After a whirlwind European tour I'm back in the U.S,, and at the moment quite tired but I hope to recover swiftly as I'm off again in less than two weeks.
In some ways, this was the "If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium" tour. I slept in my own bed on May 26, on the airplane on May 27, in Zurich on May 28-29, in Luxembourg on May 30, in Haikko Borga, Finland on May 31, in Warsaw near the airport on June 1, in Lodz, Poland on June 2, in Helsinki on June 3, in Tallinn, Estonia on June 4, and in Helsinki again on June 5-6.
That's a lot of moving around, but in addition to giving 3 talks I did get to see a lot of nice things. My travel strategy is to hit a new city, get oriented, walk around all day (for as long as I'm there) checking out museums, churches, neighborhoods, parks, restaurants, food courts, shops off the main tourist track, etc., etc., and after a couple of days you really do get a feel of having seen something of a place. And all the travel was flawless - no delays, and the planning (which took some effort) all worked out.
I'm off to Mexico City followed by Oxford in a couple of weeks, and in September will have a very different sort of trip (3 weeks in Berlin with only very limited side travel).
I consistently find that I quite like Europe, although I regret being so limited to just speaking English.
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4 comments:
The limited knoweldge of foreign languages is typically american.
My city, Trieste, is in Italy but near the slovenian border (there is a slovenian minority), had been under the Austro-Hungarian empire for 6 centuries (still today you can find here slavic, german, greek, armenian, jewish surnames) and also under U.S. administration after the IIww (~Berlin, but for only 9 years). A lot of languages but also
wars, divisions, very complicated identities, brothers/sisters with different surnames (it happened!). And Europe is full of these stories (also the countries you visited).
So: God save english speaking americans!
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulvio_Tomizza
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