Travel

Travel

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL – GIVE ME A DECAF MOCHA FRAPPUCINO AND HOLD THE FISH

June 26, 2018 Alan Behr Tribune News Service A prudent first consideration when trying to understand Seattle is that it is not Athens, Rome or, for that matter, Stratford-upon-Avon. The seed of Western Civilization was planted in classical Athens, blew westward on a storm toward ancient Rome, was miraculously grafted onto stronger roots during the Renaissance in Florence and Siena and, one thing following another,kept going until it hit Seattle, where it stopped, the broad Pacific being too great a barrier for its further transit. Instead, Asian culture came east, and although Seattle remains heavily European in population and influence, it doesn’t completely fit a classical definition of what is Western; in fact, it doesn’t quite fit any classical definition. It is, in a word, “whatever,” in the very contemporary use of that word to mean, “If that works for you, I’m OK with it.” The result is something as

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AFTER TWO DECADES, A RETURN TO PRAGUE IN THE LIGHT OF DAY

Alan Behr, McClatchy-Tribune News Service November 11, 2001 PRAGUE —Unlike cities such as Salzburg, which are lucky to display the Baroque in small clusters, Prague opens the Baroque onto the visitor like the spread of an eagle’s wings. The Baroque and other architectural styles dating back through the centuries are everywhere in the Old Town of Prague because the city famously survived the cavalcade of European wars virtually intact. And it is a wonder to see —as long as it isn’t raining cats and dogs, that is, which is precisely what was happening on my free day at a conference that took me to Prague for my first visit in more than 20 years. Baroque architecture is as dependent on a spectacle of color as the Art Deco of Miami, and color craves sunshine. Under gray skies, the Baroque loses its giddiness, and in a heavy rain, it pouts at

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PARIS, UNBOWED, STILL BECKONS VISITORS

Alan Behr TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE Paris is a moveable feast. -Ernest Hemingway When we are young, we travel to see the world, afterwards, to make sure it is still there. -Cyril Connolly I arrived back at the Hotel Plaza Athenee for a soothing lunch in the clubby, chair-filled corridor of the freshly remodeled lobby. The previous month, when I was in New York, a bomb had gone off on a block I regularly walk. Paris, which I visit often, and the city of Nice, where I had spent summer holidays, had just come through a spate of terrorism. You would not know it at the hotel: The lunch was as good as always, and everyone in the corridor was as relaxed as I remembered them; at the old hotels that have retained their greatness, you either keep running into the same people or imagine that you have. Paris is my

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A RETURN TO NEW ORLEANS AND ITS AFFORDABLE CUISINE

Waiters serve patrons at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans, Louisiana. (ALAN BEHR, MCT) Alan Behr, McClatchy-Tribune News Service August 13, 2012 NEW ORLEANS -On Bourbon Street, stout men in narrow-brimmed hats strummed loud music from bars on opposite sides of the street, battling for the attention of passersby. Neatly dressed touts fanned out from strip-club doors, urging men to step within, smiling with well-oiled cheer. I snapped a photo of a woman in one doorway who appeared to be clad in little more below the waist than a strategically placed patch, and as I walked on, a young man followed me, calling out, “Hey, I saw you taking the picture. You want to hook up with any of them?” “Thank you, sir,” I answered, “but I’m too old.” He laughed at that and retreated. In New Orleans, almost anything illegal that isn’t objectively dangerous is tolerated, as are the

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Hard driving and smooth sailing in Coastal Connecticut

Because there are no city-sized theme parks in Southern Connecticut, you must find your thrills there in real life. I had just come from helping to herd a crew of secondgraders through the Visitor Center at the PEZ factory in the town of Orange–a fragrant, colorful diversion for the nation’s devoted army of “Pez Heads” and for civilians like us, who just like popping dispenser heads and downing twelve-packs of chewy PEZ bricks. I was now rolling in an easterly direction along Interstate 95, toward Mystic Seaport. To get there and live to tell you about it, I had to steer past locals cruising at nearly triple-digit speeds in fits of driving mania that were one part homicidal and the other part suicidal. No matter how confiscatory the speeding ticket I risked summoning, I could barely keep a succession of young woman in vehicles with Connecticut plates from plowing their

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