Santorini

Santorini is every bit as stunning as you'd expect, but sadly the Internet access isn't very good so I will have to wait until Friday to blog our remaining adventures (plus describe our trip to Delphi, another beautiful place). Hope everyone back home is well - I'll be seeing you all before too much longer!

Delphi/Santorini

September 27, 2005 (post delayed due to Internet access)
At Athens airport:
To fill out the rest of our Athens visit, I should mention that we found what is possibly the world’s most fun ouzo bar in the Plaka, a somewhat touristy shopping district with legitimately historic buildings. The bar’s walls were filled with bottles of colored liquor and backlit, creating a cozy effect. The ouzo was stored in barrels and the barkeeper walked up to the nozzles to fill orders. The owner, who was at least in his 80s, got excessively friendly with me while talking to us, running his hands up and down my leg, but I chose to view it as a paternal gesture – nevertheless we quickly settled our tab after that.
We have thoroughly enjoyed our one-day jaunt to Delphi. At first we were apprehensive because it seemed our bus was going to drop us and our luggage off at the ruins with no town in sight, but then we realized the town was perched on the side of the mountain just around the bend, and everything was in walking distance. We lunched overlooking the Bay of Itea, and then walked over to explore the impressive ruins and the museum with its famous life-sized bronze charioteer with piercing eyes and a surprisingly babyish face. Afterward, our dinner was pleasant enough except we were taken aback to see that our shrimp was served with all heads fully intact.
This morning, we got up early to see a portion of the ruins we’d missed yesterday; an Athenian temple and ancient gymnasium, along with a spring the pilgrims to the holy Delphi site once used to purify themselves. Now, we are awaiting our flight to Santorini and hopefully a few lazy days on the beach.

Athens day 2

We had a wonderful day today. First we explored the Acropolis and the Parthenon – it was a bit crowded and a bit disappointing because so much of it is covered with scaffolding for restoration work, but the views were spectacular and the weather was lovely. Our favorite temple was the Erechtheion with the statues of the Caryatids in front. Then we had lunch at a rooftop tavern, and then made a brief visit to the Acropolis Museum (still very much a work in progress). Rebecca steered us to a nearby jewelry shop that turned out to be really fun – the designs were unique and we bought several items. The woman who sold them was the mother of the two jewelry designers, and she took extraordinary care wrapping up our purchases and gave us free sketches depicting the first Olympics in Athens (complete with naked athletes). We then made our way to the National Gardens and explored a bit, and then sat at a café that was clearly a hangout for locals. Rebecca flirted with a two-year-old boy from the table next to us, and the parents ended up inviting us to join them. We felt we’d seen a bit of the real Greece, not just the parts tourists see.

Athens arrival

In our Athens hotel room:
Rebecca and I made it safely to Athens and had a lovely first day here. I’d been homesick for a connection to Charlotte, so it was great to see her. Both of us are a little taken aback by how generally shabby most of the construction is here, but our hotel is in a great location at the base of the Acropolis and right around the corner from some ruins, among them the Temple of Olympian Zeus and Hadrian’s Gate. We explored those this afternoon, then made our way to a hill in the middle of the city called Lykavittos and enjoyed a dinner at a café surrounded by spectacular city lights glittering through the haze. We have all day tomorrow to explore here, and then it’s on to Delphi and Santorini.

Salzburg, Munich, Oktoberfest

Written from the train station in Hannover:
*My trip to Salzburg last week was primarily for the purpose of taking the "Sound of Music" tour (plus I knew I'd be working Sunday so felt I deserved a day to explore). Of course I loved the obligatory sights like the gazebo and the “doe a deer” gardens, but the best part of it was the chance to wander around a few places in the “Salzgammergut” region outside the city where they dropped us off to explore. I made my way to Munich that night and had a brief beer-garden dinner with Burns fellow Curt.

*Friday in Munich was a work day. I didn’t really do much sightseeing, but I got to do some “man on the street” interviews on the Marienplatz, a central plaza where a pre-election political rally was set up, and then walked down the pedestrian boulevard to do a little work at an Internet café. Curt and I had dinner with his host family, and then we ducked into a neighborhood hangout for a couple of beers.

*The next day was the opening day of Oktoberfest, and the Burns program had arranged for all of us Burns fellows to have a meeting there in the evening and treat us to dinner and a hotel. The dangerous part of this was that Oktoberfest opened at noon, and of course we wanted to head straight there. It was cold and raining outside and we didn’t have a prayer of finding seats at a table inside a beer tent, so we did our best to brush the water off of an outside table and we hunkered down under umbrellas. Once the beer started flowing, it really wasn’t bad at all. They served us hot lunches there, and after a while a group of Italians sat behind us, loudly singing drinking songs, so we got the full Oktoberfest atmosphere. I drank two and a half of the giant liter mugs of beer, and soon started turning a little green. So I made my way back to the hotel and had time to recover during a nap so that I was coherent for our evening meeting. We ended up having one of the better dinners I’ve had here in Germany at a contemporary Bavarian place called Brenner’s – I loved it even though my fish was served with the head still on it.

*Sunday morning we all wearily dragged ourselves out of bed and made our way to Berlin, where most of us had assignments to help cover the elections. However, since the returns weren’t due to start coming in for a while, I ended up with a nice sunny afternoon at an outdoor café in the city with friends. I then went to the Dow Jones office and stayed there until around 11 p.m. – my story had mostly been written ahead of time, which was a good thing because my lack of fluency meant I couldn’t really understand what was going on with the outcome until I started reading English-language stories from other services. As many had predicted, it turned into a too-close-to-call situation with no clear winner, though I feel sorry for opposition leader Angela Merkel – she’s viewed as a failure for blowing a double-digit poll lead in the last two weeks, but I’m convinced that part of the reason that happened is that there is a deeply held sexism toward her. True, she suffers from a severe lack of charisma, but she did what most voters say they want – she clearly laid out a platform of the actions she planned to take to fix Germany’s problems. She may yet end up chancellor, but that’s not at all certain at this point and it will take several weeks to sort out.

*Today I traveled to Hannover for story interviews, probably my last new German city of this trip, but unfortunately didn't get to see much of it. But at least it was a beautiful day.

Berlin etc.

*Aboard train to Salzburg:

*Last weekend in Berlin was a lot of fun. Helen, another Burns fellow working there for the Tagesspiegel newspaper, was kind enough to host me. I spent all day Saturday with my friend Craig from Duke, his wife Jenny and four-year-old son Kyle. They have the most amazingly large apartment I’ve ever seen. He’s the Washington Post Berlin reporter, and he inherited the place from the last guy to hold that job. We went to the Berlin Zoo and hung out while Kyle enjoyed the playground. Then we rode the famous bus 100, which goes past all the noteworthy sights in Berlin. After dinner at their place, I left to join Helen with two of her friends at a great local hangout. We got into nice long discussions about religion, politics etc.

*Sunday, I saw the Jewish museum, which I thought was really amazing. Of course the Holocaust and exile were a huge influence on its contents, but it was a really comprehensive look at Jewish history, culture and traditions. The building’s architecture made a profound contribution to the experience. I went primarily to see the building and had planned to breeze through the exhibits, but I ended up lingering and reading almost all of them because I found them so interesting. Afterward, Helen met me and walked with me through Potsdamer Platz, a new development with the path of the former Berlin Wall running through it, and we saw the Holocaust memorial, the Brandenberg gate and a few other landmarks before I made my way back to my train.

*Monday, Sabra came to Frankfurt to cover the International Auto Show and she ended up staying with me after having a disastrous hotel experience. That night, we went out with Burns alum Bernd, who took us to a traditional Sachsenhausen apfelwein pub that was a lot of fun.

*Work-wise, this week I have finally made some contributions to my hosts. I had a Dow Jones wire piece go out from the International Auto Show, and then I had a byline about the German film industry run in Wall Street Journal Europe. (I’ve written another short arts review for Personal Journal Europe that should run soon).

*On a personal note, I've made a very special new friend here - he's an investment banker, Swiss originally but living in Frankfurt now. You'll have to email me if you want the details.

*A funny International Auto Show experience: I’m writing an article about Continental, which has its North American tire headquarters in Charlotte, and they invited me out to their Frankfurt test track for a journalist event in which we could test-drive cars equipped with their new technologies. One of them is a system that will automatically parallel park your car – you pull past the parking space, hit a button on your steering wheel and then the car does the rest without you. Well, my car (a BMW) swerved into one of the parked cars and smashed in one of its doors. They said it was apparently a glitch in the software, not anything I did (and I tried again and the car successfully parked the second time). But then I became noteworthy among the Continental employees and a few of the journalists there as “the one who had the wreck.” Just my luck.

Mainz

Things I learned about Mainz while visiting it this week:

*It’s a city of about 200,000 people, about 40 minutes outside Frankfurt, just across the Rhine. (The trip takes longer if there’s an accident on the train tracks and you have to hop a cab the rest of the way for 45 Euros).

*It has a giant red sandstone column in front of its main cathedral which the locals call “The penis of the priest.”

*The cathedral survived World War II bombing, but it was heavily damaged during Napoleon’s time – he used it as a horse stable.

*It has a church with a beautiful set of stained-glass windows completed by Marc Chagall shortly before he died. It’s a highly unusual project because Chagall was a Jew who narrowly escaped the Holocaust and never again wanted to set foot inside Germany, and a priest had to personally persuade him to undertake the Christian project.

*It’s one of two German cities known for large “Carnival” celebrations – the same time as Mardi Gras. The other is Cologne.

*The fountain dedicated to Carnival has a figurine at its base that I can identify with – a hung-over person washing out an empty wallet.

Heidelberg, Stuttgart and bylines

I traveled more this weekend - spent Saturday in Heidelberg with Lore P.'s sister Gina, who was a great tour guide for the interesting castle there, and then went to see Sabra in Stuttgart, which is a surprisingly beautiful city. I'd known it only as the home of the Daimler/Chrysler headquarters. We checked out a local wine festival and gave ourselves headaches sampling the sugary Reisling. We also enjoyed some of the most beautiful weather we've seen since our arrival here - Sunday was a truly beautiful late-summer day.

*A few more bylines:
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/business/12564383.htm - Experience using Skype
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/business/12558865.htm - "Man on the street" interviews about gas prices.

Brussels

From Brussels:
*My first five hours in this city were spent working on a story about Food Lion’s parent, Delhaize. So the first sights I saw were the nondescript headquarters building and some grocery stores, including one inside a shopping mall that resembled a standard U.S. mall. It was anticlimactic after imagining Brussels as a beautiful place. But once I found my way to my hotel, one block away from the Grand Place (a Baroque plaza dating to 1695), I discovered the city’s charm and character.

*I was rather tired because I’d traveled to Heidelberg the night before to see my friend Peggy from Duke and I was working on 3.5 hours sleep, so the rest of the day considered of napping, searching for an Internet connection and having dinner at a great restaurant recommended by my guidebook, Chez Leon, where I had some cherry-flavored Belgian beer and the local specialty, mussels (and chocolate mousse of course). It’s on a street a few blocks north of the Grand Place, the Rue des Bouchers, full of neon restaurant signs and waiters who try to lure you to their places. The people at the next table were from Ohio so I chitchatted with them a bit.

*The next morning after some hunting I found a free Wi-Fi connection (it was difficult, Belgium doesn’t seem to be as far along with wireless Internet as Germany or the U.S.), and got my first updates since Tuesday on the devastation wrought by the hurricane and the gas panic/shortage in Charlotte. It colored the rest of my visit with sadness.

*But I continued with plans to go on a walking tour described in my guidebook. I started at the Grand Place and headed to the next landmark, the Manneken Pis. It’s a fountain with a little figurine of a child peeing into it, and I’m mystified about why it’s such a popular attraction, but I dutifully took a photo. I worked my way to the Grand Sablon/Petit Sablon squares – passing a 12th century section of city wall – and shopped at the two chocolate stores described in my guidebook as the best in Belgium. I went a little nuts (and yes, it’s very good chocolate). Then I went to the Beaux Arts museum and saw a little of the Rubens collection and other older works, plus most of the modern art section. I didn’t like the old section very much because it consisted mostly of gloomy religious scenes or dour portraits. One work that attracted me with its bright colors turned out to be a narrative about an innocent guy wrongly beheaded and the woman who set him up getting burned at the stake. Nice stuff. Significant portions were closed for construction, including the sculpture hall. The modern art part was interesting, sort of an upside-down New York Guggenheim spiraling down underground. (I also took some time in the museum café to work on typing a story on my laptop).

*I then wended my way through Brussels Park and saw the parliament building, then a striking cathedral on a hill. The route then took me to Martyrs Square, which has tributes to an 1830 Dutch uprising, but there was construction going on and I couldn’t see much. I worked my way back to Grand Place through a very busy shopping boulevard.

*A dinner last night and a breakfast this morning with various professional contacts were the remaining highlights of the trip.

*I continue to feel sick about the devastation back home. Today’s Wall Street Journal had a story examining how cities recovered from disasters including the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, the Galveston hurricane and other disasters as devastating or more so, and the conclusion was that cities always bounce back, even if it takes a decade or more. But in the meantime there will be a lot of pain.

From Brussels

I have some things to say about Brussels, but today I'm too sad because of the events in New Orleans/Mississippi. I'm sad for the victims, worried about colleagues who are down there reporting on the news, and concerned about the gas shortages/panics in Charlotte and other areas that are affecting my loved ones. Everyone who reads this, please update me on how you're doing when you get a chance.