Bonus Coverage - Chamonix!

Keeping alive our "mo' better pictures on Friday" philosophy, we offer today some extra pictures from France on top of the standard fare from Latvia. Check out a slide show of some selections from Chamonix, which is amazing. We skied for three days, including one day on the Vallee Blanche, a 13-mile, all-day trip down from a peak near Mont Blanc to the village of Chamonix, including long stretches on the Mer de Glace ("sea of ice") glacier. We could write a lot about it, but for now I'll just say it was awesome, and we really considered quitting our jobs to stay there.

Of Barcelona: Etc

We already did a week of Barcelona pictures and didn't even talk about these crazy sandbag sculptures that Gaudi used to make an upside-down model of his designs...


Or the Basque tapas bars...


Or drinking wine by gothic cathedrals...


Or the jamon...


Or the woman dressed all in red to match the decor at the fast-food doner kebab shop on Las Ramblas...

Or the pictures of New Year's Eve where we ate at a French restaurant, cheek-to-jowl with two friendly Italian dudes who kept buying mojitos for anyone who would accept them and a buxom blonde tax lawyer from Laguna Beach, of which scene there are some fantastic photos that the Lovely Katherine was not interested in seeing published.

Needless to say, we could go on. But we're moving on to something new tomorrow.

Of Barcelona: Three pictures of Pedrera

More Gaudi. He cleverly put a spotlight right where The Lovely Katherine was standing! Genius!


The exterior is neat, the roof is worth the price of admission, the interior is boring.


We don't know these people, but with the dramatic lighting and their all-black outfits, we thought this looked like some pretentious avant-garde theater production.

Of Barcelona: Three pictures of Batlló

One of the impressive private buildings Gaudi designed.


Most elaborate interior of any of the Gaudi sites we saw.


Nice roof, too. (This last photo by the Lovely Katherine who spends a lot less time taking pictures than the staff photog and yet is getting published here with increasing frequency.)

Of Barcelona: Yum, Squids.

Your correspondents received a snazzy book for Christmas in which the fine people of National Geographic tell you the best places in the world to eat various things. Some items were obscure. If you love clams, by the way, you must go to Ipswich. But on a list claiming to detail the ten best markets in the world, Barcelona's Boqueria made the cut. Setting aside what an insane claim it is to rank the best markets in the world, given that every city of any size in the whole world has one, your corrspondents have to say the Boqueria was pretty impressive. For example, it features opportunities to both eat delicious grilled squid and to admire artfully arrayed squids on ice. The best of both worlds.


Oh, and all the other fruits of the sea!

Of Barcelona: Their Famous Church

A lot of European cities have at least one church of great renown. Some have quite a few. Barcelona's is Gaudi's "Sagrada Familia." Perhaps you've heard of it. (Photo credit above to The Lovely Katherine who said the staff photographer was facing the wrong way when the light was best. -ed.)


It's not finished. Your correspondent hadn't realized until visiting just how not finished it is. It's supposed to get a lot taller.


It's an impressive piece of architecture on the outside. On the inside, it's a construction site that you pay $20 to see. I mean, it's an impressive construction site, but it's not as nice as the outside. The museum in the basement is the best part.

Of Barcelona

Your correspondents decamped from Gloucester and eventually made it to Barcelona. We rented an small apartment in what was surely a very historic building because there was exposed brick everywhere. We saw some crazy architecture, we ate, we drank, we slept late. Our jet-lag and the late-dinner culture of Catalunya were sort of a perfect storm for staying out all night and then sleeping until noon. We did manage see a few sights and take a few pictures, which we'll be sharing this week.

Berlin Leftovers

I don't know where the time goes, but we should have had something else ready for today but we don't. So here are a couple more pictures from Berlin. The Christmas markets there are serious - with rides and everything. Not always great rides, but at least pretty substantial Ferris wheels like these.

Of Berlin: They have good bars

Just a fact. We had a local guide, which helped us in locating some winners. But hey, it's a big city with lots of young artsy types, no surprises. We recognize this isn't a revolutionary thought. We hoped to add some thoughts about a restaurant here, too, but we didn't get it together with the pictures and the words and whatnot. Next time. Maybe.

Of Berlin: A Clock

Love this clock. It's not a very unique picture, but it's a pretty unique clock. I want one for the Holla offices. This one is not in our offices, but at Alexanderplatz in the former East Berlin, which is nowadays apparently where all the young dudes go to throw up on themselves and pee in the street (not pictured).

Berlin: Graffiti and Hooch

Two items of note here:

First, the art on the left - not amazing but much cooler than the stuff on the preserved Berlin Wall. The shabby graffiti in the foreground, sadly, much more common. Berlin has to be one of the most graffiti-covered places your correspondent has ever been, and it ranges the whole gamut from amazing and clever to crappy tags on everything that's bolted down.

On the right - hooches as office space! I guess it's pretty common to use a container/trailer for an office at a construction site. I don't know if I'd seen many double-deckers. I'm almost certain I've never seen a three-story container office building with floor-to-ceiling windows on one side. They should start using these for housing at our Embassy in Kabul.

Of Berlin: In which much gluhwein is consumed

Why would one go to such a Northerly city as Berlin at this time of year? Well, for one, we were going south. But not by enough, and it was still bitterly cold and dark for a fair bit of our time there. The real is that The Lovely Katherine had to go there for work anyway. But another possible reason is that Christmas Markets are a big deal in Germany. Call it a nice coincidence. You couldn't turn around without finding someone selling wooden nativities or fragrant candles or (thankfully) gluhwein. Your correspondent, to be perfectly honest, is not a big fan of mulled wine. But, in this part of Europe, it's consumed less for pleasure than out of necessity, because you're out in the freezing cold looking at the little lighted stalls full of sterling silver jewelry and you need a drink but it's too cold for beer. (Believe us, we also tried cold beer. It was good, but not ideal.)

One interesting feature you would never find in the US is the street-food dish deposit. Whether for a bowl of soup or a mug of mulled wine, food was served in actual dishes, not styrofoam. Of course, they want their dish back, so you have to pay a couple euros deposit on the dish. And yet then again, each Christmas market had its own special design of mulled wine mug. Designs ranged from colorful if somewhat over-the-top "Christmas Market 2009" souvenir mugs that one could simply keep rather than get the deposit back, to hideous eyesores that you would have to pay a sane person to keep. Sadly, the staff photographer failed to capture any photos of these hideous mugs in their natural environment.

Of Berlin

Your correspondents were dispatched to Berlin this weekend. Nice town, Berlin. Apparently it has something of a troubled history -- you may have heard about it.

There are some sections of the wall still standing, as seen above and below. One of the remaining bits is entirely covered with murals of highly variable quality. These are pieces that are apparently 20 years old but were restored (or re-done) by the original artists in 1999, and then again on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall this year. Berlin is a pretty graffiti'd town, and a fair bit of it is pretty impressive. Most of the stuff on the wall was colorful and expressive and showed less attention to craft than some of the graffiti that is apparently applied furtively in the dark of night. But it did seem to speak to the times when it was originally created, so I suppose it succeeds on that level.

The above picture is taken from the "no-man's land" side of the wall, which you're still not allowed to walk around in. Below, the painted up side, with unidentified strangers.

Of Poland: The Cheap Thrills of Night Photography

One thing Poland and Latvia have in common? They're both dark a lot these days. Something else in common? Flowers. I'm not sure where they import cut flowers from during November/December but it's got to be a decent distance from both Latvia and Poland. And yet there was a decent-sized flower market in Krakow, as in Riga.


One difference: Although the highways in Poland are notoriously terrible, I don't think there are many six-lane highways going through Riga, as the one pictured below in Warsaw.

Of Poland: Don't forget the beer!

Also in Krakow: A lot of really good bars. An embarrassment of good bars. We couldn't visit them all. Didn't stop us from trying. I guess if you want a town with good bars, it doesn't hurt to have a lot of students and a seasonal burst of tourists to keep them rolling in cash.

In Warsaw: Not so many good bars. The above picture is from a typically Central-European bar; I.e., a dark basement with a bunch of wooden tables and a tap somewhere. Lucky for Central Europe, they have good beer. The other bar we stopped by in Warsaw did feature maybe the happiest, drunkest group of 50-year-olds I've ever seen, so at least they were putting the bar to good use.

Below: Walking proof that the people of Krakow are dedicated to the lively art of beer consumption, or at least getting money from tourists who are.

Of Poland: Le Waffle

Continuing our thoughts from yesterday about street food: Our hosts home is across the street from perhaps the nicest park in Warsaw. They report that Poles line up "for hours" during the summer at the waffle stand in the park, which is thankfully open year-round so we didn't miss out on this cultural experience. Also: peacocks! He wanted waffle, but left disappointed.

Of Poland: Cuisine

If you watch as much CNN International in various hotel rooms as our correspondents do, you have surely seen the near-infinite array of tourism and/or "someone build your factory here please" ads for random countries from Malaysia to Montenegro. Well, Poland's ads tout their wonderful cuisine, fresh produce, and innovative restaurants. It sounds like a joke - surely Polish cuisine is like all its Eastern European brethren: fry pork, boil potatoes and cabbage until soggy. Well, yes and no. We had one really nice meal in a restaurant in Krakow. (We had another really nice meal in Warsaw, but that was Thanksgiving dinner cooked by an American, so, disqualified.) Nice ingredients, well prepared, a step above what you'd expect.

Of course, our other meal in Krakow was, as pictured above, pierogis bought outside at the Christmas market on the square. And really, they were delicious. In fact, I would say that if I could choose to have in Latvia either the restaurant we ate at the night before, or the street food options we had for various snacks in Krakow, I would undoubtedly choose the latter. Latvia, I love you, but where is your street food?

Thankfully, one thing Latvia and Poland share is Christmas market mulled wine. We made many stops at the cleverly barrel-shaped wine stand below, and look forward to similar in Riga sometime soon.

Of Poland

OK, even your correspondents are beginning to get a little tired of being in Riga so little. But such are the burdens of being an international journalist and part-time diplomat. We only have so much time in Europe, and there's a lot of Europe to see.


So, we went to Poland. Good friends there, and good pierogis, and old castles. Find here pictures with serious technical problems that we like a lot anyway, from Warsaw (top), Krakow (bottom), and somewhere in between (in between).

Of Copenhagen: Special Saturday Edition on The Famous Tivoli Gardens

If you buy a guidebook to Copenhagen, the number-one sight typically listed is the Tivoli Gardens, a park with rides and shops and shows and such. They're closed in November. But here are a couple pictures of what you can see from the outside.

Of Christiania (Copenhagen)

This is outside the show from yesterday's post. (It's the front door that I didn't find, because it faces on a dirt road rather than the proper street.) Having come in via the wrong way, I didn't see the big signs indicating that they would prefer visitors didn't snap any tourist photos in Christiania. Being a self-proclaimed independent "free town," there is some fairly lax enforcement of drug laws. And maybe other laws. Luckily, nobody beat me up or smashed my camera or anything. Of course, I was giving the hash dealers a pretty wide berth. On the more typically licit side of things, they had a pretty good post-show kebab stand.