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Italy, In Modo Rapido
Since Italy is such a wonderful place, we didn’t want to shortchange it by omitting it from the blog, despite the fact that we have been in India for the last couple weeks. And Italy is great. It has beautiful cities, nice people, and amazing food. It was a nice transition for us from the…
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Garmisch-Partenkirchen
Garmisch-Partenkirchen is a quiet mountain town that reminded me a bit of Lake Tahoe. There is a nice combination of tourists and locals, high-end clothing and cheap eats, and a general sleepiness on the off-season. It’s also a weird reminder of how hard it is to get away from Germany’s infamous past. The town was…
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To Munchen, and beyond!
While we missed Oktoberfest by a few weeks, we still found some nice stuff to do in Munich. It’s a nice city for walking around, and while the fest wasn’t happening, it’s still an amazing place to drink beer. There are a couple local brands that caught my attention in particular: Adechs and Augsutiner. We…
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New Jerseyians Reunite in Switzerland
Brian and I have officially become very delinquent with the blog, but we have an excellent excuse–we have been spending time with very generous friends who have been showing us around Switzerland! Interestingly, although we had five friends to visit with on this trip, they all happen to live in Switzerland. We also happened to…
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Vienna: the Before Sunrise version
There is this movie that came out in 1995 called ‘Before Sunrise.’ It stars a very young Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as Celine and Jesse, and it consists of them spending a single night together walking through Vienna. There were two sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, the most recent of which came out…
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Krakow
Poland was pretty awesome, I have to say. I’ll let Marisa talk about the more emotional aspects of our trip to the country and focus more on our experience in the city of Krakow itself. While it has a lot of the classic ‘European’ traits like really old buildings, large market squares, and light rail,…
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On Being a Jew in Poland
It was a very strange experience to be a Jew visiting Krakow. Obviously I knew that a devastatingly large number of Jews lost their lives here, but the German destruction in Poland was so much worse than that (if such a thing is even possible), and it is sad to see that Poland is still…
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Brussels
I read somewhere that Brussels was chosen as one of the centers for the European Union because it had no strong identity of its own. It lacks the concert halls of Vienna, the imperial history of Rome, or the cultural cache of Paris. Brussels is just itself, lacking famous cathedrals, works of art, or historical significance.…
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F***ing Bruges
One of the funniest things about the movie “In Bruges” is how amazing Bruges looks and seems to everyone–both other characters in the movie as well as the movie-watching audience–and yet Colin Farrell’s character hates it with a passion. He illustrates this hate quite elegantly throughout the movie: “Prison… death… didn’t matter. Because at least…
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Bruges in pictures, both moving and still
Second stop on the tour d’Europe was Bruges (aka Brugge). I read somewhere that Bruges was like ‘fucking Disneyland’, referring to the fact that the city’s medieval charm is due to very intentional rehabilitation and renovation. In a couple ways, I think that forgotten critic’s claim is more or less accurate. It feels a bit…