show two millennia of German Jewish history.
Northern California is a magical place that is a model for the sophisticated urban-plus-country living we‘d all have if the world was organized by smart people. Spending a long weekend there in the fall makes one put it on the short list of where to live if you ever moved from where you are. We landed in San Francisco for a taste of classy city chic, then moved on to the wine country, passing through forest and beach on the way.
The soul of Athens is embedded in its ancient monuments. The Acropolis and other historic sites are not museum pieces tucked away for tourists‘ visits. They are an integral part of the city‘s life. Visit the National Gallery, and you‘ll see a 19th-century painting of Athenians lounging on a terrace, with the Acropolis in the background, “Athenian Evening,” 1897, by Iakovos Rizos (1849-1926).
The city shows its pride in the venerable stones of the Parthenon and other more-than-2500-year-old temples by designing its streets and buildings with the goal of assuring direct sightlines. That appears to be the de rigueur view from the best hotels.
Come January, there‘s no better place to be than Key West. If the stars are right, you might arrive there as I did early this year, first to bask in the intellectual lights of the Key West Literary Seminar and then to revel in the glories of the annual Key West international regatta.
The seminar was about adventure, travel and discovery. If you were there, you would have heard Kate Wheeler, who trained as a Buddhist nun in Burma and wrote the novel, “When Mountains Walked,” about foreigners adrift in exotic cultures. Or maybe you‘d have chatted with her at the champagne party the seminar throws every year at the Key West Museum of Art and History at the historic red brick Custom House. (That is Kate second from the right at the 2006 party.)
In Key West you can have it all — a gorgeous beach town with thrilling water sports — scuba, parasailing, jetskis — and an annual event that draws top writers to talk and schmooze with aficionados from around the country.
Protest at Rosenstrasse by non-Jewish women saved their Jewish husbands and sons —
In a small park just off Karl Liebnechtstrasse in former East Berlin stands an extraordinary group of reddish pink sculptures called Block der Frauen, the block of women. German sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger, an artistic refugee from the Nazis, chiseled them to commemorate an extraordinary event that occurred at that site in February 1943.
The Nazis had rounded up some 2500 Jewish men and boys, the husbands and sons of non-Jewish women, and imprisoned them at Rosenstrasse 2-4, the Jewish Community Center to gather them for deportation to death. The women found out where the men had been taken and converged there. From 600 the protests grew to 6,000. The guards pointed machine guns at them and threatened to open fire. The women held their ground.
After a week, propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who indicated in his diary that he was worried about the protest‘s public relations impact in Germany and abroad, ordered that the Jews with Aryan spouses or parents be released. And then the event seemed to vanish from history.
Why didn‘t we know about this? Why is it still generally believed that no one could challenge the Nazis and live?
Why a French cognac is called Hennessy By Lucy Komisar Ever wonder how a French cognac got a name like Hennessy? Or why a French Bordeaux is called Lynch-Bages? Lynch? Does Ireland, the country of beer and ale imbibers, have a connection to fine wine? I found the answers on a trip that took me […]
There‘s a bit of magic and fantasy in a day along the Mosel River, stopping at villages of half-timbered houses, trying wines from local vineyards, visiting centuries-old castles, and seeing stunning examples of a turn-of-the-last-century style called Art Nouveau.
We picked up the river route in Traben-Trarbach, between Trier (famous for Roman ruins) and Koblenz, arriving in the evening at the Jugendstilhotel Bellevue. Jugendstil means Modern Style as it was called in England, or Art Nouveau as the French named it. The hotel is not only charming and comfortable, but an architectural gem.
Art Nouveau developed as a rejection of turn-of-the-19th-to-20th-century upheaval and industrialization. Artists adopted shapes of nature; flowers with slim leaves and long-stalks were popular. Women were depicted with long flowing garments and hair. Elements of Modern Style are seen in the lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec and in some Paris metro entrances.
London, glorious London. I know we Americans (or some of our ancestors) fought them in the 1700s, but they are still our best friends, aren‘t they? For theater, art, and experience, London is like leaving home to visit cousins. (Leaving the colonies to cross the Pond, as the Brits would say.) What I find wonderful about London is the easy fusion of the traditional and the modern. Traditional, by the way, sometimes goes back a thousand years!
Start with the traditional. To get a good grasp of the gory Royals, there‘s no place better than the Tower of London, founded by William the Conqueror in 1066-7 and enlarged and changed by royal houses that followed. The best way to see it is with a guided tour by one of the Beefeaters, those fellows who look like the picture on the gin bottle and take you around the Tower grounds explaining, with delicious, malicious enjoyment, the dreadful incarceration and murder of Anne Boleyn, two child princes, and other enemies of whoever was running the state. It‘s a bit like having your own personal version of a Shakespeare play.
Be sure to get there by the last tour at 3:30 pm; I‘ve done it both ways, and I‘ve learned that you miss too much wandering around without a guide. You can also see the crown jewels at the Tower. It gives you an idea of what the royals were fighting for! And what the republican Oliver Cromwell was fighting against.
A boutique hotel for tourists, a modern one for business travelers By Lucy Komisar I was walking along the rue de Rivoli in Paris and noticed a banner on the huge stone H´tel de Ville, the city hall. It announced an exhibit, “Du Refuge au Pi¨ge (From Refuge to Trap), The Jews in the […]
Weimar and its surroundings represent the best and the worst of the German character and history. On the square is the neoclassical German National Theater, with a statue of poet Johann Goethe (who founded the theater) and his contemporary, dramatist Friedrich Schiller. They were part of the “Sturm und Drang” (storm and stress movement, which advocated a celebration of nature and emotion. On the day I visited, a group of theatrical activists in red and white robes were performing alongside the statue, handing passers-by advice cards labeled “Secret Agent: freedom training.” Considering what we would soon see, it was an appropriate idea.
