Tag: cafe

Top 5 Cities (This Year)

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Sail Away!

A friend said to me “Now that you’ve seen the world, tell me where to go.” The simple answer is everywhere. This year I’ve visited 30 cities outside the US. Most of them for the first time. None of them were terrible, not even Napoli. But some were definitely more amazing than others. Here are the top 5.

  • Köln
  • Sapporo
  • San Marino
  • Venezia
  • Prague
  • Firenze

(Yes, that’s actually 6. Read on to see which one stole it’s way into my heart and onto the list. Any city that repeatedly inspires that much delight can’t be denied a spot.)

Köln

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“It’s even bigger on the inside!” (Not actually possible)

As your train crosses the Rhein and pulls up to the Hauptbahnhof (train station), an enormous monolith towers over you. It’s the Dom cathedral, it’s huge, and it’s so close you can’t see the top of it. It may not sparkle like Italian marble, but it dominates and amazes.

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Unexpected Wonder

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I came to Torino because I was bored of Milano. I fell in love with the place.

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Torino (Turin) sits 80 miles to the west of Milano, in the hills of the Piedmont region. Like all respectable cities, it’s located on a river. This one is the river Po. Every time I see the name I think of Kung Fu Panda.

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In addition to the river, Torino has beautiful architecture. It also has amazing food, and of course great cappuccinos. A local said Torino has everything you could want, except the ocean.

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A Day in the Life

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Next to the very handsome guy is a clock made from tiny water fountains. Every minute the little fountains change to show the new time. That’s technology!

Here’s what my life is like in Japan.

The morning started with a Skype call with my niece. It’s 8:30am on Tuesday my time. 6:30 pm Monday hers. We practiced speaking in Japanese and then made plans for her upcoming trip to Japan. I don’t know which is cooler – that she wants to learn Japanese, or that she’s scratching an item off her bucket list before she finished high school.

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Debrief of the Italy Mission

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That title sounds so spy-like. Debrief of the Italy Mission. I bet debriefings are incredibly boring – listening to someone drone on about all the mundane details of hours stuck in the surveillance van with bad takeout food and…wait, do my blog posts sound like that?

Here are the results of three months in Italy in a surveillance van

  1. I can impress a taxi driver
  2. I wish I’d started school earlier
  3. I slacked off
  4. I earned an art history degree

Impressing a taxi driver

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I chalk up taxi fares to the “language practice” budget.

Everyone knows that the best judge of language level is a taxi driver. And I passed with flying colors. He couldn’t believe I’d only been studying for two months. We talked about my year of travel, the Italian economy, and how to learn a language. I sounded confident, my accent was good, and most of the words came naturally.

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An Italian in Paris

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This blog post commemorates the Brill/Chance invasion of Paris in 2015…

I love visiting Paris. The three best parts are seeing the Eiffel Tower, speaking French, and looking at Monet’s paintings. I also really like the waiters. Ok, that’s four things. Cramming in Italian must be making me lose other skills. I mean, our brains have to get full at some point, right? Like when you can’t add any more songs to your iPhone?

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So tall you can’t take a picture of the whole thing. (If you see one, it was photoshopped.)

 

It’s a joy to see the Eiffel tower. Not just up close. Everywhere you turn it pops up between buildings. (“Look, there’s the Eiffel Tower!”) The poor thing was supposed to be torn down after the world’s fair of 1890-something or other. Look, Italian has squeezed out my room for remembering dates.

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No Love in Napoli

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Oh how I wanted to love Napoli. I wanted a dreamy week in the pizza capital of the world. I wanted to feel the ocean breeze while I sipped a crisp white wine. Basically I wanted an Italian Hawaii.

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…or the French Riviera.

 

Napoli didn’t give a damn what I wanted. It wanted my money and it wanted me gone. Firenze welcomed me with open arms like we were friends forever. Napoli saw me as a nuisance, if it saw me at all. Nothing personal.

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The International Package

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When things don’t go your way…

I’ve traveled enough to have low expectations for physical mail overseas. Why is it easier to get a person across the Atlantic than it is to get a Fedex envelope? So I knew that trying to receive something here would be a plan of last resort. I hoped to go the entire trip without needing anything. I made it about a week.

Short version:

  • I needed a replacement credit card
  • I can’t get packages at my Airbnb apartment
  • I tried sending it to my host’s mother’s house
  • No one understands international addresses
  • A nearby coffee shop came to the rescue

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My Florence

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It's a facade.

Basilica Santa Croce (Holy Cross)

It only took a week for me to find my places in Florence.

In California I had my winery, my dance hall, and my pizza shop. Now I’m in Florence and I have my piazza (square), my cafe, and my pizza shop. Yes, good pizza is something I take great delight in.

I picked an apartment near the Piazza Santa Croce, whose basilica was begun in 1294 and finished in 1442. It’s huge and gorgeous, built with green, white, and pink marble. There’s a great big square in front of it, which is nice to hang out in when it’s sunny. I like to sit on a bench and study Italian grammar out in the fresh air. As an extrovert, the tourists milling around turn out to be very energizing.

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