Author: Daniel Hatke
-
Belgrade, Where We Met Banksy
August 11-12 Ljubljana | August 12-15 Belgrade We spent Friday evening, August 11th, in Ljubljana with Anya, Jaka, and their 2.5-year-old son. Ljubljana has a Friday food festival where restaurants, breweries, and other vendors from across Slovenia converge to serve up their dishes to the city. A heat wave had struck recently, the same one…
-
Amsterdam // Schiedam & Nolet
July 14-18 You should try watching Tom & Jerry in German sometime, I think it’s funnier. We arrived in Berlin yesterday, and we’ve already begun to feel at home. We’re staying in a hotel near Nollendorfplatz, and we like the area as well as several others we’ve walked through. It feels a lot like Brooklyn…
-
Onward from Wiesbaden, with a stop in Ibbenbüren
I write this, sitting on a small balcony overlooking a courtyard at our AirBnB in Wiesbaden (Veez-bahdin). The sun’s dry rays are beaming down on me creating a warmth that’s been absent for a few days. This morning was starkly cold and drizzly as we woke early for a boat tour downstream (north) on the…
-
Impermanence and Your Fear of Death // Catacombs and Crypts
July 11-14 As part of our experience in Rome, we took a tour of catacombs and crypts. I think it may be a popular tour due to the gruesome nature of it all. However, it isn’t all that gruesome but was figuratively and literally deep. This tour begs the tourist to ponder impermanence or the…
-
Bologna // Rome
July 7-11 We are flying over the Alps today, July 14th, to spend two weeks with Shell’s family. We’ll be in Amsterdam, Ghent, Bruges, and Wiesbaden. After just a week and a half, I think we are both looking forward to the pace of movement slowing some, but that won’t be happening until the end…
-
Aziz Ansari // Enzo Ferrari // Massimo Bottura // Modena
July 10 The cicadas were already in full orchestra near the train station outside of town. Our train was late to arrive in Modena. Our plan was to hustle over to Franceschetta 58 and see if they had lunch tables left. It was a twenty five minute walk, placing us just away from one hour…
-
It wasn’t until the string quartet
July 9 Florence is a beautiful city, just look up some pictures. It wasn’t singing to me though. I really had trouble connecting with it. Massive queues, with a plethora of ways to pay to skip lines, it felt like a racket. If I’d been here on a week’s holiday while earning a salary I…
-
Population: < 1000 | Novello, Barolo, Grinzane Cavour
July 6-7 It’s 4 PM on Thursday while I write this and we’ve already turned in for naps. Blame the truffles and the wine, not our weak constitution for hiking up steep vineyards with no reprise from the sun. I haven’t been to Tuscany, but I must say Piedmont has been particularly nice to us. The people…
-
At the roundabout ahead – mostly Milano
July 4-6 After a quick few hours in Milano, we headed southwest via car. We used Waze to navigate our way around and were happy to find my Waze still set to avoid highways from our California trip. We only hit the Autostrada a couple of times, otherwise, we were taken through sun-baked pink and…
-
Leaving New York City
I certainly haven’t fully processed what’s about to happen. Or, I’m so distracted by all that we’ve had to do over the past few weeks there simply hasn’t been time for processing. Tomorrow we leave New York City. The beast of a town I’ve called home for nearly eight years. I love this city, I…