Tori Amos' "Welcome to England" plays in the juice bar on our first morning in Paris - a bit premature, but it certainly made me feel, well, welcome.

Paris is my favorite place in Europe outside of Italy. Navigating the subway, all the locations feel familiar, reinforced by too many viewings of Amelie and the Da Vinci Code. French reveals itself ( Read more... )

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Pick a video. One is dark and the short version of the story. The other is longer and you sort of lose the images half way through. Technology wasn't treating me nicely when I went to record these.

At the museum in The Hague, I find myself less interested in Kandinsky (the main attraction), and spend more time staring into the cubism of Franz Marc. Michael is happy to see Piet Mondrian, a major influence on his own paintings; I like the mobiles of Alexander Calder (we have many in D.C.) and the in-your-face realism of Erwin Olaf (though ( Read more... )

Kate Nash is playing in Amsterdam’s South Station. More sameness, but I’ve been actively taking note of things that are different here: Grocery stores close by 6 p.m. at the latest (if not sooner most days). Portion sizes are small, which is great if it were beach weather, but right now I’d rather be warm and fat than hungry. People love to smoke. ( Read more... )

At Fran’s house, I meet his ex-girlfriend Iris, a yogi, architectural historian and fellow Twitter addict. We talk about American reality TV (The Rachel Zoe Project and RuPaul’s Drag Race). We have plans to see Kandinsky in The Hague with Michael’s family, but meanwhile she tells me today we must go to the FOAM photography museum here in Amsterdam ( Read more... )

The flight does not feel nearly as infinite as I'd worried. We'd been rerouted by the volcano, sent up through Portugal by way of Newfoundland, but I spent the hours modifying my mental state, enabling the European fixtures of my personality -- something not quite Kafka-esque ( Read more... )