waaaaaaaaittttttt for it

I can't believe it has been more than a year since the last post.  To those of you that like the posts, I apologize.  for those of you who don't like the posts, I apologize (for starting to post again).  I am starting today to work up the bicentennial annual holiday letter.  This letter was originally a rant which Ginny would edit to make it seem like a holiday best wishes letter...she is evidently an amazing editor.  I think it has been about two years since the last update so this letter may be annoyingly long but if you are reading it online you always have the option to stop. I'm going to go offline now and start composing...while I'm waiting for the plumber to show up on a saturday (I am assuming the plumber and family will have a nice christmas after this bill is paid).  so ho ho ho to you all and I'll return when I have some holiday writing to share.
JJ Clause (get it?)

A little "light" music from Strasbourg

Last night we saw the Strasbourg water and light show which is put on every night in the canal that comes off of the Rhine river.  It is actually not as dull as that sounds but never the less.  Please take a look at the video.  The video was taken with a hand held helmet cam so the quality ain't great but the camera is so small it is the most convenient way to take video pictures.  I should explain that the video is not centered well but the reason for posting this clip is you will see dancers at some point.  Those dancers are holograms (or holographs?) that are projected into the mist and smoke over the water.  All done with lasers and other lights and in color.  It was pretty awesome.  Again however I have to apologize for the quality, I was shooting in the blind without a viewfinder to see what I was capturing.

I'll write again soon,
Au revoir!

Ahoj jsme v Praze - Hello we are in Prague

I am writing this several days after we got back to Strasbourg from Prague but I took some notes while we were there.  Hopefully this will bear some resemblance to the truth.

Prague is a wonderful city.  I don't want to cast aspersions on Strasbourg because Prague is just a much bigger more cosmopolitan city (yes I used the word cosmopolitan).  Two of our group got up early in the morning and went out to Strasbourg Airport and flew to Prague, we call them the advance party.  Four of us got in a car and drove the 6 hours across Germany to Prague (9 hours when you count getting a bit lost around Nuremberg trying to locate a burger king (don't worry, we found it)).  The retard party (don't get all huffy, I mean in contrast to the advance party, I think it is the right word to use in French it means delay) arrived about 12 hours after the advance party.  We were pretty tired but met with the apartment owner's brother and got squared away.  

The apartment was great although the parking space in a local garage that was supposed to be included didn't work out.  Tadious (or vacav, mirche, paco, or bubba as I was likely to call him) who was the brother of the owner told me he would come with me to park the car because it is a block or two away and it is difficult to navigate old town Prague.  ::::Let me take a moment to describe driving in Prague: Imagine if you will a corn maze out in Iowa and this maze takes up about 200 acres.  You cannot turn around in any branch of the maze and many arms of the maze come to a dead end (or in this case a sign that says no entry).  If you try a strategy of making one right had turn after another, you will eventually end up making a trail that resembles a lolly pop (and I am speaking deeply from experience here.  So you try to go down a few one way streets the wrong way and guess what, you end up making the exact same lolly pop trail that I described earlier.  So finally, you take a short cut through a hotel court yard, back up along a canal tow path, drive up the steps to a bridge, take the escalator in the enclosed downtown mall (the escalators are wide enough to fit a small car), then eventually you end up in the drive through land of Burger King and exit at the parking garage to your hotel.  And this is all with the assistance of the GPS which is set to speak English with an Australian Accent.  But wait there is more, after we arrived at the parking garage, it turned out the door to the garage (looked a bit like a spiked door at the end of a draw bridge entrance to a castle dungeon) would not open.  Bubba told me to approach the door slowly in the car (and make sure to show no fear because the door can sense it).  After doing that several times with no response from the door, He said let me run back to the apartment and get the remote (now I'm thinking to myself....that would have been a good thing to have at the beginning of this experiment) but I would have been wrong, because the remote didn't work.  So Mirche said "I will go inside and hit the switch" (which i thought would have preceded running back to the apartment to get the remote) but the switch didn't work so Paco so I will talk to the garage attendant (now I think he is just putting me on).  Vacav comes back and says the garage attendant says the door is broke, or as you Americans say, it is broke.  Actually at that point I used several American words and none of them were "broke".  None the less we made another excursion to a public parking garage that was only 2 blocks (and 14 miles by car on streets) away.

The rest of the trip was wonderful.  we went to visit the cathedral, we had dinner on the bank of the river, we visited museums, I found the Deloitte offices in Prague, I found the offices of several law firm clients in Prague, we took the funicular up to the top of a hill in the city ad took in the view (with a camera) from there, I learned several words and phrases in Czech and even got one person to understand what I was saying.  Mind you I wasn't saying what I thought I was saying but he understood what I did say and he laughed (in Czech of course).  The weather was great, we got hit with one brief shower but we were headed into the castle and cathedral tour anyway so it was great timing.  I  stole two paver stones from a cobble stone street as souvenirs (don't get in a huff, they were tiny slices of the cobble stones that were being discarded), and besides it doesn't compare to me taking a small quartz stone today from the Maginot Line Museum.  I think someday I will be able to build a garden wall out of the stones collected from around the world.

I have taken at least a thousand pictures on the trip so far and a few videos.  I will post some of them to this blog at some point in the next week and I will post a few others to facebook.

So back to Prague, it seems like we were there for about 55 minutes but in fact it was almost four days. I guess if you figure it took me 24 hours just to get in the parking garage when we arrived, that makes sense.  The burger kings and McDonald's in Prague I have to say are a bit better than Strasbourg but for that matter they are all pretty much what you expect.  I have gone to some great restaurants in Strasbourg and Prague as well because Ginny and the others seem to like having properly prepared food some of the time.  I owe them a lot for letting me go off to Mikey d's for coffee and eggs and burger king for the Big King or Woper.  When we left prague, we made a quick stop at a little hill top village called Leuchtenburg (or berg, can't remember) it had an old castle like ruin and it had a nice little Catholic Church.  As important to me it had a tiny German bakery (but they had a German name for it). and they had some great pastries.  Then it was back on the road for the 6 hour drive to Strasbourg (and that is with the autobahn where you can sneak up to 95 miles an hour or more if the car can do it).

Prominte, (excuse me), it is getting late and I have to take a break from writing.  I'll write again soon.

Comment voulez-vous dire que en français?

Or, how do you say that in French?  Our fourth morning in Strasbourg and I am happy to say that I woke up in the morning and not afternoon.  Somewhat of a slow day today, doing laundry, writing on the blog, waiting to pick up Joe (father in law) and Joe (brother in law) Havlick.  They are flying Icelandic Air from JFK to Frankfurt Germany with a quick stop in Keflavik to check on the melting glaciers.  They are taking (we hope) the same airline bus from Frankfurt to Strasbourg that Ginny and I took.  A quick three hour jaunt (see how I am getting my french words into the conversation).
I think I realize why my Norwegian and Spanish is helping me to communicate here in France.  I approach someone and try to ask a question using my french studies (all two months worth) and unintentionally, I lapse into Norwegian with a bit of Spanish for good luck.  The people I am talking to think that it is just butchered french so they appreciate my efforts and they help me out.  I haven't found a single person in Strasbourg that doesn't try to speak English.  From two grandmothers walking their dogs to the guy in the cell phone store they all take great joy or pride in helping me and then giving me a little french lesson to boot.  By the time we are finished here, I should be able to speak English and maybe a little french.
Yesterday we took a little boat tour around the city of Strasbourg.  It was very nice although Ginny and I both had to fight off falling asleep due to the gentle rocking of the boat and the mellifluous tones of the pre-recorded tour guide in the headsets.  Judging from the prices, ice cream must be very rare in Europe.  About $7 for three small (I really mean melon ball size) scoops of ice cream.  It is enough to make you scream but I don't know how to say this is outrageous in French.
We saw the main cathedral in Strasbourg yesterday but didn't take a long tour.  You can walk to the top in one of the towers but again, didn't have the time and didn't know the number for a counselor to get me over my fear of cramped spaces and Ginny's fear of heights (sort of amazing that we get into airplanes at all). The reason my fear of cramped spaces is a problem is that the stairway up to the top is one of those stone spiral staircases like you see in the movies when they are taking someone down to the dungeon.  Very short and very narrow and I don't know how many stone stairways you've been in but the ones I've been in don't tend to have any give or flexibility.  Now I know why the hunchback of notre dame was hunched over, it was the only way he could get up the stairs.  Well I'm going to give it a try never the less.  Look for the headline "American tourist in France gets stuck in stairwell 300 feet up in a cathedral".  By for now, I'll be in touch (or touche as the french might say).

Nice to meet you Al Sace and Lorraine

Ah... France in August.  Not bad.  We are staying in a house (former Prussian Officer Quarters from around the early 1900's) in Strasbourg.  Ginny made all the arrangements (of course) and I made whatever business arrangements that I could prior to coming over.  It is great to mix business with pleasure as I never feel right just taking vacation.  We flew over from SFO to Atlanta to Frankfurt Germany.  Didn't sleep much on the way but I was so glad I got a hard neck brace before flying.  Didn't loose feeling in any limbs while spending 12-14 hours in an airplane seat.  Got to Germany 7:30 in the morning and then went about finding a way to Strasbourg.  We settled on an express bus that only took about 3 hours.  When we arrived in Strasbourg, it was about 31 or 32 degrees...I thought maybe I should have brought a parka....until I figured 32 Celsius is about 91 or 92 degrees F.  So I'm sorry I didn't bring shorts but if I had brought shorts, I probably would have sparked another French American war.

So the first night we didn't go to sleep until about 2:30am which somehow means we stayed up for about 48 hours with a couple hours dozing here and there in the bus.  Then I made up for it.  I slept for 12-14 hours and still wanted another 12 hours but couldn't get away with that.  The boss is on this trip and she saw to it that we got out and about the town to see what is out there.  We had dinner in "little France" which sounds romantic until our tour guide today told us the story of how it got that name.  I'll tell that story when all the kids have gone to sleep and aren't reading this blog.  Nevertheless, we had dinner right on one of the rivers or canals that runs around and through Strasbourg.  Then we took a walk along the river to get a close up view of "little France".  We drove home after dinner which is no mean feat.  You see Strasbourg has probably been around in one shape or another for a thousand years but certainly since the 1300's.  No one back then was thinking "how can we make sure there is room for automobiles in our little city".  I don't think there is a road, street, boulevard, or rue that goes more than three blocks in a straight line.  By law, a street must bend, turn, twist, or dead end within 2 1/2 blocks of a straight away.  Some roads don't connect to anything, you accidentally get on one and find that it has barriers as the other end and it is one way????  I'm sure there is a secret that they keep to themselves.  Oh and another tip the potential traveler to France, they speak French here.  Almost all the words are different from ours.  Oh sure, you can sort of figure out the connection for instance I will pay is something like jais payee but it isn't crystal clear.  I tried for several months ahead of time to listen to French lessons on tape (audio) because I thought  I KNOW SPANISH AND NORWEGIAN, HOW DIFFICULT CAN IT BE???  Now I humbly know the answer to that question.  I was told once today that my French is good but that was after I said merci.  He thought I was thanking him, I was begging for mercy. More to come, we will be here a while.

Happy New Year, I'm starting off by breaking last years resolution to get the annual letter posted by Dec 31, 2011.  Well I'll make a resolution for 2012 to get 2011's letter posted by the Jan 3rd.  I'll have it up here in the next two days.  Meanwhile, I'm spending Jan 1, 2012 in Brooklyn NY getting ready to fly home to Pacifica and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Halloween

Well normally I don't get excited about Halloween. It was a working holiday when I was a kid. We usually just went to a handful of the 14 bars in West Conshohocken and we danced or sang or acted like fools and got cash from the bar patrons. Candy was always nice but cash spends anywhere.

But this year we got a video mail from the "Super Pumpkin" aka the Tank, aka grandson Jack. I think he does a very good Rodney Dangerfield impersonation even if it is unintentional. I can't help but laugh out loud every time I see this video. I hope it makes your halloween a little happier.